Ben Heck's Power Glove Teardown

[@Coderjo.]

The NES had a hardware bug related to the DPCM channel of the sound chip, which, when it was reading sound data, took over the bus and could cause you to lose a bit of controller data. Games that used the DPCM channel would work around this in various ways. SMB3 would poll the controller multiple times until it got two polls in a row which had the same buttons pressed. Games that didn't use that channel could just poll the controller once per frame, since it wouldn't lose buttons due to the DPCM DMA.

[@spunkmire2664]

"I love the power glove, it's so bad" said Lucas.

[@guycrew728]

Felix: I think I have arthritis. Ben: Don't worry Felix, we'll amputate it. XD

[@mrfilipelaureanoaguiar]

You should use the power glove to manipulate dangerous substances in a closed environment to move a robot hand. Example manipulate Acetone.

[@Xikacp3riX]

Might be the most impractical thing i've ever heard

[@EbenezerScroogeMcDuck]

The original innovation was SUPER ACCURATE. It was super expensive too. They dumbed down the device to the minimum... and it was so minimal, it simply didn't work. Is there a way to enhanced the glove back to its original form during development to make it super accurate again?

[@kelli217]

It actually does kind of look like signed data.

[@0phoff]

I was thinking exactly the same! IIRC, you can interpret 8bits however you want... If its unsigned it will print 255 and if you interpret it signed it'll be -1 (2's complement)

[@matthewrichardson828]

You're a dork too? I thought I was alone.

[@justinolbrantz403]

Kind of? There's no doubt it's signed. If it's true that the 6502 doesn't support signed comparisons they must be converting it to biased in software, but it's definitely signed coming out of the glove.

[@sunderark]

I really miss the old show.

[@patchworkboy87]

"This music is so Rare...this was made by Rare" - can confirm, work for Rare.

[@KhanGarth]

i'd like to hear more about how fingerless gloves keeps Karen's fingers warm.

[@maker_karen1785]

Well, you see blood vessels are just like water pipes in a home. The longer they are insulated, the longer the liquid inside will maintain its temperature. Since the fingers are at the end of the line for that path of blood flow away from the heart, the blood is more affected by exterior temperatures the farther it travels down the arm. Such as in the winter, the blood would get colder. Therefore, the longer you keep the blood vessels insulated, the longer the blood will stay warm. So by wearing fingerless gloves, the blood flowing through the vessels in the hands is being kept warm long enough to keep the temperature of the blood flowing through the fingers warm. For anyone whose job it is to frequently type on a computer to respond to people on the internet as well as needing to use tools and build things, it is ideal to have as much dexterity as possible, i.e., exposed, warm fingertips. Therefore, fingerless gloves are an ideal solution for such a person, especially if they live in the arctic tundra that is Wisconsin in winter.

[@glitchsmasher]

how do clothes keep you warm if your head is naked

[@remley8877]

Who cares, as long as she looks totally hot wearing them? 😉

[@RetroGamerr1991]

Felix looks like a dark Jeff Goldblum

[@oliverer3]

I wonder if the powerglove would work perfectly in a completely silent room. Like those they use to test things with background noise.

[@sir_john_hammond]

"What were you guys doing with a POWERGLOVE anyway?!" *mock shock* 2 min later: "So I bought this powerglove game because I knew we were gonna do this episode".

[@shanewomeldorff7929]

I hope they spared no expense on his funeral... Rip.

[@SpicyDragonWings]

"I do love me some gloves, keeps my fingers all toasty" (gloves are fingerless) *Cue X-Files music*...

[@Ownage4lif31]

How much does this guy get paid? Over 100k or less than 100k? He has a lot of potential, he better be getting paid a lot

[@drthmonkey42]

Nintendo already remade the power glove. They called it a Wii Remote for some reason.

[@DeDeNoM]

Don't turn it on. Take it apart!

[@superandroidtron]

The double sampling mentioned at 10:55 is a workaround for a bug in the NES hardware. When the 2A03 plays a DPCM sample, there is a chance that the reading from the controller port will be corrupted every few hundred cycles. As a workaround, games that use DPCM can read the controller twice and see if the readings match. If they don't, the controller can be polled a third time. Since the corruption can only occur once per some relatively large number of cycles, the third read will always be correct if one of the first two was corrupt (assuming that the controller reading logic is relatively short). Note that this only affects NTSC consoles and not PAL ones. For more info on this bug, this page might be of interest: wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/APU_DMC#Conflict_with_controller_and_PPU_read

[@BrightSpark]

I know that this phrase is overused and kinda cliché, but I genuinely think that the Powerglove was ahead of it's time. If it was developed today with VR on the rise and with modern technology instead of the late 80s tech then it would be the perfect input device for VR games.

