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  • Tristar & Red Sector Inc. & Ate Bit – Vuvuzelatro (2010)

    World Cup craze had to arrive to TCTD.

    4mat posted this some days ago and fortunately someone made a little intro with it!
    Before you think this post is bullshit, you should realize the complexity of replicating such an analog and “human” sound like that of the vuvuzela with a synth like the SID chip. 4mat is a true master of the SID! And the whole intro is only 4KB. Nice Hires graphic too.

    The sound of the video is a bit weird. Here you can listen to the original post by 4mat

    I will not say “enjoy this demo” this time XD

  • TCTD Interview with AY-Riders’ Yerzmyey pt2

    This is part 2 of an interview with AY Rider, Yerzmyey. Please look here for part 1.

    LB – I think my favorite release of yours was FREAKuencies on 8BP but I like Interphase on DWD a lot too. Which of your own releases do you like most and why?

    Y – Actually I don’t like very much my own music. If You ask me about music, I simply prefer AY-RIDERS’ albums. It’s good to gather a bunch of various people to get various and diverse album(s). Then it gets much more interesting. As for myself, I mostly try to fight with the AY’s limitations. :) It’s damn hard to force it to generate some _interesting_ synthethesized sound. All we get is only square waves or some acid noises. In contrast to the Atari ST, we use only original hardware posibilities or AY/YM chip, so the work is harder. Anyway, if You want to listen to good ZX Spectrum music, then don’t listen to my crap but go quickly and download AY-RIDERS albums. :)

    LB – What inspired you to start writing music? Was is a particular song or game or person?

    Y – Hmmmmm. From the music side in general, probably it was electronic music. Marek Bilinski’s art creativity or KOTO’s stuff… Also Vangelis, Jarre, Kraftwerk… Hm. From the game-music side, it was ZX Spectrum stuff, like “Agent-X”, “Chronos” or “Raw Recruit”. Generally – all the incredible stuff from Tim Follin. We used to say that they’re NOT games with musix but – musix with some games attached :)musix with some games attached.  And for demo-scene inspirations, surely it was Ziutek from ‘Ethanol Soft Inc’ group, as well as Hacker Kicia (with his demo songs for SoundTracker 1.1 ZX AY editor).demo-songs

    (more…)

  • TCTD Interview with AY-Riders’ Yerzmyey

    This week TCTD talks to Yerzmyey, organizer of AY Riders, producer of awesome tunes, lover of the z80 and generally all round amazing guy. So thanks very much to Yerz for being so generous with his time and lets get down to business!

    Lazerbeat – Where are you from?

    Yerzmyey – Ah, well. I come from Rubber Planet. ;) A place where all computers have rubber keyboards. ;) Well, actually that’s not exactly true. :) ZX Spectrum was highly popular in PL, in 80s and early 90s, however, somehow it stopped suddenly and now literally only a few people support the machine here. Cry, cry! As for geography matters ;) , my mother’s family came here from Czech and Austria (in that time it was connected with Hungary) and my father came here from Lithuania.

    LB – It looks like you have been active in the Demo scene for for over 20 years. How old were you when you founded H-PRG? Why did you start it?

    Y – First programs we made with Mr Hangman about 1987. We were 12 years old or so, in those days. :) We were only making games (just occasionally some simple pseudo-demos, haha). The games were not that bad actually :) – ugly but playable. Sadly in those times the only thing we had for saving the progs – was a tape-recorder, so the games didn’t survive to the present day, heh. Our the earliest programs that have survived come from 1989, so I took the date as a beginning of the HOOY-PROGRAM group. :)

    And what is funny, it wasn’t me who started all of this, it was my younger brother (who isn’t very interested in 8-bit nowadays, after all) who met Mr Hangman – and HE started making ZX games with him. :) I only joined them. But then my brother lost interest (well, not in playing games but in making them :) ), and I stayed. In this way we founded a team. ;)

    They were funny times. :) I remember that we had to be very careful and save our programs very often because every time Mr Hangman’s refrigerator/fridge turned on – then ZX Spectrum got reset, hahaha. :)

    Also, while loading (from tape of course) everybody was forced to leave to room, so as not to disturb the loading process. (more…)

  • Artcity: new website by Bitfellas

    This is  weekly demo special edition! Since I am behind two weeks, I decided to post this related news item.

    Once upon a time I used to go all the time to a site called GFX ZONE which was a repository of demoscene pixel artists, both old and new. Those fanatic of digital graphics and the demoscene probably remember it (you can still watch it, in its zombi state, clicking here)
    Long defunct, I now found this site, recently re-launched, with a huge archive of pixel art to dive on. Run by the awesome Bitfellas crew, the site is pretty amazing, and a -necessary- stop for every pixel art aficionado.

    Ah, the good old days when we actually DID antialiasing, and by hand.

    Most recommended visit: Artcity

    Illustrating this post: one of my favourite pieces by one of my favourite artists, “Too much clubbing”  by Cyclone, from Germany. Check out his gallery.

  • Fairlight & Virtual Dreams – 242 (1993)

    The year was 1993 and full screen video on computers was pretty much not a common thing, what with MPEG probably just being in the works.

    The Virtual Dreams guys (Fairlight’s demo division) made this lofi-looking video compression algorithm to create this classic demo.
    I really love the effect, someone should write an After Effects or similar effect plugin to achieve this :D

    The great thing it’s that there’s actually a story in this. Where is this guy going?

    Did I say it’s running on a stock Amiga 500? That’s 7 Mhz and 1MB of power for you.