Hardcore Data Crafting and Demoscene

Linus Akesson, whose hardware chiptune project I’ve mentioned earlier, has done it again!

A few weeks ago, Linus (aka lft) won the wild compo at the demoparty Breakpoint in Germany. This is one of the biggest demoparties that does it the oldschool way, rather than having huge arenas full of LAN-gamers and mega corporate sponsorship (yes, yes, yes). Demoparties are gatherings of people in the demoscene, meeting, coding, drinking, composing, data-dancing, and competing with music, graphics, and demos. It’s complicated to explain what the demoscene is, but in short something like “a rather closed subculture making geek-art for geeks, with their own aesthetics, copyright, status-making, communication systems” - keeping underground since 20+ years. Now, imagine walking into a room full of obscure old computers, an air full of sweat and a myriad of square wave vibrations, and people watching a big screen shouting wildly as a scrolling text says something about IFLI, unlimited bobs, lamers, side borders, etc. It’s really something worth living for. : )

So, Breakpoint is a big demoparty (something like 700 people). Reading on their website, they say that girls no longer get in for free as they are so “many” now. “The goal of attracting girls to the scene clearly has been achieved - girls no longer are second-class sceners.” I remember a certain Swedish C64-party where the entrance fee for girls was doubled, but that’s another story. Anyway. Among the entries to the compos (competitions) at Breakpoint this year was a new release from Linus Akesson. It’s another release that blurs the borders between software and hardware, as he programs chips directly and puts them together into a micro-computer or personal computer, in its true sense. He uses an 8-bit CPU with 1kb RAM and 8,5kb ROM and basically nothing else: no special circuits for video or audio. It’s all hand made. Pure code. Mega data action!

Maybe it is the most hardcore demo ever made, as demos is traditionally about maximising hardware in any way you can. Demos on contemporary hardware has to be system friendly if it’s supposed to work on different hardware set-ups. The old tradition is to make everything yourself with no regard to what you are “supposed” to do. The Commodore 64 demoscene is notorious for exploiting undocumented features with trial and error - ie, utilizing features that the engineers didn’t put there consciously. I am not a programmer and I do not know what is using undocumented features and what is not, but here’s some of the C64-releases I liked at Breakpoint:

• #2 Graphics: Leon - Wanderer [ gif, exe ] For proof of handpixelling, see the workstages
• #1 Demo: Exceed, Resource, The Dreams - Cauldron [ mp4, exe ]
• #13 Music: Lft - Nymphaea [ exe ]

( how-to-run-them )

As we can see, my taste doesn’t always correlate with the demoparty-voters’ taste. But I still like compos at parties, since it’s an interesting challenge to try to win demosceners’ votes. It’s also interesting to see how much noise they can put up with. He he. Anyway. Back to Linus. Check out his page about the demo Craft here, with detailed information, schematics, video downloads, etc. The youtube video has been a bit crowded, but if you’re lucky it is working here. It includes many of the standard effects of the demoscene, but the combination of MHz, little RAM and many colours, makes it look fresh - especially considering the hardware.

ChipFire

I got this candle for my birthday. When you light it, there’s chipmusic! It plays Happy Birthday with bleeps, slightly off key and with some wrong notes. When you blow it out, the song plays until it’s finished. I’m hoping to see more fire induced chipmusic in the future!

Sega Mega Drive Slack-Hack

Now this is a great idea for lazy chipnoise fanatics! By pulling out the game cartridge while some music is playing and quickly inserting another cartridge - you get new music! Made by the people at dramacore and sickmode. Download their album

Sega Death - 16 bits from hell (22mb)

“the album is weird but thats what happens.
nothing was sequenced and no fx were used.
just some cutting out of the silence and crap.”

- ian @ dramacore

“Classical” Chip Music

I remember a few years ago when I found a song performed by 7 C64:s. It was a cover by some “old classical composition” (in lack of better terminology). Unfortunately I didn’t really dig more deeply into this, until yesterday. It was programmed by Linus Åkesson in assembler to “get rid of the boring, quantized timing found in most computer-developed music” as he puts it himself. I had never really made a connection between “classical” music and chipmusic before and this was a fresh eye-opener. Browsing through his website, it turns out that Linus Åkesson is a very interesting data boy. For example:

1) He created his own chip. Together with his demoscene crew Akesson made the actual chip that plays the sounds and music: The Hardware Chiptune Project (2007). In a few days they made a microcontroller (8 Mhz CPU, 8kb ROM, 2kb RAM), programmed the sound generator and the tracker-software to finally make the music. The result is something far less minimalistic than Tristan Perich’s 1-bit music (2006).

2) Åkesson made a melody search engine for the C64 music collection HVSC: SID Theme Search Engine. The HVSC contains most C64-songs ever released, and the fileformat is essentially open source - containing all instruments and notation. That is why Åkesson could generate a database with the notes from each channel of almost every C64-song - a process which took several days eventhough using an emulator.

But to get back to the “classical” music in SID-style. There are several compositions: Allt Under Himmelens Fäste originally by the legendary demoscener Mahoney, Romance originally by Chopin but now in SID+piano version and, Fratres originally by Arvo Pärt. There are even more but my favourite remains the 7xSID-song Förklädd Gud. The thing that gets to me is that it’s rare to hear chipmusic so carefully crafted. The sounds are 8-bit but the assembler dynamics of 7 SID chips (although emulated) makes it sound more like Wendy Carlos than Rob Hubbard. This is an interesting song to keep in your pocket when people blame chip music for being simplistic. So check out Åkesson’s website - there are lots of interesting projects and lots of information and downloads aswell.