[@chdn]

I think I may know why the controller was being pulsed twice at 10:50. If I recall, pulsing 8 bits from controller port 1 twice in a row will get inputs from controllers 1 & 3 if a Four Score is connected (controllers 2 & 4 on the second port). SMB3 does not have Four Score support but the developer may have used a general purpose routine to save time. Without a Four Score connected the code just records the same inputs for controller 1 & 3 so there is no undefined behavior. Other developers may not have had access to the library or may not have had the code space or CPU cycles to use it so their code only pulses 8 bits per port.

[@blooz300]

The souls of dead kittens thrown in a washing machine with Nickelback.

[@GregAtlas]

I thought you said you were going to see if you could upgrade the design in the beginning of the episode. If I remember right, the original design used really accurate optical flex sensors for the finger flexing, but for the production model they went with the cheaper option of carbon-based flex sensors. What would it take to jury rig and calibrate some optical flex sensors to replace the carbon-based flex sensors?

[@urherenow]

Quoted from a more knowledgeable person than me:"Man there's so much wrong with that. First deciding that a silkscreened micro must be an ASIC. Then he decides that the data isn't signed because the NES CPU has no decimal mode. WTF? BCD was removed to avoid patents, not because it's complex, and twos-complement signed binary is simpler than BCD mode anyway. He completely fails to recognise that he's got signed bytes and says "255 is centre", when 255 is -1 in twos complement - it's centre zero as you'd expect. Finally, why make it work like a relative position mouse? Making it an absolute position input like a lightgun would make far more sense and be far easier to use."

[@YoISkate90]

I legit wish Ben heck was my dad so I can learn all of this

[@RT55J]

The reason Mario 3 multi-samples the controller is because it uses the DPCM (sample) channel for sound. Due to a hardware bug, bus conflicts can arise between controller inputs and the DPCM channel, which may result in erroneous input reads. To compensate for this, most games that use sampled sounds keep reading the controller until it gets two consecutive reads. You can see this in the video how occasionally on the o-scope you see 3 or more reads happening.

[@BawesomeBurf]

So glad I got to meet you at the MGC!

[@dodger0101]

Hi Ben, there was a book out around 1994 called the virtual reality construction kit. They used a Power Glove as the control interface ala Lawnmower Man. There is way way to hack the glove and effectively double the resolution for detecting finer hand movements. The book showed you how to hack the glove and came with software for an elementary VR environment. Much fun :)

[@crimsondragon20]

"I love me some gloves, they keep my fingers toasty." *wears finger gloves*

[@flax5977]

Question For Karen: Does ben make as many movie references as he does when he is on camera?

[@maker_karen1785]

Constantly. But so do I, so it's ok. And Max usually throws in a few as well.

[@flax5977]

+theHeckwithKaren But, thats "Highly Illogical" 🖖🏽

[@keatonhunter860]

"i do love me some gloves, keeps my fingers all toasty" she says as she's wearing finger less gloves

[@eth0]

0:35 “Karen, you seem to be doing OK with it” Next shot, Karen dies.

[@maker_karen1785]

Sometimes the final cut isn't accurate to what we're saying and doing. See also: Hey look, you got multiball! (screen shows only one ball.) :P

[@eth0]

+theHeckwithKaren Hehehe, gotta love those little “mistakes,” they make for a good chuckle from time to time. Also: senpai noticed me!

[@element14presents]

D:

[@stevenbenson9976]

I was quietly hoping that you guys would find a way to enable analogue on all games for it just to see if it would work.

[@torquesoftware]

I'm so glad I've found this channel. Ben reminds me of Gabe Newell, especially in the voice lol.

[@CDRaff]

I used my Power Glove exclusively for about 6 months. Granted it was the regular controller built into the back of the glove and not the glove itself.

[@codebeat4192]

Old video I know. I think Ben could do better by not bind the controller to fixed coordinates and only register the changes with some error correction (detection treshold) and smooth out the changes to the mouse coordinates. Actually like swipe works on a phone, detect the direction (and after that reset it) and speed (distance/duration) of the change. By slow changes it moves (for example) 1 pixel, at faster changes it moves 2 pixels and so on. I think you will get more stable and useful results.

[@fragmen52_47]

you could use it to control a 3d printer, maybe add use a paste extruder and try to make 3d sonic fan fiction

[@nintendolunchbox]

Ben. What was your worst or most expensive soldering mistake have you made?

