In advance of my appearance at the Ultrachip Festival in Edinburgh next month (19th-20th August! Two nights of awesomeness from the UK’s finest chiptune musicians! Free entry! W00t!), I thought this would be a good time to reveal the secret weapon at the heart of my live shows. Ladies and gentlemen, behold… the Synchronizatron 3000.
Out of all my projects, I like this one a lot. I like it because it brought me out of my comfort zone and into the murky world of hardware design (aided by the Arduino project which does a fine job of making that world accessible to electronics noobs like me). I also like it because it elegantly solves a problem that, in all likelihood, nobody in the world but me has. But most of all, I like it because it has a pair of blinky LEDs on the top which serve no meaningful purpose. (more…)
After the triumphant AY Riders gig at the Forever demoparty back in March, I had a hankering for some more Speccy-and-keytar-and-vocoder live performance action, so I jumped at the chance to play my first EVVAR solo set at last weekend’s Outline party in the Netherlands. Outline is by no means one of the largest parties, but there’s something magic about the atmosphere there which has made it one of the most eagerly awaited events in my calendar over the last couple of years. Most demo parties will give you the opportunity to chill outside in the sun with a beer or slave away at a hot CPU to finish off your creations, but it’s rare that the two activities flow together so smoothly as they do at Outline.
And with everyone’s spirits kept high, it means that when the evening activity kicks off, you have the most awesome audience you could possibly hope for. Big ups to TMC for the video, m0d for the other video which should be surfacing soon, Ziphoid for streaming the gig on SceneSat Radio, and of course Havoc, D-Force and the rest of the Outline team for making it all happen…
Setlist
1:51 Gasman – Out Of Neverland
6:18 Gasman – Torch Dragon
8:41 Celine Dion – My Heart Will Go On
10:23 Gasman – Cybernoid’s Revenge
14:23 Madonna (arr. TDM + Factor6) – Hung Up
20:17 Gasman – Oldskool Crusader
23:47 Michael Jackson – Thriller (featuring Okkie)
30:30 Purple Motion (arr. TDM + Factor6) – Satellite One
balls, touching
And after all that, I still had some spare energy to do some casual hacking around with sine waves and come up with an entry for the 128 byte intro compo. As you’ll see from the video, 128 byte intros are one of those peculiarly demoscene-ish things that demand a certain frame of mind to be enjoyed properly, to the point where it gets a tad surreal for outsiders. If nothing else, you can certainly count on the Outline audience to provide a soundtrack to a silent production.
(…and before you ask, the title does indeed come from an infantile demoscene in-joke about genitalia. I’d actually only planned for there to be one ball, but then one of those fortuitous coding accidents from adding or removing an odd instruction happened, and I knew I had to run with it.)
I wrote a Speccy chiptune for the Revision party this weekend (where it was presented on the 29th anniversary of the release of the ZX Spectrum, no less). The whole thing was done live at the party in the space of about six hours, and it’s very much in my signature style.
February has been and gone, bringing with it my now customary jaunt into the world of February Album Writing Month. I fell some way short of the 14 song target this time, which I’ll blame on considerably increasing my production values this year, and not at all on being a lazy git.
I’m holding back a few of the songs from general release, because they’ll be going towards this month’s exciting musical happening: the Geek Pop virtual festival! Yes, all the greatest musical minds from the worlds of science and technology will be gathered in one place on the internet – and somehow I’ve ended up being one of them, performing on the Comical Flask stage alongside such luminaries as MJ “Hey Hey 16K” Hibbett. And because it’s a virtual festival, you don’t even need to drink beer out of a nasty plastic beaker or walk two miles to the nearest shower. Hurrah! Keep your browsers peeled (or something) at the Geek Pop website for the big unveiling on March 11th, or mosey on down to Wilton’s Music Hall, London on the 10th for the live launch gig.
In the meantime, here’s some almost-as-good-or-equally-good-but-not-as-geeky music I also wrote last month…
2011-03-10: Have had a report that Syd is no longer able to send boards outside the Ukraine due to a change in the law which came in this week. Trying to confirm the details right now, but clearly this is a major downer if it is indeed true :-( Obviously, Syd is the best person to advise on the current state of orders. (And if you have any more news on the situation, please pass it on to me via comments or email)
2011-03-11: A later report from gringo128 (comment below) suggests that this only affects the EMS delivery service – Syd is now sending boards by standard mail, which is a bit slower (two weeks rather than 5-10 days) but still offers online tracking (and is hopefully adequately insured too, but please check before ordering). Hoping I can bring you news of their successful arrival some time soon…
2011-03-16: The good news: Another Speccy2010 board has safely arrived in the UK by DHL, and Craig, the lucky recipient, has made a follow-up video of unboxing number two. The bad news: The current batch has now sold out, and Syd has stated that he’s decided not to send boards abroad in future, due to the complications this time round. For now all we can do is wait for the situation to change, or someone to step in to take on the role of international distributor (could that be you, dear reader…?). In the meantime, keep an eye on zx.pk.ru and here for news of any new developments.
Updated 2011-03-05: Added info about troubleshooting over the serial port.
This is the story of how I got hold of a Speccy2010 board, one of the most exciting developments to hit the Spectrum world in recent times. It’s a Spectrum clone developed in the Ukraine, which replicates the original 48 and 128K Spectrums, along with the Pentagon and Scorpion models popular across Russia. It connects to a TV or monitor by composite video, S-Video or VGA, and lets you load emulator images (tape, snapshot, or TR-DOS disk) from an SD card. The whole thing is the size of a packet of crisps, and is built around an FPGA programmable logic chip which can be reflashed with new firmware versions (again via the SD card) to gain new capabilities as and when they are developed. In short, it’s exactly what people are asking for whenever they post to a Spectrum web forum asking “Why doesn’t someone build a next-generation Spectrum?” And you can buy one, today.
