Author: Peter Swimm

  • Animal Style Schools Teh Noobs

    Animal Branding not included in lab fees.
    Animal Branding not included in lab fees.

    Chip guitar god Animal Style is teaching an Intensive 10 week chip music course in Southern New Jersey this January. Should be very interesting, as Joey is also extremely well versed in music education, so even the Pros would have something to gain from it.

    Oldschool Game Music Composition @ Perkins Center for the Arts in Moorestown, NJ

    This course will provide an introduction to electronic music history and composition through the perspective of a video game composer. Students will learn to compose early video game style music on their laptop while exploring the capabilities and limitations of old computer sound chips (oldschool Nintendo, Sega, Commodore64, etc). Free computer programs will be distributed, learned and mastered throughout the course. New songs will be created each week. No computer programming skills or performance abilities are needed. Anyone with a basic understanding of music and a laptop computer (running Windows XP or Vista) will be able to create amazing video game style music. At the end we will discuss ways to perform electronic music and examine the varied styles and approaches of current chip music. All students must bring their own laptop.

    GM-
    43 • Mondays • 6:45pm – 8:45pm
    Date:     January 12 – March 16
    Teach    er: Joey Mariano
    Cost:     $130 Members / $150 Non-Members

    link: http://perkinscenter. org/classes. asp

  • C64TPC Appeared

    Oh wait.. my netbook doesnt have a seiral port. Dang.
    Oh wait.. my netbook doesnt have a seiral port. Dang.

    Since the dawn of XP, older pc to c64 transfers tools like the x1541series cables can be very tricky to get running properly. Now a new device named C64TPC is out,  and it looks really nice.

    From the website:

    The C64TPC connects your Commodore 64 to your PC through their respective serial ports. This enables the C64 to use the PC as it’s disk drive. This includes the: Hard disk, CD/DVD, Flash Memory, MMC, and any other type of storage device attached to your PC. C64TPC also allows you to save your .d64 images back to the PC.

    C64TPC consists of two components: an hardware device and the PC software. The hardware device conducts low level communication between; the C64 and the PC. Thus, the user does not need to struggle with complex settings or processes. The C64TPC software is a program with a graphical user interface, which provides a simple method of interacting with the hardware.

    C64TPC only supports C64 diskette images, .d64 files. It can both read and write these files. The user does not need to extract the individual programs from these images to use them.

    The Device is currently only $24 from ebay.

  • 1-bit Music on the Atari XL/XE

    And let beep sort it out.
    And let beep sort it out.

    In a followup to our previous post, got the following tip from b00Daw:

    Pwners of the “A8b” — Atari 8-bit — scene, XXL and other Poles, have made demonstation of the GTIA’s abilities to play music from its normal ‘clicky’ nature.  By porting over some Z80 ZX Spectrum routines, the team was able to create a music disk cheekily named “Beep’em All” for the A8b which utilizes the POKEY and GTIA sound chips while still managing display through the ANTIC chip.  GTIA “clicker” sounds almost exactly like Speccy’s beeper with this late innovation.

    MP3s:

    http://atarionline.pl/pliki/beepemall_mp3.7z“

  • Covox live at Shanshui Records Five Year Anniversary Party

    Covox live in Beijing from Sprak on Vimeo.

    VIA THE AWSOME SF CHIPBLAWG DUTYCYCLE

  • 1-bit Music Roundup on Chipflip

    GOTO Dreamy
    GOTO Dreamy

    GOTO80‘s chip theory blog is always entertaining, and he has written a rad overview on making 1-bit music on z-80 based systems. An excerpt:

    Ok, the new thing is 1-bit music made with Z80! Just like with the AppleII-post before, this is me being an astonished newbie. It sounds so nice and data, I can’t believe it’s not a sound chip!

    …

    So yesterday I found this and this, filled with mp3s of Z80-music made with the ZX Spectrum (or clones). This is how it works, according to Yerzmey: “Z80 chip produces all sounds and sends them into BEEPER and AUDIO-OUT connector of ZX SPECTRUM (jack) through ULA chip”. Normally you can play 1 channel square waves, but with the 3.5 MHz of this Z80 you can play samples and get up to 8 channels of sounds! So this is another example of chip music that does not only play sounds immanent inside sound chips, but uses the CPU to create a sort of softsynth.”

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