C64-storage: uIEC

Storage is a problematic thing with the C-64 and most other 8-bitters. Floppies are great, but drives are heavy. That’s why I got the 1541U last year and my whole body was satisfied with it. But at 130 euros, it’s a bit pricey. The uIEC is roughly half price and lets you browse the memory card just like with a floppy disk. It was developed by Jim Brain, one of the titans of the Commodore world. Although it doesn’t work with all software, it’s still a great substitute for a disk drive.

The uIEC comes with no documentation whatsoever, which is kind of nice, but there’s actually not so much info online either. For the hardcore nerds that’s not a problem of course. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably insert it upside down. Like I did. But bloggers like Ilesj are helpful, and I wanted to do something similar. Please comment if you find any mistakes or have suggestions.

tl;dr. /// GOOD: cheap, doesn’t require d64-files, good-looking. /// BAD: tricky interface, no casing, no manual. /// TRICKS: buy with daughter card, update the firmware, use with Final Cartridge. /// I THINK it’s a good gadget for gigs – just put all your stuff on a memory card and avoid all that D64-confusion on stage.

The speed. The uIEC is just as slow as a normal disk drive, unless you use its built-in JiffyDOS fastloader. You can use it either by installing a piece of hardware in your C-64, or use e.g the SJLOAD-software. When you have it on the memory card, simply add a !* before the filename (LOAD”!*PROGRAM”,10,1). It loads very fast. However, SJLOAD doesn’t support shortcuts to enter directories, copy files, etc. To enter a D64-file for example, you have to write OPEN1,8,15,”CD//:ACIDBURGER.D64″:CLOSE1. So we need more interface.

The interface. I’m a bit lost with this, admittedly. Would be great with a simple support for short commands, but not sure if it exists. With programs like FB64 you can move around the memory card and load files from directories and D64-files. Also, the SJLOAD stays active if you loaded FB64 with it. Also, there’s software like CBM-Command to transfer files between D64/floppy/cards, etc. If you like that Norton Commander thing.

The loaders. The uIEC generally doesn’t work with software that tries to run code on the drive. So games and demos with many files and custom fastloaders probably won’t work. I noticed that SJLOAD caused some problems – like not being able to load files in the music software I use. So hopefully something better than SJLOAD will appear (or did it already?). There are a few fastloaders supported, such as Final Cartridge (couldn’t find mine to test with though). Also, plenty of the tools I use didn’t work until I updated the firmware.

The firmware. I had to update the firmware to be able to run software from folders or D64:s. No big deal though, just put the files on the memory card and it manages on its own.

Btw, good to know:

- The uIEC is device 10 by default. To show the directory you write LOAD”$”,10 instead of the normal LOAD”$”,8.

- If you buy the uIEC with daughterboard, you don’t have to fix your own power supply. Then it uses the cassette port for power.

- uIEC is based on the SD2IEC that grew out of the 1541-III. Other options are e.g. IEC-ATA and MMC2IEC.

- You can build an uIEC into a nice external box if you want to. Check out this one by Rik Magers for example:

Amiga in the UK-charts: Dex & Jonesey

In the 1990′s you could use chipmusic tools to make dance music hits. It was r rare to hear 8-bit songs in public before that. With a few exceptions, records with 8-bit music appeared in the 90′s and were made on the Amiga (see the timeline).

The British duo Dex & Jonesey have probably been involved with more chart hits with the Amiga than anyone else. They worked with 15 UK chart hits between 1996 and 2001, even with mainstream folks like Phil Collins and Lionel Richie. Imagine feeding some phresh Phil Collins vocals into OctaMED, eyh!

They mainly worked with more dancefloor oriented artists though. Their remixes of Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness apparently sold about half a million copies (including their radio edit). Dex & Jonesey used the Amiga for Hardfloor, Usura, Todd Terry and about 40 other releases (check the discography, up until Strings of Justice).

Back in the 1990′s, music retromania was more about synthesizers than computers. It wasn’t like today, when you get bonus points for any 8-bit reference. I mail-talked with Jonesey to get some more information.

- The music biz found out soon enough after attending the studio that we were literally running a Phil Collins record from 1000 pounds worth of studio and out doing David Morales and Arman van Helden. It was bizarre looking back! We did some huge magazine interviews which was really fun. Yet the music industry hated the fact we were not Apple Mac focused and produced so many hit records from a ‘poor man’s’ computer. There was a lot of negativity that we had to fight, but content as always was king and we made it through the storm!

Dex & Jonesey started with Amiga 500 and Protracker, but quickly moved on to using two Amiga 1200 running OctaMED, complemented by a keyboard. - The 44khz quality of DAT was good enough to master from. We had literally a full studio although everything had to be recorded live to DAT including live keyboards which I played. It was daunting but at the same time great fun, it was like being on tour and playing in a live band.

Dex & Jonesey had a competetive edge in two ways. They had a huge library of sounds that they’d sampled from extended mixes amongst other things (all stored on floppies, of course). Secondly, the sound of the Amiga made it stand out from the others. - The sounds were crunchy and tough, not dull and bland, thus allowed my music to have an advantage that others could not replicate. I even had a famous product downgrade to an 8 bit to get the ‘sound’ but it was more than technology that drove the output/results.

In 1999 the duo split up, but Jonesey continued to use the Amiga for hits like Independence. He stuck with the Amigas for another two years, but then switched to Logic on Mac. - When finance got much better I bailed out on the Amigas as technology had caught up and the machines had broken down. I had bought around 15 of them and grown tired of the failures. I went to Apple Mac and still have the leading 8 core system that runs Logic Pro. 

What OctaMED provided compared to the new setup, was a fast work pace. - The part I missed about the Amigas the most was the quickness of operations. It was so user friendly where Macs are always so complex!

Such ‘immersive’ qualities of trackers are often forgotten. Once you know them, they are really quick to work with. A lot of the people I interviewed for my thesis mentioned it, and it was recently empirically researched by Nash & Blackwell of the Rainbow Research Group (pdf). But trackers are not made for handling long chunks of audio. If you’re a remixer and use the original audio, even a modern tracker like Renoise is a bit painful. So respect to Dex & Jonesey for keeping it up for so long!

Originality is Back!

Talking about originality is asking for trouble. So not many people talk do anymore, atleast from where I’m standing. It’s just not a very relevant topic in a world where “everything is a remix“. In remix culture everyone (and everything?) is a DJ that is always inspired by others in various ways. Yeah, okay. Sure. But…

Still, I don’t value all music the same way. Consider the difference between a DJ who plays other people’s music, and someone who improvises with her own compositions using home-made software. It’s not that it’s more impressive, or better, or more complicated – but there is some kind of difference, right?

It’s not about the performance: a DJ is just as likely as a composer to use Ableton with 100000 clips. It’s not about the composition, because even if you don’t sample you’re probably stealing subconsciously anyway!! It’s impossible to find an origin to the composition.

Most importantly though, is that originality is not about “creativity”. What I’d like to propose here, is that it’s about the ontology: what is the song actually made of? I got this idea from Raquel, and thought I’d think aloud about it.

For example, if you take yer average electronic music release, it likely uses plenty of samples, effects and instruments that someone else made. It’s not super-difficult to copy the song if you find the source. For example, look at how Jim Pavloff rebuilds Smack My Bitch Up from scratch. The value in this bitch-song comes from the idea, not the labour.

Yeah, I said labour. By using music tools with a bit more friction you can move away from presets, towards manualism. Instead of tweekin’ sum knobz, you have to spend an hour to write a list of numbers instead. There are no instruments or samples to load, no automatic sliders or fancy algorithms to produce automatic variations. In the ideal manualist case there’s absolutely nothing but your hands.

Chipmusic is not 100% original – nothing is. But it does get pretty close sometimes. Most chipmusic software does not use samples. A lot of them don’t even let you save an instrument that you’ve made. Sure, you get some basic timbres and effects, and an interface with plenty of character. If u’re lucky there’s even some copy-paste functions. But then it’s up to you.

Por examplo – when lft makes Bach-music in C64 assembly, they are original works event if he didn’t compose them first. They are original, because he typed them by hand, from scratch. The list of common denominators is short: assembly, C64 and keyboard.

