Category: Chipmusic

Toons from various consoles.

  • Various Artists – Level Up

    VA - LevelupA little while ago I was looking for tunes by one of my favorite artists, Eat_Rabbit and I found a compilation album I had never heard before. The list of musicians read like a who’s who of European Chipmusic so it was an obvious download. I am no expert, nor do I pretend to be “hip”, “groovy” or “cool” but I do seem to be lucky enough to stumble across quality releases that people don’t mention to regularly. Seems like a reasonable concept for a column?

    Ukrainian netlabel DWD Records released Level Up in November 2007 and from the first track its awesome. Cornbeast, who you might recognize from his recent 8BP EP opens with a nice stompy Gameboy tune. Electrox from Stu of Dropdabomb fame is perhaps a little darker to my mind than some of his other tracks? “Dig You Own Tomb” is weird and wonderful even by Eat_Rabbit standards. If I had a gun to my head I guess the genre would by “Egyptune”? perhaps “Gameboy Cairock”? who knows?  I am sure most of you have heard of Goto80? Good stuff, “Honolulu” is an ace little C64 track in the middle of the album. Uoki-Toki contributes a Game-boy track called Gorilka Dance. If you like it, check out his Myspace, there are 6 or 7 EPs for download. I don’t feel brave enough to guess what Datassette or Paza used for the final two tracks but I like them both and the round out the release well.

    Level up has been in pretty high rotation for me over the past couple of weeks, some of you may have heard it before but if you missed it first time around, its well worth your time. If you like it, drop by DWD Records and send them a nice mail, maybe we could convince them to put out some more releases…

    01 Cornbeast – “Acid Rock” 01 Cornbeast – “Acid Rock”
    02 Stu – “Electrox”
    03 Eat_Rabbit – “Dig your own tomb” 03-eat-rabbit-dig-your-own-tomb
    04 Goto80 – “Honolulu”
    05 Uoki-Toki – “Gorilka Dance”
    06 Paza – “Damnfool”
    07 Datassette – “Where The Hell Am I?”

    DWD Records
    Complete Release – 34mb.zip

  • Breakpoint 2009 about to start!

     

    demoparty in the making!
    demoparty in the making!

    In little more than 12 hours everyone’s favourite -PURE DEMOSCENE- (no gaming fuckers) party is about to commence.

     

    After a bad start generated by the global crisis, sceners worldwide have helped the party to be a reality and it might be, as they say, its finest hour! Corporate twats, take notice!

    We’ll be looking forward to the oldschool competitions: usually the best Amiga demo of the year is released at Breakpoint (probably by TBL), so it’s going to be a busy weekend.

    Those lucky party-goers attending the venue are in for a good weather treat: the forecast looks promising, so you will have the chance to spend good time outside of the place and your screens. Remember, this party doesn’t accept remote entries, so if you want to be part of the competitions, your only choice is to go to the party!

    For us who can’t go, it seems this year, despite the economic problems, we’ll get the stream again. Yipee!

    Schedule, Compo rules and more? Head over to the official site of Breakpoint 2009.

  • SN76489 beta VST now available

    backgroundThe Sn76489 VST mentioned the other day is now available for download on the benanderson89 blog. Also this tasty preview of a potential Sega Genesis VST:

    You’re all probables thinking “I have VOPM/TFM, why do I need YM-EMU?”. Well for a start VOPM emulates the YM2151 chip used in Sega arcade machines, not the mega drive and TFM doesn’t support PCM playback. My lovely VST will have the following features making it one of the most ambitious chip VST ever!

    • 6 Independent, monophonic FM channels each controlled via a separate MIDI channel (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 respectively)
    • Each channel will have it’s own programmer section
    • Each channel will be able to change instrument at any time via MIDI! (Now I’m just spoiling you)
    • The 6th channel will support PCM playback! No decimators too! I’m going to use an 8-bit shift register like the real chip (which means I’ll have to daisy chain 25 10-step analogue shift registers to achieve the desired result)

  • OMG Tshirts!

    tctdblackSOLD OUT

  • SN76489A emulator Appears

    waveformEnglish chip artist benanderson89 has made a SN76489a vsti. I normally don’t cover vsti type stuff, but it looks like he aiming for something pretty accurate he writes:

    The internal workings of this VST are based off of the actual data-sheets for the real SN76489, mimicking the internal circuitry and flow logic as close as possible. More specifically, this chip emulates the SN76489A (which used a 16-step register) as used in the Sega Master System and Game Gear.

    The VST is pure hardware emulation, no decimators, bit-crushers and samples are used at all.

    The VST sports the following specs (some are still very buggy);

    Tone channel: 15 different vibrato levels, 4 different vibrato speeds and 4 different vibrato delay times and an ADSR envelope with an overall volume level. True 4-bit quantization on all data inputs (except pitch frequency) and final volume output, frequency limited to that of the real chip, velocity sensitivity.

    Noise channel: 3 different noise frequencies, true pseudo random noise generated by a 16 step shift register with an XOR feedback loop, the same ADSR functions and quantized output as the tone channels, velocity sensitivity.

    No downloads yet, but we will keep you posted.

    via Forums | 8bc.org – Online Chiptune Media Sharing.

    scrap-brain-zone