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By Peter Swimm, on May 29th, 2009  galleryNES – galleryNES is an open source picture gallery for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Create your own pixel art and view it on a real NES in slideshow format!
via no-carrier.com.
Pretty smoking news, these…
Jeri Ellsworth, woman behind the C-One reconfigurable computer and the Commodore 64 DTV, among many other brilliant things, has developed a way to record analog audio to 3 1/2″ floppy disks.
I was pretty amazed at the results, which you can check on the following video:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Xpr7B-7BFP4" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]
I want to see Burnkit 2600 using one of these :)
via: Hack a Day .
By Peter Swimm, on April 21st, 2009  As told by this exhaustive and detailed dissection on NFGWorld.
An excerpt:
CDs and plasmas (and DLP projectors) are fixed resolution displays, and they don’t scale images well. Photographs and TV shows and movies look just great when you zoom in or stretch them a little. They use a technique called resampling to create an image that’s not quite entirely unlike the original, but bigger.
Pixels, however, are hard-edged pointy little things which look really terrible if you stretch them at all. Resampling a pixel makes it blurry, and half the appeal of pixel art is its clarity… Even if you’re not a pixel-art fan, they often look out of focus. Many people won’t notice, or won’t care, and they might as well stop reading here.
By Peter Swimm, on April 21st, 2009  8Bittoday has an interview with Minusbaby, l’efant belligerent of 8bitpeoples. They discuss his background, his reason for pixel pushing and some of the tools he uses to create his art.
An excerpt:
[8bit today] Instead of being restricted by limitations, you give the 8bit touch to it by mind. Could you tell more about your process of working?
[Minusbaby] “Because I come from a sort of mixed media background on a several fronts (dependent on what was around and what I could afford) – computer, spray paint, lead, carbon, oil pastels, fake gold leaf, smoke, fire, ink and anything else – I felt that there was no reason for me to stick to traditional pixel art techniques. While I do follow a set of rules based on grids, aspect ratios and aliasing, everything else is fair game. For example, a Commodore 64’s palette is limited to sixteen colors. A few months ago, I made a Pulsewave flier using its palette along with darker versions of the original sixteen colors. While some purists have a tough time giving me respect, my color choices and disregard of the screen resolutions of the original consoles and computers set a personal precedent allowing me to do whatever I want, therefore avoiding boredom and inspiring growth. I am done being bothered by conservative crews who can’t cope. Besides, it’s fun to be naughty and break rules.
Read More:
By Peter Swimm, on March 13th, 2009  He gets profiled in New Scientist:
How did you get into this music?
…
When I realised that you could emulate old machines on a PC and learn what was going on inside them, I went back to the older sounds. I’ve designed instruments for pop stars. I reprogrammed Game Boys for UK artist Damon Albarn, for example, turning them into real musical instruments.
And a photo spread on cnet.
While I maintain that he tends to over-arcane the creation of and over-emphasize in importance in “the chiptune scene”, the concert sounds really cool, and I look forward to what music is released from it.
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