syphus

Not sure how all the US-based Nintendo chipsters missed this interesting looking Blockparty release, but it doesn’t seem like anyone’s been talking about it in all the usual circles. Anyway, this is the first release of a new NDS tracker - NitroTracker means well, but sadly doesn’t seem to be coming up with the goods. If this guy’s gone for his own custom format, then maybe it’ll be able to carve out its own comfy niche…
Looking forward to giving it a shot, when I can find my DS. It took second place in the Wild compo at Blockparty, and the pouet thread is here.

The Chip Tune Marching Band, which I helped organise in Newcastle and Helsinki, has gone to New York for Bent Fest without me (while I’ve been living it up at Breakpoint :). Jamie Allen (lecturer in the department I work for) and Kazuhiro Jo put this idea together and are doing the workshop wherever they can.

Yes, I hear you cry, there are no actual ‘chiptunes’ involved, per se. The phrase is attention-grabbing, though, and reflects the fact that people are making crazy chip-style noises with squarewave generators, and it’s all terribly good fun.

Having said that, if you look closely at the video on the Make article, you’ll notice a surprisingly high ratio of chip-musicians to regular people: Cerebral Scars, Goto80 and, of course, myself :D

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/04/handmade_music_bent_edition_-_tonig.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Just got back from Breakpoint ‘09 in Bingen, where my favourite production of the weekend was Syntax Infinity - an MSX2 demo from Tulou and Traktor. I dunno exactly who worked on it, but they’re both excellent Amiga groups I wasn’t particularly surprised to see that the great music was done by everyone’s favourite Esau, who’s a member of both. Anyway, check it out.

I’ll elaborate and possibly post some similar things of interest as and when I recover from the 10-hour living-death layover at Stansted and stop hallucinating.

C64 Datasette - you remember it. The Datasette embodies Commodore cheapskatery from start to finish: it was a cheapo alternative to a proper disk drive, it’s got a crudely thrown-together connector with wires hanging out and it’s even got a skinflint mono drive head apparatus. All expenses spared, so that Jack could keep the costs down!

So it turns out they last pretty well. And in this age of 1541 emulators, MMC64 interfaces and the like, it’s sad to see a Datasette sitting unused and unloved. So I decided to lavish about four quid on mine and turn it into a block-rocking pimp star supreme with:

• an internal speaker
• internal 9v battery power
• an external in (for when I eventually get the recording head to work)
• a line/headphone output
• a switch/knob for power and drive motor speed control (though this doesn’t really work yet)
• an unfeasible amount of mystery line noise, which I’m going to pretend is intentional and adds ‘character’.

Read the rest of this entry »

A quick one, to be elaborated upon when I’m less at risk of a 25-hour-a-day, stress-induced multiple organ failure extravaganza:

LIVE on 7th March at The Telegraph, Newcastle, along with gwEm, Jellica, Cerebral Scars and BSK

LIVE on 15th March at the Maker Faire Closing Party - part of Maker Faire and the Science Festival at Newcastle’s Centre For Life. This one’s with goto80, with some ace visuals and club DJs stretching into the night to round off the weekend’s excitement.

ALSO: be aware of www.chiptunemarchingband.com - taking place on the Saturday afternoon of the Maker Faire

The 117th release from underground Amiga legends Up Rough is a top-quality Gameboy Advance musicdisk featuring a bleeding-edge AHX/Hively player port and an astonishing array of dancing teddies.

Code by Flubba, Graphics by Spot, Music by Qwan, Syphus and shitloads of others - lots of classic AHX favourites from over the last 14 years to enjoy on your GBA/DS/emulator.

Download here!

One of my two major personal discoveries at Blip Festival this year (the other being cow’p) has given me a good 24 hours of happy now that I’ve finally got around to downloading both of his 8bitpeoples releases.

Trash80 is a big deal, having done some really important Gameboy hardware dev, music for games like Darwinia and various other things, but since we obviously move in quite different circles I wasn’t very acquainted with his work before Blip. We hung out quite a bit through the five or so days we were in NYC, but he was the very last artist to play which mean that all the rest of us were chilled, no longer worrying about our own sets, and ready to hit the dancefloor for the grand finale. Well, fucking hell. Excellent stuff: for my money, the perfect application of chipstyle sounds in the fully-sequenced/produced arena. I could learn a thing or two about breaking down some my own entrenched production ‘values’ by listening to this guy.

Oh, he also saved Mia and I from getting unutterably lost in Manhattan at 3am with his GPS skillz. Tim, I salute you.

Shit, I almost forgot: the point of this entry was to send you to 8bitpeoples to download Icarus and Hologram! Do it.

Woo! Finally set up with syphus.net, my shiny new domain, thanks to scamp at untergrund.

Also spent this evening starting again (for bazillionth time) with C on 68k Amiga. Resources I’d found and then lost in the past were rediscovered at Spellcoder’s www.amigacoding.com and, even though he thinks I should be learning 68k ASM like a real man, Stingray^Drifters has been extremely helpful (as always). So my goal for the weekend is addressing audio.device and shoehorning in some inline ASM to make a C program that plays one of my modules…then I’m one step closer to my bold manifesto to release in musicdisk formats this year :)

Distraction, as usual, comes from old episodes of Micro Live

After an afternoon’s messy PHP hacking in Wordpress’s shit little editor, I’ve now got my music page back under control and featuring a nice little player. It’s still an unordered list, but instead of showing mp3 and mod links for each tune, it shows one row with two icon links (or one, if there’s no corresponding mp3) and Read the rest of this entry »

…are going to be (I’ve just decided) bi-platform or tri-platform musicdisks, probably multiformat, for Windows, Linux and Mac. They’ll have a shared codebase, different GUIs and a built-in wavewriter with mp3 encoder so that people can download the tiny exe then generate an album’s worth of mp3s at whatever quality they choose to take away and listen to. Read the rest of this entry »