I thought of a way of making circuit bending a Playstation2 a bit easier than having to solder 64+ tiny wires by hand, because I didn’t really want to have to do this again:

I circuit bent the PS2 by soldering a field of switches directly to the data lines of the PS2’s graphical bus, which consists of 64 data lines, that each create unique and consistent glitches and a few adress lines that also produce interesting effects. combined, they work as an endless pallet of I took some time comparing the schematic with the circuit board to map out all the points that create an effect. It’s quite a lot of them:

Any of those can be connected to ground, to the 1,6V also present on the GPU, to each other, and also the Sound RAM, that I’ll write about later. Working with such a complexity is pretty challenging but well wort it.

I took some time during the lockdowns to actually sit down and learn how to use KiCad. I had a few PCB’s ordered just to try out if I could do it at all and it seemed to work.

Thinking of a way of using my new skills to simlify the process of connecting to the PS2’s graphic bus, I came up with the ide of creating a flexible circuit board that could be soldered directly to the vias on the GPU’s underside, organising their slightly chaotic placement on the circuit board into two flat cable connectors.

Introducing Gl0tchpatch PS2:

This would open up an easier way to experiments with all sorts of interfaces that could be created on the other side of the flat cables.