Tempted? Well, here’s the deal. This isn’t mass-produced commodity hardware – Syd, the developer, is building these by hand in small runs – so don’t expect any formal commercial support or handy “enter your credit card details here” online order forms. (Don’t worry – ordering isn’t difficult, just… different.) The boards are fully tested before despatch, and Syd will try to help with any issues you have with it (as will I), but beyond that, it’s sold “as is” – there’ll be no refund if it turns out to be incompatible with your monitor, or doesn’t run your favourite game or whatever. The whole thing cost me £150 (175 EUR, 240 USD) including all delivery / transaction fees, and on top of that you might pay something like £20-30 for the power supply, keyboard, cables, SD cards and other accessories, depending on what you have lying around already. So, it’s somewhere above the “geeky impulse purchase from Firebox” price range you may have been hoping for, but still a very decent price for a piece of kit for a hobby you’re half-way serious about. If your sense of adventure doesn’t stretch this far, stop reading now. For the rest of us, here’s what you have to do…
It’s time once again for the denizens of comp.sys.sinclair and World Of Spectrum (along with anyone else with an unhealthy obsession with Sinclair ZX Spectrums) to meet up to discuss new developments, old games, nostalgia, crisps, beer and everything else in the world of retro-computing.
The date: Saturday 12th February 2011, from 2pm. The venue: The Gypsy Moth, Greenwich. Come along one and all!
I’ve rewritten the DivIDEo converter app in pure C, and as a result it’s now available in friendly standalone Windows and Mac OS X command line executables (and slightly less crazy and Ruby-ish to compile for other platforms). All the necessary libraries (including a major chunk of ffmpeg) are compiled in, so now there’s nothing standing between you and full-on ZX Spectrum video converting action. Head over to the DivIDEo website for the downloads.
Incidentally, a couple of people have asked about the identity of the singer in the Outline presentation. Apparently, while that clip is what we sneeringly refer to as an “internet phenomenon”, it’s not quite reached 100% saturation, so: it is Edward Anatolevich Hill, with a Russian TV performance of the song “I am very glad, because I’m finally back home”, or as it’s becoming increasingly better known, Trololololo.
Six years after my first tentative attempts at streaming video from the DivIDE interface were presented at Notcon 2004, I’ve finally come up with a system that I’m happy with. It boasts 25fps playback with audio somewhere above the ‘nails in a vacuum cleaner’ quality of previous attempts (through the use of delta compression on the video data and variable bitrate audio to use up whatever processor time is left), a one-shot conversion utility that handles all the video decoding, rendering and re-packing, and a player routine that more or less respects the ATA spec (so won’t fall apart as soon as someone else tries it on a different CompactFlash card. Hopefully). Here’s how I presented it at the Outline demo party:
The BBC Micro Men comedy/drama shown last October starring Alexander Armstrong and Martin Freeman as Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry has, unsurprisingly, gone down a storm in 8-bit enthusiast circles.
There’s been a lot of demand from the international Speccy community for subtitles, since it’s apparently rather heavy on colloquial English – and so as a contribution to this weekend’s Forever party, I spent several highly pleasurable hours in front of the rather spiffy Miyu subtitling package to put these together. It’s definitely a show that rewards repeated viewing – for instance, take a close look at what’s on the whiteboard behind Hermann as he says of the newly laid-off engineers: “They are clever people. They’ll think of something. Maybe they already have”…
Yesterday’s Full Frontal javascript conference turned out to be the ideal setting to compare notes with Ben Firshman of JSNES fame on the finer points of implementing emulators in Javascript – so this new release of JSSpeccy is the natural consequence of that. I’ve put in an optimisation which might possibly be a speed boost on Chrome (only writing bytes to ImageData when absolutely absolutely necessary), and the much-needed ability to load your own snapshot files, using the little-known getAsBinary method on file upload objects. (Unfortunately Firefox 3.5 is the only browser which supports it right now, but it looks like it may be in the process of getting the official W3C blessing right now.) And since I was on a roll, on the train back I implemented tape loading traps and the ability to load .TAP files (again, only on Firefox 3.5). Wahey!
#fawm song 2:So Much For Global Warming http://t.co/OHQOGSKF (nicely timed to coincide with some classic climate ignorance on Twitter today) #6 hours ago
Oh my god, said Stewart Baker, a man we phoned up to add dramatic effect to this news story. http://t.co/5G3z7888#2012/02/02
Finished my first song of #fawm last night: the shamelessly self-referential This Year's FAWM (is gonna be awesome) http://t.co/pBButtkF#2012/02/02
@MJHibbett You're getting a promotion while his old indie band does a comeback tour of Japan? :-) #2012/01/31
And today's trip - #thamespath section 9: Newbridge to Tadpole Bridge http://t.co/ZEZAnPKb#2012/01/29
Last week's outing I never got round to posting up - #thamespath section 8: Farmoor to Newbridge http://t.co/OXiFlg0o#2012/01/29
@jonleighton aka hey, we both know why I'm here but let's have an awkward email thread about 'opportunities' before I get to the point! #2012/01/27
RT @griffinkate: Aargh, Google are doing a new thing and it's probably evil and the text about it is long and boring and I'm ill. This i ... #2012/01/27
