Archive for April, 2006

International Vodka Party

Friday, April 28th, 2006

International Vodka Party, raucous Spectrum demo scene gathering in Poland

Oldskool Crusader

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

This was my entry for the Oldschool Executable Music compo at Breakpoint 2006, which placed 6th out of 12 entries. This was a cross-platform competition to produce a piece of music on any sub-32-bit computer (the Spectrum in this case) in under 32K.

Download gasman_-_oldskool_crusader.mp3
Download MP3 (4.5M)
Download TAP (10K)

As the saying goes, never work with children, animals or 1980s-era speech synthesisers.

It is a well established fact that to win a music compo at a large party, you need a gimmick, and speech is as good a gimmick as any. This led me to start experimenting with a Cheetah Sweet Talker interface I picked up on eBay – a worthy project, I thought, as to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever done anything creative with speech synthesis on the Spectrum beyond using it to robotically swear at friends and family. My master plan was to write a jazz piece with semi-spoken lyrics (because the synthesiser can only “sing” in monotone) about marmosets. Yes, marmosets. It was meant to be in keeping with the party theme of “Rumble In The Jungle”, you see.
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Breakpoint 2006

Friday, April 14th, 2006

Breakpoint 2006, the world’s largest pure demo scene event

London 2.0 RC4

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

London 2.0 RC4, web frameworks / Web 2.0 meetup