In Exedub from 2SLEEP1 you can see me composing the song live, starting with nothing but an empty music program. This seems to go well with this idea of originality. But the song is a recording. It doesn’t exist as an executable (a bit like with live coding) but I’m not sure if that’s important or not. Indeed, it does change the ontology of the music.

What is important is that purist chipmusic – provided in non-recorded file formats – is original by default. The ontology of chipmusic is quite unique. I’d say that it’s the only digital music genre in the world. All the others are just platform-independent recordings. I doubt that there’s any other genre that has 10,000′s of songs as executables or open-source.

Anyway. This idea of originality is an analytical concept, more than something useful for everyday life. Who knows how the songs are made, anyway? But I think it’s important to have concepts that are neither antropocentric nor über-structuralist. Materialism, yo.

A thesis about ANSI that hates PETSCII

I was reading an MA thesis in history by Michael Hargadon about ANSI art (pdf). It’s an interesting read, but struck me as rather odd, occasionally. Perhaps because it’s North American? For example, there is a newskool Razor1911 ASCII piece (the kind that looks strange on PC because the /-signs don’t align) is described as ASCII-art at its finest, effectively ignoring Amiga ASCII (just look at ASCII arena).

But what made me really worried was when I read that C64 BBSes never developed true BBS artwork like that of the IBM PC. He continues to say that only some block-drawing characters were available. This is ignorant to say the least, and actually makes me doubt the accuracy of the rest of the text. To be honest, I skipped through it rather quickly after the Big Petscii Diss.

Anyway. Theoretically, it is rather technodeterministic. There is loads of technical explanations. Perhaps that’s because, as far as I understand, the author was a SysOp and not an ANSI-artist. He quotes a historian saying that the first-order constraints that govern the creation of art and the form it takes are the availability of materials and the ways in which these materials can be arranged to produce meaning. So Hargadon later concludes that the limitations of a given platform will define the forms of expression that can be sustained on it.

I like when the machine gets credit for what’s being done, but I think this is taking it too far. I think it’s problematic to differentiate between unavoidable and influential constraint, as Hargadon talks about. The first is supposedly a consequence of a discrete and fixed object (called platform) and the latter is a consequence of the overall technosocial system (called operating environment).

But computers are not fixed objects: they change. Hackers continue to ‘push the limits’ and sometimes we even call their attempts new innovations. But these features were always in the machine, obviously. It was merely the human understanding that was ‘pushed’ and not the machine.

We cannot define these machines objectively. There is always a human bias. It is particularly obvious with objects that are continuously abused by demosceners. There will soon be a new C64-demo that requires the emulator programmers to start working again. Or vice versa – the emulator programmers discover something that leads to new 1337 coder tricks.

What I mean in this context is that ANSI-art could be disconnected from the ANSI-standard just like the term ASCII-art was. People could make all kinds of crazy text mode graphics on BBS’s if they just added software support for interlaced frames, changing fonts, etc. After all, BBS-software was often developed by elite userz rather than companies.

If you want to read long academic texts about warez d00ds, I’d recommend Alf Rhen’s Electronic Potlatch. Nevertheless, this is a valuable contribution to science despite its narrow scope that disconnects it from all other forms of text art (graffiti is not even mentioned). And although I agree with Hargadon that modern social science requires the relaxation of .. the rules of historical evidence, it’s something that comes with a great responsibility.

Amigacore Without Amiga?

At the excellent Bimbo Tower store in Paris, they have a specific section for Amigacore. I’ve never seen that before. It had about 10 vinyls with classics from DHR-people like Catani and Babalon, artists from Bloody Fist, and so on. But there were also two releases that I’d never heard about.

R-ictus – Onanisme Rituel (video) is some sort of speedcore and Vverevvolf Grehv’s album Zombie Aesthetics is a bit more metal-oriented (video). They are both quite lo-fi, but obviously not produced only with Amiga.

But it has the Amiga spirit. And perhaps some of it was even made with the Paula chip of the Amiga. But that’s not the point here. Perhaps Amigacore is a valid genre even without the Amiga? I wasn’t convinced about the term when I wrote this. But if there’s a special section for amigacore in a record store, it does have a broader relevance for music listeners.