[@cfrend]

I have never been as impressed with Ben as I was during this video. Scope directed reverse engineering #FTW. Nice work

[@FloridaManRacer]

Dear Ben Heck Show. Is there a way to gut out a power glove and retro fit it with Wii or PS3 Motion controller components to "upgrade" and modernize the glove? seems to me it was an idea abandoned only due to the limits of technology in its day....

[@nicktobeck6687]

John Douglas Racing Video the wii and playstation use the same principle for motion tracking. The wii uses the pair of IR leds in the 'sensor' bar with the wiimote finding the position in 3d space. The playstation motion uses the camera to track the light of the controller. Both modern controllers use accelaromitors to track motion better, and to an extent orientation. The big thing that the power glove has is the ability to detect gestures, but a better system could be made using the predecessor's fiberoptic system, or a better implimentation of the power glove.

[@allluckyseven]

"Are we gonna reuse some of the pieces from our salvage episode in that?" Oh, Karen... Making me love you more and more.

[@montywh]

you mentioned a mic line in the 2nd controller port, which as your explanations pointed out, happen to be used by the glove's receiver setup. like most people, i'm sure you've seen a few AVGN videos, or his side project, James & Mike Mondays. in one episode, they did the japanese Legend of Zelda on a famicom, and found out by making a noise in the 2nd controller mic, you can instantly kill all Poe's Voices on screen (the bunny slipper looking monsters). now i'm curious if we could use the power glove's receiver, or homebrew a nes controller with a mic attachment, into an american system, and that sound kill would still function

[@Miasmark]

read a book about hacking a power glove to use in DOS through a serial port about 15 years ago.

[@WatchdogGoon]

I would combine the power glove with your fighting robot project and have a big robotic hand that you could manipulate your opponents with!

[@Owna]

Some games, such as mario 3, request the controller state twice to overcome what is known as the DPCM glitch. You can look it up if you want more info on it :)

[@greatafricanhornedfrog2954]

I love his monologues about the evils of technology

[@theslvrbullt]

That fan art... Byo-tiful. Sell that to an art museum for millions, and when people ask what it's supposed to be, get snobbish and tell them they just don't understand. I loved seeing you reverse engineer the power glove. Almost makes me want to seek one out just to screw with it.

[@cryptnotic]

So there's a subtle DeWalt and Black and Decker advertistment with the yellow drill and the orange orange drill on the work bench.

[@WalterGalindo]

I Love The power glove, it's so bad

[@ericbazinga]

And by 'bad' I mean terrible

[@ericbazinga]

OTBWY Beautiful

[@dcshoes841]

Shut up, Lucas. You're not so rad.

[@westfrank4166]

Angry video game nerd!!!

[@Aeduo]

The doubling up with reading the controller data is likely debounce. Also that data is definitely signed 8 bit.

[@KamenDesantis]

I'm late to this episode by a longshot but I remember the mid-90s messing around with making a cheap VR rig on PC using the power glove and the segascope 3d shutter glasses. And coded with the old rend386 libs! We were talking cutting edge back then LOL! Wierd Ben would not have at least mentioned such things.

[@stphinkle]

It just shows that the power glove's capabilities were not fully utilized in terms of its full functionality. They could have made it a far better experience if the games were recompiled for use in analog mode. I think part of the fact is that microcontroller likely delayed the response time of the glove motion having to translate its sensors into NES controller button emulation. If the games were made for it in analog mode with a fast enough sample time, the experience could be much better.

[@DoomRater]

I donated my Super Gloveball cart to my old Youth Group as they turned out to have a Power Glove for their NES! I had to try it out having played so much of the game with a controller. It was awkward but it still felt a bit easier to win the bonus rounds with the glove than a standard controller.

[@doctorx0079]

I saw The Wizard at the cheap theater, Ben. Trust me, you're not missing much.

[@0phoff]

Hey, Love your show! It inspires me to start projects of my own. I have a quick question though... What kind of wire do you buy for your day-to-day soldering? I know I want both stranded and solid cores, but on element14 there are so many different kinds (different Gauge, number of strands, diameter, voltage rating,...) Also, is there maybe some kind of kit which has all the different colors of the wires (stranded and solid)? I couldn't find one on the website...

[@NickyShadow99]

"Regrettable acting" THEY'RE SELF AWARE!!!!

[@pa4tim]

Felix, where did you find that cool Tektronix T-shirt ?

[@NoahKuzel]

A power glove upgrade, or a chance at making it work?

[@youbecha64]

I was curious if the power glove could be susceptible to interference...also if you made the response coarser, i.e. for ever 10 (input bits) it moves once...but 10 pixels over...rather than one for one. I am sure I am not describing it well...but like when you zoom way in with a paint program, so you are painting each pixel, but the mouse has to travel far to get the cursor to jump to the next pixel.

