Category: Platforms

  • Battle of the Bits proud to present Winter Chip IV

    winter-chip-iv_coverBattle of the Bits proud to present Winter Chip IV
    BotB and it’s resident BotBrs invites any and all to participate, listen and/or vote in BotB’s fourth annual Winter Chip competition.  As always, this year’s compo has added even more chiptune formats totalling at a balmy sixteen.  That’s right!!  16 different ways to share yer skillz in chip.  Each participant can submit an entry to each category if their heart so desires.
    Submission Deadline :: March 9th
    Voting will follow for ten days.
    Categories this year are :: heart-magic, brain-tech, bleep-squeeze, deep-tweak & oh-noes-my-pants!
    Results will be posted March 20.
    This is the first competition to be hosted by BotB’s new engine.  Over six months ago a great effort was initiated by lead developer puke7 to give BotB an actual framework to stand on.  This has successfully brought about reducing database call redundancies, decreasing load times, and making BotB not a complete pain in the ass to update.  All code was started from scratch again.  Old site features are still springing up.
    All n00bz!! =D/
    [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/LSVvbpi4y7Y" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

  • Digital Tools Profiles: Ptoing

    ptoing-zxfaces“Brilliant Pixelartists don’t fall from trees. But there are people who know just how to place the right colors on the right places. Sven Ruthner is such a man. The demoscener known under the alias Ptoing just got the right feel for colors and for intense shapes and proportions. The illustrator works with different media, but is also very enthusiastic about vintage homecomputers, like using C64, Amiga or Spectrum ZX”

    Read More:

  • 8BITTODAY: 256k Byte Compo

    rawwy2009_articleNice dissection of the entrants in a compo earlier this month. Great read, with plenty of videos. Excerpt:

    What could you say in 256 characters? To get an idea; it’s a little more than one and a half text messages on your mobile phone. Now if you had to program something in 256 characters, what would, or maybe mostly could that be? It’s the same idea like our article on Artefacts by Plush, working with artificial limitations on limited hardware.

    8bittoday

  • Antidote to the Three Minute Hate


    clouds from 11hzRobot on Vimeo.

    Made with PSPSEQ

  • 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.