PLAY+MOBILE

Douglas Edric Stanley

2004.01.16

PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot
PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot
PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot

Stéphane Cousot and I have successfully completed the workshop PLAY+MOBILE, in participation with 7 students from the Aix-en-Provence School of Art and one student from the Bordeaux Art School. The workshop focused principally on reappropriating the Gameboy Advance platform, through the creation of artistic experiments designed specifically for it.

PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot
PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot

The programs built during the workshop were for the most part influenced by the idea of musical instruments, drum machines, etc., and used the internal synthesizer of the Gameboy circuit.

PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot
PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot

One of the more interesting experiments on the platform was built on the first day of the workshop. While moving around a little “Hello World” text field, one of the students discovered that by printing the text outside of the reserved video memory registers, the “Hello World” text would write into various hardware registers of the machine and affect output. We have recorded this behaviour in the play+mobile demo (mp4) video.

All programs were built either with C or DragonBasic.

PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot
PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot

Playmobile Development tools were built either by Stéphane Cousot or myself, and were designed to simplify the programming process, especially on Mac OS X. The website was built by Stéphane Cousot, and designed by Stéphane, Pierre-Erick Lefebvre and Douglas Edric Stanley.

PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot
PLAY+MOBILE Workshop, Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot

Here are some Programs you can play/download. To view them, you will need a Gameboy Advance with a programmable cartidge, or you can use an emulator such as Boycott Advance. Stéphane included an in-browser Java emulator, but it’s pretty buggy and sound doesn’t work (the whole point). At least it gives you an idea of the programs before downloading them: