Archive for the ‘Demoscene’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

tracker2ay

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Here’s a utility prompted by zxbruno and Eq both asking, in the space of two days, how to convert STC, SQT and PT3 music files to something you can actually play on a Spectrum. For those not in the know, STC and friends are Spectrum tracker file formats originally introduced by Sergey Bulba‘s AY Emulator and which are now the de-facto standard for archiving Spectrum demoscene music (most prominently on ZXDemo, ZXTunes and Sergey’s epic Tr_songs archive). Which means it’s a bit unfortunate that there’s not been an obvious way to transfer them back to the Spectrum.

In principle it should just be a case of locating the appropriate Z80 player routine and bundling that together with the music data. In practice it involves a lot of faffing about (such as repointing pointers to make up for slight rubbishness in the SQT data format, and writing a 5-line Basic loader/player). Now, thanks to this utility, you just need to type tracker2ay mysong.stc mysong.tap instead. (Oh, and it can convert to TAP, TZX or AY.)

If at this point you’re screaming “But why does it have separate source code if it’s written in Ruby, which is an interpreted language?” then award yourself 20 geek points. Ah, you see, this time I’ve been playing with rubyscript2exe (and tar2rubyscript) to create all-in-one executables that everyone can enjoy without worrying about library dependencies and things. (But obfuscates the code in the process. But in a good way.) Please do check out the source code if you’re curious about that sort of thing, because I reckon it’s one of the best bits of code I’ve written in a long time, in a ‘nicely-written code’ sort of way rather than ‘evil complicated hacks that go together to do something superficially elegant’.

Posted in Demoscene, Music, Ruby, Spectrum | 6 Comments »

Mr Phong

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

There just aren’t enough songs about computer graphics pioneers. Here’s one about Bui Tuong Phong, of phong shading and phong illumination fame. I decided to record this one entirely without keyboards, so brace yourselves for a gloriously shoddy guitar solo and a gloriously glorious bottle solo. (Forgetting to take out the recycling can be a good thing, you know.)

Download matt_westcott_-_mr_phong.mp3

(more…)

Posted in Demoscene, FAWM, Music | 3 Comments »

Triptik

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

My very fast (written in something like 2 hours) music entry for raww.orgy, which ended up in 4th place. In a cunning kill-two-birds-with-one-stone move, it’s also one of my FAWM songs.

Download gasman_-_triptik.mp3

Triptik on FAWM

Posted in Demoscene, FAWM, Music, Spectrum | No Comments »

Pimp My Chips

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

[Screenshot: Pimp My Chips]

This week saw the release of the long awaited Ate Bit musicdisk, Pimp My Chips – featuring a selection of Spectrum covers of classic pop songs. Musical contributions came from Mofobaru, Simon, Nik-O and myself, and the full pack is well worth a download if you’re suitably Windows-executable-equipped. If you don’t, or you’re more of an instant-gratification-click-and-listen type (or a stick-it-on-your-mp3-player type), here are my tracks as friendly bandwidth-hogging MP3s.

Dancing Queen (Abba)

Download gasman_-_dancing_queen.mp3

Disco 2000 (Pulp)

Download gasman_-_disco_2000.mp3

Video Killed The Radio Star (The Buggles)

Download gasman_-_video_killed_the_radio_star.mp3

Paranoid Android (Radiohead)

Download gasman_-_paranoid_android.mp3

Posted in Demoscene, Music, Spectrum | 5 Comments »

SoundTracker 20th Anniversary

Monday, November 19th, 2007

[screenshot: SoundTracker 20th Anniversary]

Released last week (ok, so I’m slacking…), SoundTracker 20th Anniversary is, unsurprisingly, Hooy-Program’s celebration of the 20th anniversary of Karsten Obarski’s SoundTracker for the Amiga, which has shaped the design of computer music software ever since. This Spectrum production features a four-channel MOD soundtrack by Yerzmyey using the original ST-01 sample pack, played using the General Sound add-on interface.

To be honest, I find the General Sound to be an exceedingly silly interface. It has its own processor that’s four times as fast as the one on the Spectrum, and its own independent memory store – in fact, the whole thing has a spec strangely comparable to one of the original Amigas – so it’s pushing the bounds of credibility to call it a way of playing MODs on the Spectrum. It’s more like sellotaping a CD player to the side and saying “Look! My Spectrum can play CD-quality audio!”

But hey, it made for a nice silly new demo, anyway.

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 2 Comments »

Leaving summertime behind

Monday, September 10th, 2007

This demo received 4th place in the Sundown 2007 Oldschool Demo competition, out of, um, 4 entries. I could blame that on the not-quite-optimal projector settings it got shown under, or (more likely) the intense competition from the other entries. But actually I won’t, and instead I’ll sit contented in the knowledge that I got to explore some new concepts and techniques in Spectrum demo coding, without really knowing how they’d turn out, and managed to get them to a state where they didn’t totally suck. (Provided you’re willing to use a bit of imagination.)

The plan was to create something approaching a lo-fi YouTube-stylee home movie of scenes from a summer day – but with all visuals generated in real time, of course, as per the usual demoscene custom – drawing on the already-lo-fi graphics of the Spectrum, some crafty image processing, and some fine photos taken by Natalie (whose Flickr stream I previously plundered for Gallions Reach). And now, in a post-modern self-referential ironic twist (or something), you can watch it as a YouTube video.

(more…)

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 5 Comments »

Passing remote web data to attachment_fu

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

This week I have been mostly discovering what a wonderful Rails plugin attachment_fu is for handling image uploads. You just hand it the contents of an upload field on a form, and it takes care of everything else – checking that it’s a valid image, working out its file type, choosing a sensible filename for it, resizing it appropriately, and sticking the resulting image file into either the filesystem, the database, or Amazon S3.

That last feature has been particularly handy on Demozoo, which is currently hosted in borrowed space on a server that doesn’t really have 100-odd megabytes of free space for demo screenshots. However, attachment_fu comes a bit unstuck when you’re dealing with files that don’t come from a form upload – for instance, in my case I’m planning to have a scheduled task that leeches new productions and their screenshots from Pouët, and I’d quite like to take advantage of the Imagemagick-and-S3 goodness that attachment_fu brings. A bit of digging around was in order.
(more…)

Posted in Demozoo, Hacks, Ruby | 12 Comments »

“best not publish your work on the internet, someone might steal it”

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

In 2005, record producer Timbaland found a piece of music by young Finnish musician Janne Suni on the internet, took it without permission to use in his own work, made a lot of money out of it, and shrugged it off with a sarcastic comment when confronted about it. This hasn’t been covered by BBC News yet.

In 2007, adult DVD producer TVX Films found a picture by young British photographer Lara Jade Coton on the internet, took it without permission to use as the cover of one of their DVDs, made a lot of money out of it, and shrugged it off with a sarcastic comment when confronted about it. This was covered on BBC News yesterday, in a report that concluded with the reporter saying something to the effect of “The case is still ongoing, but for now this underlines the dangers of posting pictures on the internet.”

No. It. Damn. Well. Doesn’t.

Clearly, when putting a photograph or any other personal information online people need to consider the possibility of it falling into the wrong hands and being spread further than intended, but “what if some thieving scum come along and illegally repurpose it in a way that I don’t approve of” should not have to be part of those considerations. Ms Coton did nothing irresponsible in posting that photo. It wasn’t pornographic in any way – it was an elegant, professionally made shot. Good enough to be put on the cover of a DVD, in fact. Definitely not something she should regret putting her name to on the internet.

So what does that BBC reporter think she should have done? Just stuck to taking photos of bunnies and flowers? Or better, just stayed in and watched MTV? This is what copyright law is for, guys. You use someone’s work without permission, and you get your ass handed to you in court – as I sincerely hope will happen in both these cases. Don’t try to paint it as if the original artist did anything wrong by publishing that work for free on the internet… the suggestion that they should curb their artistic expression, just because there are a bunch of law breakers freeloading off it, is just offensive.

Posted in Demoscene, Rants | 1 Comment »

Demozoo

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

I’m back from Assembly Summer 2007, where I launched my long-promised demoscene database site Demozoo to not very much fanfare at all. It’s been in development on and off for at least two years – I ambitiously chose it as my ‘hello world’ project to learn Ruby On Rails with, subsequently aborted and restarted it about seven times over as I learned more and more Right Ways To Do Things, and eventually reached the stage of hacking on Rails internals to make it do what I wanted (most significantly the Nested has_many_through patch/plugin, which lets you achieve simple and yet bizarrely normally-impossible relationships like ‘all productions made by members of this group’).

The initial reception of the site has been mixed; there have been excited noises from people who have immediately seen its potential, and it’s already been useful for filling in those ‘dammit, what group is he in again’ memory lapses at the pub (as well as a cunning way to startle Smash on AssemblyTV, by introducing him as “Smash of jecoute” rather than his rather more well-known role in Fairlight). It’s also attracted some (not entirely unfair) comments that it’s basically a very unfinished clone of Pouët, to which I have three replies:

  • Yes. Deadlines, party coding etc, mumble mumble, not enough time to add much data at all besides Pouët / add whizzy features other than the minimum necessary to make it work. *shuffles feet*
  • Yes. But the massively important and really subtle difference is that it can handle individual people’s nicknames properly, even where they’re duplicated all over the place. (And that’s what’s taken two years to get right, pretty much.) For example, there are at least three people on the scene who go by the name of Simon and at least two groups called CPU, but if you enter a production by “Simon / CPU” then it knows exactly who you mean. And once you’ve got individual authors in the database, you can start indexing graphics and music. And if you don’t have to pick authors from a dropdown every single time, it becomes viable to enter a whole heap of complete party results in one sitting. Which will happen, soon.
  • Yes. How about I stop trying to justify its existence right now, and work on it some more until it speaks for itself?

I like answer number 3 best.

Posted in Demoscene, Demozoo, Ruby | 2 Comments »

Will It Blend?

Friday, July 13th, 2007

A product of about one day of not very hard work (because why would you want to be stuck behind a laptop when there’s so much else going on at Shucon?), Will It Blend? is our tribute to everyone’s favourite iPhone destroyers, willitblend.com. It was put together in collaboration with Factor6 who did the music and additional graphics, with textual contributions from almost everybody. Which are largely unreadable, in more ways than one.

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 4 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »