You are going out tonight? Need to set your mood right for the evening?
Do yourself a favour and listen to Tom Woxom this weekend. This deutsche guy knows how to lay down a beat or two to make your booty shake. German precision!
His liveset at the Micromusic Get Together 2009 that happened in Berlin at the same time as Blipfest Europe (and as such, quite largely going under the radar) is pretty damn cool.
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Thanks to O_TR_O for sharing this gem related to computer graphics in the 80s.
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory, from now on EVL (eeeeevil :P), is “an interdisciplinary graduate research laboratory that combines art and computer science, specializing in advanced visualization and networking technologies”. Active since early days of computing in the University of Illinois in Chicago, these people have been researching on advanced fields like “distributed computing/visualization, collaborative software, the development of viable, scalable, deployable stereo displays and management of next-generation advanced networking initiatives”.
The focus of this article is on a set of works developed in the early 80s by a group of students, on a system called “Datamax UV-1”, which ultimately spawned the creation of the EVL lab itself. These were created with a variation of an old programming language called GRASS (smoke much, mon? :P) and deployed on the Z-Box platform, which was a “a raster graphics machine”.
With a certain “demo” vibe on many of the pieces, it’s great to see art like this done in a context that is not exclusively related to computers or a computer-related activity like the demoscene.
Check out their YouTube channel for a bunch of cool stuff to look at. Particularly interesting are the works pre 1980. Top notch.
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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?
I just got news of this amazing development.
The MSX scene is one of those incredibly loyal and active scenes, always pumping out incredible feats with this hardware from the 80s. Their forte has always been hardware development, and this news item is no different.
Apparently, the Sega Master System/Mark III VDP (Video Display Processor) is based on the MSX1 VDP.
The Supersoniqs, an international group of MSX techies, has gathered to bring you an amazing hardware add-on for the MSX range of computers: a SEGA VDP add-on.
What does this bring to MSX users? According to them.:
“The Sega VDP used in the Master System and others is actually a MSX1 compatible VDP with an extra screen mode. The extra screen mode not only gives you the possibility to use horizontal smooth scroll, but also allows for two color palettes of 16 colors, one for backgrounds and one for sprites, out of 64 available colors. Besides, this VDP also includes it’s own three channel PSG with noise generator (looks very much like the MSX PSG) so you will have the option of using six channels of PSG in your MSX. That’s pretty cool huh?”
It sure is.
So they are calling for support form developers to add support on MSX software for this new VDP, including tracker and PT3 replayer support for the extra PSG. I sure like the sound of tracking on 6 channel PSG! And you know what? These freaks also want to add SID chip support to this card! Freaky! Are they thinking about us? They sure do, as they say: “we want this card to be both appealing to gamers, and chip-tune enthusiasts.”
So, initially a graphics upgrade, turned into a monster add-on for any MSX enthusiast.
Can’t wait for the first tracker that uses 6 channel PSG + SID chip. I’d put my MSX2 finally to good use!
After the jump, you can check out a video of the unit prototype, in action: (more…)