Not sure if this is offical (nothing on their website, simply a directory with a picture of a vinyl release), but the ever excellent TreeWave have a new release on their website. If you like it, buy it, once they tell us how!
Category: Chipmusic
Toons from various consoles.
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New Tree Wave release
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Retuning an Underclocked Game Boy
There is a modification to an original Game Boy that involves replacing the internal crystal oscillator with one of a different value, documented by the genius Gieskes. Often, a value of 2MHz is used to replace the default value of 4.194304 MHz because 2MHz crystals are easy to find in shops and on the internet, or at least thats what I do.However, this creates a problem, in the sense that the crystal oscillator is responsible for controlling all timing aspects of the Game Boy including the frequency pitches of the pulse oscillators. -
Duty Cycle Generator – Single Channel Echo
Neil Baldwin over at Duty Cycle Generator has added the ability in his sound engine “Nijuu” to add an “echo effect” to a single square wave channel.
How it works is to have a circular buffer (one each for voices Square 1, Square 2 & Noise) that the echo writes to by figuring out what is going to get written to the PAPU (Pseudo Audio Processing Unit) registers each frame. It then captures the register settings and continues to do so until the buffer is filled, then starts again at the beginning. When you enable echo, Nijuu retrieves the values from the buffer and writes them to the PAPU registers in the “gaps” in between notes when it decides that there’s no activity on the voice (I do this by detecting if the ADSR envelope on the voice has reached the release phase or if there is no note playing). The echo feedback continues to loop around, attenuating the captured amplitude until it reaches zero. All the while, any new notes are captured to the echo buffer in the same way and it continues to capture/attenuate/feedback notes forever until you turn it off.
(The above quote was taken from Neil’s article and slightly modified for accuracy.)
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The Prodigy, 8-Bit style
Chatting with my friend Paza Rahm, he showed me a video for a track that he submitted for a compilation. The track in question is part of a big project of these russian guys, who set forth to compile not one, but three albums full of The Prodigy covers and remixes. The album in question, “Emulator Punks!!“, is the latest installment in these series of three and features mostly eastern european (and unknown to me) artists, producing these tracks with a plethora of methods, from fakebit to full-on Spectrum AY power passing through Paza’s almighty Atari ST. The other two albums, “Pixel Bit Chipology! Classics: Inside” and “”Pixel Bit Chipology! Classics: Outside” are on the same vein and cover a variety of Prodigy tracks as well as showcases even more artists.
A bunch of these tracks are very good and well worth a listen, among which we can find Paza’s previously mentioned track, “Charly”, Capkonamco’s amazing remix of “Baby’s Got A Temper”, Snork25’s take on “What Evil Lurks” and Bulldoza’s gloomingly kick-ass cover of “Poison”
In all, yet another “tribute” album but this time featuring a bunch of artists you usually don’t listen anywhere else, thus removing us a bit from the usual stuff and, even though The Prodigy is “preset techno” as our own Peter Swimm likes to call it, some surprises and nice twists on the originals are to be found.
Long live the Eastern Europe massive!
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Today on the FMA: Live Bubblyfish!
Download an excerpt of her live WFMU appearence at the usual place.