[@nicktobeck6687]

youbecha64 yes, someone could broadcast the same ultrasonic sound and mess with the system's positioning.

[@BowsettesFury]

Best way to use the og power glove- PROG 14 ENTER ENTER START

[@tjclt250r]

Ben did you know each game had a code that had to be entered when you started game play...it would change some of the commands the glove made or received...the book that comes with the glove is a must have

[@JC-qu5lv]

Very cool, if you look into the history of the power glove and where it came from it was actually brilliant. Using light measurements to control inputs and it pretty on top of it's game then it of course was downgraded and reduced to be more cost effective to work as a toy. Some of the initial designs/patents/ideas around it were quite clever.

[@tekolicious8310]

Hey Ben you ever did a show about wireless power transfer?? Kinda like wireless charging but with 12v and 24v devices?? There is not a lot of info out there.

[@nicktobeck6687]

Tekolicious you're better off avoiding wireless power transfers of that voltage. greatscott! has a video on wireless power transfer. Don't know if it is on 12-24v, but I would suggest looking at similar value power transformers since they work on the same principle, just that the AC power would have to be created if your using dc. But you would be better off avoiding that entirely with the serious amounts of voltage, the poor performance at any level of distance, the possibility of making an inductive heater or a heating coil, an elector magnet that could have an overly powerful effect, and devices that operate at that kind of voltage would need larger amounts of power.

[@KennyChu]

"Why are you guys playing power gloves?" - that what she said

[@lucaseaston]

Great episode. I like the bit where Ben almost dropped the my computer folder into the trash. That would have been fun :)

[@TWMist]

i think the first byte tells you if the other bytes are positive or negative numbers.

[@AncientMysteriesAndInnovations]

Very cool. I got this when it was in stores still lol

[@AviatorArcade]

Hey i know this is an old video- and it's helped me with my mission to fix my power glove. Cutting a long story short, i bought an NTSC one from Ebay and it arrived broken, when plugged into my NES, it was doing the constant beep, but it's as though the buttons on the glove were not responding to my inputs. After a couple of tries, every time the glove is plugged in now there is a quiet, constant buzzing sound with no light on the glove- Question is, do you think this could be repaired? Any suggestions on what you feel this may be? These gloves are pretty rare here in England and there isn't much support, nor do people know what they're looking at so having to take this into my own hands really. Thanks a lot

[@NekoFallen]

Turning the Power Glove into a mouse... Fun fact: The makers of the Power Glove eventually came up with the P5 Glove that was meant to be a computer mouse/joystick.

[@furrymessiah]

What kind of mods are in that NES? The power light was blue, so it's clearly not a stock unit.

[@omfgbunder2008]

i was under the impression that it clocked out 8 bits for the buttons then another 8 for controller identification. at least that's how the snes works (with the exception of some controllers which do it 3 times)

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

I might be better to use short int rather than unsigned char because it might be looking for more than 8 bits of resolution.

[@TheSpacey52]

"Now I'm playing with power!" -Freddy Kreuger

[@IzludeTingel]

Would have used it just the same... but try to improve it. The medical device this thing was based on was incredibly accurate. They removed all the things that made it amazing just to be able to sell it at an affordable price. Someone out there needs to try to get the device back into the state it was meant to be.

[@MetroidChild]

The nintendo probably had signed numbers in some way, at least when performing jumps in the code

[@BGBTech]

those numbers he was getting, they looked like signed twos complement numbers to me. will assume that is probably what they were. ADD: usually at the ASM / machine code level, there isn't really much of a distinction between signed and unsigned numbers anyways, but more it is up to how they are "interpreted" by the program working with them. most ALU operations work equivalently between signed and unsigned numbers, and usually about the only real difference is that there are often different signed/unsigned comparisons for conditional jump ops or similar. can't say as much specifically about the 6502, would have to look more into it. ADD2: the 6502 supported signed arithmetic.

[@GMLscripts]

100% right about two's compliment. I'm surprised Ben didn't catch that. The 6502 has a status register to indicate a negative result from a calculation and its branch instructions all use relative addressing with two's complement operand to indicate a forward jump of up to 127 bytes or a backwards jump of up to 128 bytes.

[@morphman86]

I thought "I can't be the only one who wants to make a Powerglove Midi Controller". A quick search showed me I wasn't. There's even an artist that makes his music mostly using a hacked Powerglove.

[@Jkid101090]

One of my dreams is to one day have a portable, all-in-one gaming system. I wonder if Ben could take a tablet or a phone and mod it into the case of a Wii U controller? I love the feel of that thing and mobile phones have tons of potential when it comes to playing older games.

