Huoratron // Blip Festival 2007: The Videos from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.
2playerproductions has started psoting videos from their Blip Festival 2007 videos.
You can see more on their channel
vimeo channel
http://vimeo.com/channels/blip2007
Or Order their dvd’s
Filmbaby page for 06 and 07 dvds
http://www.filmbaby.com/films/search?film%5Bsearch_field%5D=&film%5Bsearch_param%5D=blip+festival&commit=GO
For about 5 years, I lived less than a 10 minute train ride away from Kichijoji and remained completely oblivious to the fact the I lived so close to what is probably Japan’s premier
Chip Music event. Quarta330, Coova and Saitone held the first Lo-Bit Playground 5 years ago. Since then pretty much every major Japanese chip act has played there. A fair few guests from the US (Bit Shifter, Bubblyfish and Nullsleep) and Europe (Covox and Role Model) have also appeared over the years.
I don’t recall exactly where but I heard rumors that the venue 4th Floor was kind of hard to find to I did a little research. I Armed myself with a Googlemap, first hand directions from two people and a phone number. Pretty confident that the venue was “1 minute from the station” I arrived 40 minutes before the first act and couldn’t find the place at all. I know the local area pretty well but it is an incredibly dense commercial area, there are probably 2000 shops within a minutes walk of the station. Ten minutes before the doors opened I found the venue.Little did the world know that down that spooky little corridor just visible to the right or the stairs, on the unmarked 4th floor of the building, another Lo-Bit Playground was about to happen.
The venue is pretty cool, very cool in fact. It’s not large but it managed to accommodate about 100 people and gear for 7 acts without feeling claustrophobic. A quick apology before we go any further, Lo-bit playground is very very hard to photograph. Its very dark with almost no stage lighting and a the venue has a very low ceiling so the pictures aren’t quite as dynamic as I would have liked. On with the show!
(more…)
Hardnes, a project that uses a real 2a03 in an iPod style nsf player, has had its sources released. A intersting project for the brave or the bold. Kevtris writes:
Well, I was going thru my files and thought I’d release this for anyone who was curious how it worked.
It’s fairly outdated and I’m sorry in advance for the poor quality of the comments (lack thereof) and I bet my 6502 skills sucked too.
Anyways as can be seen from its page, it’s just an Intel flexlogic part, RP2A03G CPU, a 74244 input buffer for the buttons, a 128K SRAM (could be upgraded to 512K easily), and some audio amplification and a 3.3V reg with 7406 for logic level translation to the PS1 memory card.
The memory map and PDS file should be enough to go on for anyone wishing to build something similar.
At the time, uploading data to the card was an incredibly hilariously terrible job. I used a hack to load 3K or so of the 128K file at a time using the EPROM emulator I had. So loading a 128K card image took awhile to do.
Anyways, enjoy.
Some may decry it, but the basic democracy of chipmusic means that despite the shit floods, there is plenty of room for unique voices to come out. DaPantz still shows some rough around the edgedness on a few of these tracks, but there are a few surprises and interesting musical choices that differ wildly from artists trying to sound like Sabrepulse or Bit Shifter, and instead tackle their own unique approach to chip music. Well worth a listen!
Syphus writes
So an interview I did a while ago for a journalist got heavily used in his rather good GamesTM piece this month. Normally when I give an unsuspecting journo about 50 times more than they ever wanted to hear about my own tedious interests, I end up seeing a three word platitude lazily dribbled onto the page…but this guy did a great job and used nearly everything I had to say across the entire article :D Also featuring everyone’s favourite Bit Shifter (Josh)
Download a scan of the article here! Nice TCTD Plug!