A little while back we mentioned that Squidman had documented the YM2151 soundchip. The tracker “Herzeleid” is in the extremely early development but it is available for the brave to try. It is cross platform, but please note you will need to compile it yourself. B00daW and the Squidman are talking about the tracker in this 8BC thread where you can follow the development and find some useful info if you have problems getting it to run. Keep your eyes on this one, I have a feeling its going to develop into a very interesting piece of software.
|
|
|||
|
This is the second and final part of our coverage of Lo-Bit playground 12.0. Part 1 can be found here. 20:00 – Tanikugu
LBPG is incredibly well organized, all acts have their equipment laid out and ready to go before the doors open. Tanikugu’s rig was by far the most interesting. They had no less than 4 Midines carts plugged into 4 AV Famicoms with 4 bridge adapters hooked up to 2 laptops. Unfortunately they had difficulties with one of the Midines units from the outset. The set was fairly minimal, mid paced, perfectly competent Famicom techno but I felt they didn’t really get their feet under them due to the technical problems. Watch this space though, who knows what Tanikugu could evolve into.
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!
Ukrainian netlabel DWD Records released Level Up in November 2007 and from the first track its awesome. Cornbeast, who you might recognize from his recent 8BP EP opens with a nice stompy Gameboy tune. Electrox from Stu of Dropdabomb fame is perhaps a little darker to my mind than some of his other tracks? “Dig You Own Tomb” is weird and wonderful even by Eat_Rabbit standards. If I had a gun to my head I guess the genre would by “Egyptune”? perhaps “Gameboy Cairock”? who knows? I am sure most of you have heard of Goto80? Good stuff, “Honolulu” is an ace little C64 track in the middle of the album. Uoki-Toki contributes a Game-boy track called Gorilka Dance. If you like it, check out his Myspace, there are 6 or 7 EPs for download. I don’t feel brave enough to guess what Datassette or Paza used for the final two tracks but I like them both and the round out the release well. Level up has been in pretty high rotation for me over the past couple of weeks, some of you may have heard it before but if you missed it first time around, its well worth your time. If you like it, drop by DWD Records and send them a nice mail, maybe we could convince them to put out some more releases… 01 Cornbeast – “Acid Rock” 01 Cornbeast – “Acid Rock” DWD Records
LB: So how did the idea for Piggy come about? Marc: well, I had been using LSDJ for a while and even tho I was in love with the program, I longed to have the same flexibility with another type of sound generation. No matter how you like the Gameboy sound, there is a moment where you get tired of it, especially if, like me, you do your tracks without mixing techniques, synths and so on. I wanted to have something similar for samples and midi. I remember having a few chats with Starpause and Firestarter about it and we all got very excited about the perspective. So I went for it. LB: Did you plan to work on the GP32 from the outset or were you deving on PC without a particular platform in mind? Marc: It’s always been the main goal to do a hand-held program and to stick with the LSDJ interface. I was looking at a couple of options possible at the time: DS, PSP and GP32. The home-brew scene on DS & PSP was already pretty strong but it was constantly moving, so rather than trying to base myself on moving ground, I decided to go for the GP32. Especially that the idea of a company distributing an open platform like Gamepark did was great so I was happy to jump on that boat |
||
A little while ago I was looking for tunes by one of my favorite artists, 
Comments