[@AaronPaluzzi]

It's cool to see you hack through the Powerglove. Just curious if you've ever seen this book? It's from the first VR push in the 90's and had documentation on a Motorolla circuit you could build to link a powerglove to a IBM PC / Apple Macintosh ii serial port. I built one back in the day. Worked great, but never did anything major with it. The book also had a set of plans for an early HMD. www.abebooks.com/9780672302701/Garage-Virtual-RealityBook-Disk-Jacobson-0672302705/plp

[@MagnaRyuuDesigns]

Actually the kid who uses the power glove isn't really a "villain" of the movie, he was just the kid who gave Fred Savage's little brother his first loss in the movie.

[@MagnaRyuuDesigns]

yeah i think that was suppose to be apart of the game as a bet

[@mtylerryan]

"They keep my fingers toasty." says Karen is FINGERLESS gloves.

[@kiddaaronlee]

i see a logitech g930 headset there in the background :D you know you can order a replacement battery and pretty easily put it in the second ear pod and wire the original and the replacement in parallel for double the capacitance.

[@erhanalankus]

your videos are the highlight of my fridays. thank you.

[@AnActualDuck]

I've always wanted to see what people could potentially do with the expansion port on the bottom of the NES if you could tackle that at some point. There is some videos on youtube about it but nothing extensive enough to satisfy my itch for knowing it's potential.

[@nicktobeck6687]

Justin Jangles if I had to guess the expansion slot would work with a possible disk system like the famicom disk system, or use with a modem service (altough I could be off on that part, since the famicom used the game slot, but it would be more eligant than having a strange cart sticking out of the front of the nes with a cord.)

[@DoomRater]

Also, I think someone already did this sort of thing for the Power Glove as there's a tool that allows you to play Doom.exe with it. Like, Vanilla Doom with the Power Glove.

[@TWMist]

you should set a finger bend to disable the mouse

[@DoomRater]

I have one more question. Has anyone done any work on Power Glove emulation for NES emulators? I'd love to use a Wiimote to play a Power Glove game for example, as its probably the closest device that would even work.

[@theoldone22]

I have seen a few great mods of the power glove.

[@chawancut]

Do you have the power glove connector pinout? I have it but don't have the sensor bar and box. I would like to convert its 9 pin connector to the normal controller connector to just use the direction pad and normal controller buttons. Thanks!

[@stphinkle]

I am guessing the 6 LEDs correspond to NES signals, Up, Down, Left, Right, A, and B but I could be wrong.

[@LordDrachenblut]

there is actually a data glove out there based on the power glove for computers

[@nicktobeck6687]

LordDrachenblut the data glove came first, and demonstrated the possibility of the power glove. The cost to produce the data glove was about 10,000 dollars, so it was cheepened down to under 100 dollars.

[@KieranGee]

The protocol is pretty much exactly the same as the one in the SNES controller, literally shift register.

[@Rezic]

I hope some aspiring homebrewer sees this and makes a new game for the power glove based on its strengths.

[@PonchiOFFICIAL]

how and where did you get the power glove when it is too old/sold out??

[@jetjazz05]

Now that VR is being developed by a lot of companies now maybe when it's established Nintendo will come out with a new "Virtual Boy" and they'll have a new iteration of the Power Glove. It'd be amusing because (hopefully) both would actually work well.

[@raoufallani5142]

thank you so much great work - RAOUF

[@AlpacaMyBowl]

Felix has been working that corner...

[@xxSepelxx]

What about building a better Version of the power glove?

[@TazarZero]

So for the hiring process, did the requirements include "be as bad at "acting" as I (Ben Heck) am"? Cause this chick nails it.

[@FarnellGlobal]

Got to fit in somehow. ;)

[@SeraphimKnight]

It wouldn't be the Ben Heck Show without awful acting. I mean, it *is* in the intro after all...

[@maker_karen1785]

Yes. Yes it was. For example: my first episode, Ben: Hey can you do a cockney accent? K: ....maaaaybeeee? No. No I cannot.

[@michalnemecek3575]

maybe it could be used for magic duels?

[@ericsanquist]

How about a wireless powerglove for the wii

[@kgh237]

I wonder if Ben Heck will do a HTC vive tear down in the future, it would be interesting.

[@Porygonal64]

Oh, the Sonic fan art jokes. :P

[@shmookins]

So it was actually using motion sensors. Huh. I thought it faked motion controls with wires or button or something. Neat idea to have that that long ago. I've only seen pictures of the thing so I don't know it.