100Hz Music?

I played about with this a little while ago and thought you might like to see what it sounds like.

So I made a quick demo track using some of my old ZX samples and here are the results.

First up 50Hz...



Then the same track, but made to play at 100Hz...



I'm sure you'll agree, the drums certainly sound finer. As for the bass, etc. I'm not sure if it's improved or not. Make up your own mind ;)

New Toy

Here's a pic of my new toy ;) A Samsung SM206BW. It's really nice. No, hold. It's really really nice. Actually, it's really really really nice! Ok, you get the picture. One thing that hit me (literally) is the brightness of the monitor. I switched it on and was almost blinded! You have been warned ;) The pic really doesn't do this justice at all.

Vista likes to track...

I recently installed Vista on my home laptop and after a bit of a fight I got it to recognise all my devices (the sound was the main problem). I must say it's quite nice, visually. It's quite usable, but the added security can get a bit annoying, but that can be disabled.

Anyhow, I just thought I'd share a little video with you to show just why you need a high end machine to use that yummy GUI.


So what's this video of? Basically it's Sk@le Tracker running on Vista. Then you can see the realtime preview of the tracker window, it's a little tricky to see with the YouTube recoding of the video, but the notes are all scrolling in the little preview window too - all in realtime. Then you get the alt+tab window, which is also scrolling away. Then finally, the windows+tab 3d application switcher, that really made me laugh and think, 'kewl!'.

Just as a minor update, I've played around with more realtime apps, eg. Google Earth, and it's still equally as kewl :) Just get Google Earth to wizz around the world to a destination and try the windows+tab app switcher. You can even watch YouTube videos in multiple windows like this. I know it's all cosmetic, but it's just so kewl :)

Another compo, another entry...

Well, I recently entered the graphics compo at Forever 8 and came third. Not bad considering the competition. Anyway, here's my entry for all to see, it's titled 'Love Lust Sex' of course :)

Keep your eyes on the prize...

Just so you can see one of the prizes I got for winning the gfx compo :) Taken with my shiny new Fuji FinePix S6500fd camera. Hoorah!

I WON, I WON!!!

... and I also came 4th! What am I on about? raww.orgy 3 of course!

I entered the music compo with a track called 'Peehole' which I submitted the STeM Mix of. I wrote this track in Vortex Tracker II only, and it seems this was a big mistake. I managed to use combinations of effects and pitches of notes that Vortex doesn't faithfully reproduce. So the track sounds better in Vortex tracker than it does on a real Speccy. Despite all of this, my track still came 4th.

So what did I win, well, my graphics alter ego K-0S entered the graphics compo with this picture of D0k...

The graphic is actually a heavily edited version of a real picture, but not of D0k. Just a D0k-a-like. The original was a 16M colour JPEG, and as you can image, it takes a lot of messing, pixel editing, etc. to get it this good in two colours.

So all my hard work paid off. Hoorah! :)

MacOS x86 - It's super sweet!

Well, there's been quite a silence from myself just recently as I've found out that you can get MacOS X (Intel version) to work on some standard PC hardware. Hell I'm writing this post on my current setup at the minute! You can see a pic of the box to the right.

For those of you curious as to what spec this little beastie is, here's a quick spec - bear in mind that this system was built purely as a test rig:

Asrock P4Dual-915GL Mobo
Celeron D 335 (2.8GHz)
512MB DDR400 RAM (2 x 256MB Sticks)
20GB HDD
Asus 16x DVD-ROM Drive

I'm pretty sure I'll be making this system better soon by adding more RAM, a bigger HDD and a wireless card.

Where did all this start? In a VMWare session on my trusty old laptop...



So now I can see why Gasman uses a Mac, I'm so taken by it all that my next major investment may well be a MacBook. Or at least a laptop which is compatible with MacOS x86 ;)

XM2PT3 Beta - AT LAST!!

Well, I've been quiet for a bit mainly due to working on a new prog. It's called XM2PT3 and is a basic XM module (PC) to ProTracker 3 (Speccy) converter. At the minute it's capable of converting the following:
First 3 channels of all XM patterns,
Basic appregio to ornaments,
Note slide up and down,
Note portamento,
and Tempo change.

The output of the program is all to the screen, but it can be piped into a text file and loaded straight into Vortex Tracker II. Part of the process evolves looking at sample names and including relevant sample data in the output. This just requires a little work before hand to change sample names in the XM to names like bass, main, snare, etc.

So what was the first XM I converted? It was a 4 channel XM version of the Hi-Score table from Monty. The original only really requires 3 channels and the forth was just an echo of channel 3, so it was a nice mininal effort conversion :)

Below you can see the start of the conversion text (in the DOS window) and then what it looks like in Vortex Tracker II.



Ok, I'm off to play with SkaleTracker to make me some nice XM's to convert :)

Mega-Xfer!

Well, after about a day of building a test box, loading windows 2k and then downloading all the updates, I've finally made a start on the >400 +D disks to xfer to pc as mgt disk images.

I'm basically making backup copies of ALL Bogie's and my +D disks. So far I've done 7! The pile doesn't look much smaller, but at least the disks are xfering without errors. Which considering they're over 10 years old, isn't bad. Infact some may be even older!

In the time it's taken me to type this short amount I've managed to do another 4, so we should be done by about xmas I think :)

The start of the end?

Well, I finally decided to make a blog which was just me. So you can see I do actually do stuff in my otherwise non-existant zx life.

So what's cooking mr. la sir?

Well, ideas are floating around at the minute for a secret project between myself and K-0S.
More details on this as they become a little more concrete.

Music wise I've been working on a few AY tunes that are all far from finished.

To insanity, and beyond! :)