Mr. Linde, swedish SID musician and creator of many nice things Commodore related (like the picture to PETSCII converter which he gladly gave to me for testing purposes :)) has released a new tool called VICFICKEN (nice name xD), which is a glitch tool for Commodore C64.
Allegedly inspired by No Carrier’s glitchNES, this tool will put garbage in your screen so you can satisfy your glitch needs. Pulling out the value of the SID’s noise waveform, it will create glitches by messing up video RAM, commanded with your joystick presses or a MIDI assistant hardware like MIDI2600, allowing for variations on 5 different VIC registers.
Definitely a nice tool to add to your lo-fi VJ arsenal!
Here’s looking forward to modifications on the border, too. Things look pretty weird with a huge fat C64 border around. Is it possible, Linde?
Comments
10 responses to “VICFICKEN: glitch soft for C64”
@Akira: I haven’t tried it myself yet, but one screen shows the border being glitched up: http://mixtape.be/vicficken/vic7.png
Looks awesome anyway :)
True, William.
I wonder if you can get charset information in the border…
Since this works messing up already present video memory, I assume you would need to have video data for the border in RAM beforehand…
Really cute. Sort of reminds me of the garbage screen that comes out of my Paddle Play program for the VIC20. Which has gotten me thinking that a more appropriate name would be VICIIfickin since the c64 uses the VIC-II chip and the VIC20 has the VIC-I chip.
About filling the border — There is a memory space where you set the height/width of the character screen. If you set it to full width then you run out of screen RAM before you get to the bottom of the screen. But if the code reset the character screen offset (another memory space) while the raster beam was halfway down you could fill the whole screen with garbles.
Yeah, opening the borders involves changing registers carefully at the right time. If you watch while pressing the fire button you’ll see that the vertical borders open up occasionally. The problem is that these are the registers I’m feeding noise to, and I’m afraid that to open up the borders I would have to limit the fuckupery severely… But I’ll see what I can do. Thanks for the coverage!
This is awesome! So is there a MIDI control solution already available, or would this be a DIY DIY approach? Awesome work BTW, I have always wanted to incorporate something like this into live shows.
Yes, DIY DIY for now. I have a breadboard with two 4066 digitally controlled quad bilateral switches here that I used to have hooked to an Arduino ( http://www.mixtape.be/joysynth/ ), but the arduino is at the school lab now. I might go there tomorrow if the weather isn’t too nice :). It’s definitely something you’d be able to throw together in an hour and have decent control over with Max, Tom.
I think I’ll save up for a midify board and try that soon.
like the atari joystick adapter i currently have :D
If you give it a try, please keep us updated on the results! Would be very helpful :)
I think Linde uses a MIDI to JOYSTICk solution.
Awesome! Thanks for the reply.