MODBOY

Circuit bending, in software

bend the live chip while the game plays, live — not a filter on top. it all happens inside MODBOY, the console; the Speaker is the control surface that reaches in, the matrix behind the bends, the stems and the effects. reach in and move any of it:

• battery browns the chip out; the voices thin and clip, but the pitch holds.
• clock drags the pitch down, or wows and flutters it.
• pulse morphs its own timbre as it plays.
• corruption pushes into the registers, wave RAM and video memory; the picture tears, the sound shreds.
• stutter grabs a slice of the live output and repeats it, tightening from a clean roll to a smear.
• reverse throws the whole output into an endless backward loop.
• burst re-speeds the last stretch, from a quarter-speed drag to double-time, mixed against the clean signal.

every one is a knob or a button — map it, automate it across a set, pull it back clean. where a scripted glitch fires once and drifts, this one stays in tune and lands on the bar.

and the voices come apart into stems: every channel on its own Live track. mute the lead, keep the bassline, solo the noise.

External processing

past the chip, the whole output runs through an external effects chain, all voices at once:

• seed works like a cheat code: punch in a number and it draws one of 10,000 effect combinations, tape echo and convolution reverb among them.
• clip is the last stage, the one you set yourself, on the way into the output.

Under the hood

the cores hold. the Game Boy passes Blargg and dmg-acid2. the Advance runs to an exact cycle budget and plays commercial games clean.

and it stays out of the way. emulator running, big screen open, Live’s CPU meter reads 1–2%: MODBOY barely touches the audio thread — the one that clicks and drops out when it runs late — so you can push it hard and the sound still lands on time.

owning the core is the point: every register the chip computes is one you can read, route or bend.