Databending Roms, Introductions

Hi, my name is artificialcuttlefish, and I like to try new things, especially things involving sound, in combination with 1s and 0s. I am always learning and creating new things, so stay tuned for the wacky hijinks that shall ensue :)

A quick resume of my past audio experiments: I have previously worked under the name of A Salmon Of Questionable Morals. Under that name, I released 2 albums:

Positions EP

*-*

Both of them are free, and both of them are also quite loud, so be careful to not damage your ears!

I use many different methods, software/hardware, and production types, some of the many are listed below:

Live Coding

Renoise

Circuit Bending

Databending

Supercollider

Pure Data

Jack (!)

Audacity

And many more :)

A quick note about this blog: Don't expect regular updates. This is kinda an experiment for me, because every other blog I have had in my entire life has ended with 2 posts and 0 followers... I am just hoping that this one will at least be a good place for me to keep my experiments, and allow others to see how they work, if anything.

Alright, now the topic promised databending roms, and so I shall show you!

I have been databending old game roms recently, just to see what kinda of neat glitches I could find. If that sentence didn't make any sense to you, let me explain:

ROMs, or "Read Only-Memory" files, are files that are used to store the information for video games. They contain all the information that is needed for the game to play, other than, of course, the console.

Databending is altering a file to make it glitch, crash, act differently, or even become a different file type all together!

So, you see, I am glitching these roms for the heck of it, and I have quite liked the results so far! I will be cataloging my results with these experiments for a while here, and in upcoming posts, so stay tuned! (I might even make a tutorial for any of you who would like to try it yourself!)

I just finished an experiment in which I messed around with the insides of a gameboy rom (file type .gb), specifically the rom of the classic game Pokemon Red. Here is a two minute sample of the results, taken from when the game starts up, to when it crashes and stops working:

http://www.mediafire.com/?6basgwj5islejkg

I will be using mediafire to host my audio/video uploads, by the way. It seems like it will work well.

If you were wondering what such an interesting glitch looks like, here it is for your visual enjoyment, in screenshot form:

No, I am afraid I do not know from where the suspicious numeral 5 came, it just sort of showed up. That is the screen that shows up, and there it remains until the game crashes, about 2 minutes inward, after a large array of very interesting sounds and melodies. I tried multiple times, and I must say this was my favorite, audio wise. Many of the others actually managed to be somewhat playable, despite some very strange glitches, such as a Professor Oak who could walk through walls and had the voice of a sparrow Pokemon. I regret not getting a screenshot of him walking through his bookcase while squawking like an angry bird. Alas, it is too late for that.

Anyway, tonight I will be experimenting with editing a rom from the famous Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES, file type .smc). Updates coming soon!