Category: Interviews

  • 8BITTODAY interviews pixel art group SUPERBROTHERS

    8BITTODAY inteviews the slightly enigmatic pixel pushing crew SUPERBROTHERS. A taste:

    “[8bit today] You deal with highly modern subjects, using visual references to an old computer graphics. Is it a kind of revolt, against soulless progress, or what other ideas you embody with such aesthetics?

    [SUPERBROTHERS] SUPERBROTHERS is intended as playable editorial illustration.

    SUPERBROTHERS creates films and artwork depicting videogames that should have or may have existed (in the Soviet Union perhaps).

    SUPERBROTHERS occasionally creates systems of meanings that intend to connect with the worlds of finance, information technology and culture.”

    And perhaps a comment on the Crystal Castles debacle?

    ” [8bit today] Why do you spread some of your works only in printed form and not publish it in the web?

    [SUPERBROTHERS]
    SUPERBROTHERS supports antiquated technology such as print as a matter of course.

    SUPERBROTHERS would prefer not to be vilified as a pirate and provocateur.”

  • GameSetWatch Interviews Classic Composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki

    iwatsuki_composer

    GSW has an interesting interview with classic and current composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki, who worked on games for The NES, the SNES, and more recently XBOX 360. The interview disucsses some of the difficulties composers had on the older hardware, and compares and contrasts it to today’s modern games. An excerpt:

    GSW: What are some of the important differences between composing for the XBox 360 compared with your work on the 16-bit Super Nintendo?

    Iwatsuki: The biggest difference between the Super Famicom and the Xbox 360 is the difference in memory. You could almost fit the contents of a Super Famicom cart within the memory space allotted to the music of a single Xbox 360 game. For Omega Five it adds up to a few megabytes because of the high quality of the recorded sounds. The Xbox 360 uses 48 kHz sound output, so naturally we were using those specifications. In retro mode, we consciously lowered the sound source to between 12 and 16 kHz, then rendered these files at 48 kHz to give it an antique quality. Even the retro tracks are large files, which is the sort of thing you could not get away with on the Super Famicom. Back then we were forced to be inventive and make sacrifices on sound quality so that the hardware could handle it.

    Read it.

  • Interview with PSPSEQ Dev Ethan Bordeaux pt2

    In part 2 of yesterday’s interview, We discussed the PSPSEQ developer, Ethan Bordeaux, background. Today we get more into the meat of the program, how its varied methods of synthesis works, and where the project is heading.

    LB: Moving on a little then, were there any specific interesting parts of the port to a hand-held device?

    ECB: Not really. The development environment on the PSP is pretty good so I can have a version that runs on my PC and one that runs on my PSP that share 95%+ of the same code. Made debugging a whole lot easier. The one thing I had to figure out early on was whether or not the C compiler would be good enough to allow for the level of polyphony required to make music. I wish the PSP had enough power that it could run any 16 generator and effect tracks and not have to worry about overloading the system, but I think the level of polyphony and complexity of music you can make on the PSP is pretty impressive. Generally speaking you can get between 12-16 tracks going at the same time, which is definitely good enough to make some cool tunes.

    LB: I agree, I was really surprised at how complex PSPseq is, could you give us a quick run-down of the available synths?
    (more…)

  • Interview with PSPSEQ Dev Ethan Bordeaux pt1

    pspseq300In order to bring you more in depth coverage on how the tools behind the blips and bleeps are made, we asked musician Lazerbeat to sit down and chat with some of  the innovators and creators of the scene.  Here is part one of his two part interview with PSPSEQ developer Ethan Bordeaux. PSPSEQ is a “a free homebrew application for composing music on the Sony PSP handheld game system. PSPSeq contains both realtime synthesis and sample playback capability, along with multiple FX modules of widely varying types for modifying instruments in countless ways.”

    LB: So, Hello Ethan, thanks very much for doing this.

    ECB: You’re welcome. Happy to get the good word out on PSPSeq.

    LB: Before we get into the details of PSPSeq, tell us a little about your background with programming.

    ECB: Sure no problem… my day job is as an embedded systems programmer. I was hired by a company called Analog Devices where I first started off supporting their DSPs and then later on was transferred to a group where I wrote software algorithms for them, specifically for cell phones. Been doing that for the past 8 years or so. Mostly I work on speech and audio processing algorithms. It’s fun but when you’re doing that kind of work you are only writing a very small piece of the overall system. I wanted to do something where I owned the entire project; audio, UI, documentation, etc etc.

    LB: Did you start programing as a hobby or was it something you learned specifically with a view to a career?
    (more…)