Chipmusic • Platforms

Battle of the Bits proud to present Winter Chip IV

winter-chip-iv_coverBattle of the Bits proud to present Winter Chip IV
BotB and it’s resident BotBrs invites any and all to participate, listen and/or vote in BotB’s fourth annual Winter Chip competition.  As always, this year’s compo has added even more chiptune formats totalling at a balmy sixteen.  That’s right!!  16 different ways to share yer skillz in chip.  Each participant can submit an entry to each category if their heart so desires.
Submission Deadline :: March 9th
Voting will follow for ten days.
Categories this year are :: heart-magic, brain-tech, bleep-squeeze, deep-tweak & oh-noes-my-pants!
Results will be posted March 20.
This is the first competition to be hosted by BotB’s new engine.  Over six months ago a great effort was initiated by lead developer puke7 to give BotB an actual framework to stand on.  This has successfully brought about reducing database call redundancies, decreasing load times, and making BotB not a complete pain in the ass to update.  All code was started from scratch again.  Old site features are still springing up.
All n00bz!! =D/
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/LSVvbpi4y7Y" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]
Amiga • C64 • Pixel Art • Spectrum • Visual Artists

Digital Tools Profiles: Ptoing

ptoing-zxfaces“Brilliant Pixelartists don’t fall from trees. But there are people who know just how to place the right colors on the right places. Sven Ruthner is such a man. The demoscener known under the alias Ptoing just got the right feel for colors and for intense shapes and proportions. The illustrator works with different media, but is also very enthusiastic about vintage homecomputers, like using C64, Amiga or Spectrum ZX”

Read More:

Spectrum

8BITTODAY: 256k Byte Compo

rawwy2009_articleNice dissection of the entrants in a compo earlier this month. Great read, with plenty of videos. Excerpt:

What could you say in 256 characters? To get an idea; it’s a little more than one and a half text messages on your mobile phone. Now if you had to program something in 256 characters, what would, or maybe mostly could that be? It’s the same idea like our article on Artefacts by Plush, working with artificial limitations on limited hardware.

8bittoday

Live Events • Site News

New Events Page!

Due to numerous requests I added an event list to TCTD.

You can see the list of the shows here;

You can submit news here:

Contact

Things we require

Show Name
Lineup
Date/time/Price
Page link

Chipmusic • Editorials • Labels • resources

Chip o Muerte: 56KBPS launches

56web2

Click To Visit

News from an interesting new Latin American Chip collective. Homeless Ninja Robots writes on teh 8BC:

Here comes a new challenger: 56KBPS, a latinamerican chiptune netlabel, we are launching our site just today, and it’s packed with releases from mexican and brazilian artists:

-Bon (LSDJ, Guitars, Vox)
-Homeless Ninja Robots (NES)
-pulselooper (LSDJ)
-TheTheThes (Trippy-H)

We focus on real hardware rather than software or emulation, and we dont promote just music, but plastic arts and literature as well.

There are pending releases from:
-Tigerchip
-PopcornKid
-Play Ninja Bit
-Kealkowa

Their ideological commitment to authenticity is bold, considering the difficulties people have obtaining hardware in Latin American countries. The basic democracy of chip music is that if you have a machine that can access the Internet, you have 100% of the tools you need to make a chip music song.

This is an overwhelmingly positive development for introducing young and new voices to the international stage.

But then again, one could make the argument that a limitation like hardware only will filter output to showcase the true heads and those who REALLY want to do it. The Price of democracy is that it becomes as easy to create and promote garbage as it is to promote brilliance.

It will also be interesting to see how the collective promotes arts and literature, as chip music seems to have a tough time interacting with other aspects of the arts community.

Anyways it will take me a few days to absorb all these releases, but this can only be good for the burgening Latin American chip music community.