I suppose that amigacore has lo-fi and distorted sounds that has not been drenched in cheesy postproduction effects like a lot of breakcore still seems to be. So it’s not only about the raw timbre, but also about the sequencing technique. I believe that trackers were highly influential on both IDM and breakcore in the 1990′s. Early ‘breakcore’ acts like Venetian Snares and Nasenbluten used the Amiga. So perhaps amigacore is basically like ‘oldschool breakcore’…?

 

We call them VJs

…but it’s not really fair. It’s a misleding term since VJs usually create their own material (unlike a DJ). I think it was Jean Poole who first pointed that out to me, many years ago. Anyway. I started writing this post as a reply to “Which European VJs are there?” but then I digressed, and then it turned into this. Feel free to complain!

I’ve written before about the popularity of glitch in the chipscene. In Europe Gijs Gieskes (nl), RealMyop (fr) and Kissdub (fr) are some of the foremost 8-bit glitcherz, although people like Karl Klomp (nl) and Rosa Menkman (nl) also work with low bits every now and then. In USA there’s e.g. Notendo and No Carrier who work with glitching the NES – in hard and soft ways.

For a VJ, it seems pretty common to be stuck in a corner somewhere playing for something that you don’t even know what it is. But there are a number of closer cooperations between musicians and visualists. Distortled Box (es) work in the glitch field. Meneo (es) have/had Entter (es) on the visuals. ZX Spectrum Orchestra (uk) did some über-fresh audiovisual sets straight from the machine. 8GB (ar) did both music and visuals for his performances.

Just like with music, the 8-bit visual tools are quite poor when it comes to interaction, afaik. If demo coders weren’t so obsessed with non-interactive things the situation would be different, of course. Imagine if there were more things like VBLANK’s VJ on a chip, or Atari Video Music or all those crazy visualizers from Jeff Minter. Since it’s all code, it should be more easy and obvious to add interactive features. If all those 32-byte-thingies were interactive, it wouldn’t take many floppies for a full night’s VJ-set!

I believe Paris (us) was talking about this a few years ago, as a key feature of making visuals from scratch with old tech. With his background in analogue modulations and physics, he should know.

Anyway: one of the titans of low-res VJing is the C-men (nl). Starting as a duo, it’s now a one-man army who’s brought his Amigas around for over a decade, and not only for chip-related gigs. His visuals don’t use the “8-bit aesthetics” even if they technically are.

Two of my favourite VJs are Otro (fr) and Raquel Meyers (se). While Otro is perhaps more known for graphic design, his VJ-sets are incredible aswell. Raquel has recently taken an interesting turn into the text mode world, with e.g. 2SLEEP1 (together with yours truly). Both them have also made a few works for the demoscene.

And finally: Enso (us) has a nice psychedelic flair to his visuals, Pikilipita (fr/uk) made VJ-software for e.g. the GBA and VjVISUALOOP (it) seems to have made some nice stuff. Now I’m going to eat, but please comment about all the VJs I’ve forgotten here!

Btw: lulz @ writing a post about visuals that only contains text.

 

1.000.000 soundchips you never heard about

Except for computers and consoles, there are many other machines with real or mimicked soundchips inside. The recent DCM8 drum machine and the amazing Droid3 are examples of the latter, while Sidstation and POKEY.synth contain actual soundchips. But these are all sort of retrospective projects from the past decade or so. But what kind of soundchip-machines was around in the 80′s?

The most obvious example is the YM-soundchips. It’s a confusing field but, basically, Yamaha made these chips for both consoles, computers, keyboards and synthesizers. They mostly used FM-synthesis, which was a big part of the sound of 1980′s (and early 90′s bedroom electronica like µ-ziq). Yamaha synthesizers like DX-21, DX-100 and FB-01 used soundchips that a few years later were found in consumer products like X68000, some MSX-models and plenty of keyboards (ABA-88 lol). Later on, similar chips were also found in soundcards and mobile phones. *

The Remco Electronic Sound FX machine from 1979 was quite the noise maker. It was built on the SN76477-chip, which was popular for arcade games like Space Invaders but also used in ABC80 and Gakken EX. There are a few semi-recent DIY-projects, but I haven’t been able to find old consumer products with this chip. Recently, Panzer Party released a vinyl composed only with the Remco machine though.

It’s surprising that so few soundchips were used for both games and instruments. They continue to be two quite different fields. One consequence of that is that computer/console-based chipmusic was always separated from those who used soundchip-keyboards. For example, the techno-centrics of chipmusic (‘a soundchip is an instrument/medium’) wouldn’t categorize a DX-21 song as chipmusic.

Another consequence is an apparent gap in soundchip research. Many soundchips were never used for computer/game stuff and are (therefore?) not so well documented. Chips like M114S, CEM3394 or MC-3 2191 were found in keyboards, arcade games, toys and synthesizers. Some chips were found in speech devices, domestic robots, mobile phones and other thingies. Afaik, there is no thorough lists of such chips. There might not be 1.000.000, but who knows?

Well, there is Cyberyogi of course. He has an impressive collection of old keyboards that he also circuit bends (and makes squarewave music, not chipmusic). Describing the sounds, he often references POKEY (Simba – My MusicWorld, Hing Hon) and SID (Letron, PSS-100) but the hardware inside was either analogue or had obscure chips. There are probably people similar to him around the web, right?

(As some kind of consolation cross-over between synthesizers & computers, check out the HxC floppy disk emulator)

* I haven’t listened a lot to FM-music but to me it’s striking how different these chips were used by pop music producers and game composers. Virt argues that since FM-synthesis was difficult to grasp and had a crappy interface, most pop producers settled with using the preset sounds. (Reminds me a bit of how the TB-303 suffered from bad manuals and interface aswell.) Game composers though, were making far more complex things – sonically and musically. Was that because they were usually Japanese, and FM was very popular there, and they are better at enjoying unpredictable machines?

Winning Printers

Printers are the future! Like Apple’s new CEO said. According to … the Onion.

So it was a joke, but there is definitely something strangely futuristic about printers. It’s probably the most invisible post-digital thing around, and with DIY 3D-printers like reprap they might get some love soon again.

Or perhaps they already did? I’ve come across many printers with a strong character lately. They seem really fun to experiment with. The spraycan-based Near Tag Quality makes me think about an unthinkable mixture between beamers and blu (or?). Time Print Machine bleeds ink on paper, which creates round “pixels” of various sizes. Kind of like the LEGO printer and the human printer, but with more interesting results.

Electronic Instant Camera by Niklas Roy

But the Electronic Instant Camera by Niklas Roy is the reason for writing this post, really. Great work. Like a slow-fi Polaroid. A mixture of Gameboy Camera, Anton Perich’s painting machine from 1979, and the waterfall screen. I hope that it sounds good too. Printers are good music instruments. 

Anton Perich's Painting Machine

Finally, the TXT-PRINTER. It’s an official Philips TV from 1984 that contains a printer for outputting teletext pages. One at a time. I actually have one of these, and I can’t believe it didn’t get more popular! Photo taken from this page.

► Phriz-B Live at Lazybird

Like many others, Phriz-B was making loud dance music on his Amiga in the early 1990′s. He didn’t exactly reach the charts with his tracker rave (unlike e.g. Urban Shakedown), but it was definitely good enough to go on an underground vinyl label.

Sadly, it never did. All that was ever released was a CDr in 2004. Luckily, I heard of this release from herv and got in touch with Phriz-B to get it re-released. What I got was even better – a live gig performed exactly 7 years ago with the original floppies from 1992-1994. No fancy equipment like hard drives or mixers. Original floppy headz, sweat!

Live at Lazybird contains some classic Amiga samples that some of you nerds might recognize. But other than that (and the precious Amiga distortion) this has little to do with chip/demo-blabla. This is party, not packdisk! Rave on!

Get it here

Music for Twitter?

So first Viznut and friends did some experiments and put it in a YouTube-clip. Then there were threads at Pouet and chipmusic.org, and eventually it even popped up in places like Motherboard. Then there was another video:

This is all about tiny pieces of C code that generates 8-bit music. Mega complicated haXXor stuff. But you don’t have to understand it to like it. In fact, you can even make it yourself. Just copy stuff here, paste it here and then change some numbers. Don’t forget to copyright it!

This seems less hardware-dependent than minidata things usually are. So perhaps it could be some new kind of sonic Twitter art, like I tweeted little-scale’s Arduino music (mp3). Good luck everybody! Waiting for the first compilation…