Media Convergence as Bubble-Bubble

I’ve complained about Bruce Sterling before, and now I’m about to do it again. The reaon is this chart of platform convergence by Gary Hayes that he posted on Wired. It argues that we’re moving towards one device that can play everything. But here’s the thing:

No device can play everything. That’s just common sense, right? You can digitize a VHS-tape and convert it into a format that modern media players can understand. But then it’s not a VHS-tape anymore. Everything that is special about VHS has been removed. It’s a bleak imitation, at best. Sure, the difference is less if you discuss, uhm, Real Audio or executable files. But it’s still the same principle. The juicy materiality (hard- or softwareal) has been stripped away.

Emulators are not the same thing as the original machine. They are not worse or better – they are just different. One example is the C64-emulator for iPhone that wasn’t allowed to include BASIC. Coding is not something that the iPhone should support. So the C64 became yet another boring gaming device, in iWorld. Btw, that follows the logic of the chart, that places the C64 just before … XBOX! Lol! The point is: every remediation & convergence both adds and subtracts. Things disappear. For good and bad.

Media convergence is obviously something that’s going on, in many different ways. And when I think about it – perhaps Sterling and his crew are right. There will be a machine in the future that can do everything. Yeah. I’m pretty sure there will be. Because we already had that machine so many times before. The magical device that can delete the material constraints and make your dreams come true instantly and without friction. Remember virtual reality in the 1990′s? Or home computers in the 1980′s? Or … I don’t know, beamers and wheel chairs and jet paks?

Silly comparison? Maybe a little. But we have to accept that these interface fantasies are cultural constructions that were as “real” or relevant in the 80′s as they are today. In 30 years people will patronize our fantasies just like we do today.

And when you think about it… A touch screen that you can use some fingers on? No keyboard? Unprogrammable systems, automatic surveillance, distribution monopolies… I mean. Eh?

This convergence is just a bubble-bubble. It’s not some unavoidable teleological future. Seems more like a temporary phase before we move towards divergence and paint that in terms of progress and optimism. Just like we did with the 1980′s computer market, for example. Seems pretty likely to me.

Al Warka and the Iraqi Home Computer Scene

The history of home computer hacking seems to be very centered around Europe, US and Australia. But it’s important to not forget other regions. I’ve previously written about C64 cracking in Argentina, but there’s lots more to research about e.g Asia, Africa and the Middle East. After reading this blogpost I got in touch with Salwan Asaad, who told me more about the early days of home computing in Basrah, Iraq. As it turns out, it was similar to what I grew up with: platform wars, competitions, floppy swapping and meetings. Salwan:

Annual school competition on a local and national level in students developed demos [..] Gaming circles: I met many enthusiasts back then at the arcades, we used to gather up and go to arcades to play, talk, and exchange floppies. The last such gathering took place around 2001

While other arabic countries settled for the MSX-computers, which Salwaan refers to as “the enemy”, Iraq developed a unique series of computers called Al-Warkaa (or Al-Warka), named after an ancient babylonian city in Iraq. There were two popular models, which were both based on Japanese home computers. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any photos of them but Salwan told me that it looked like the NEC-ones, but in white instead of black. (photo from old-computers.com)

The Al-Warkaa PC-6002 was the Iraqi version of the Japanese NEC PC-6001 Mk2 SR. Soundwise, it used the the common AY-soundchip but I found a similar model that had a built-in speech synthesis (yeah!). It was probably the first home computer that could sing (my YouTube-playlist).

The Al-Warkaa, unfortunately, didn’t have this feature. Instead, it offered an extra soundchip (probably FM, judging from what Salwan says) with 3 voices. It had 12 preset sounds and also the ability to make custom sounds. A home computer with both FM and PSG built in! It seems that the NEC also was able to combine FM and PSG, just look at this great demo!

The Al-Warkaa PC-6002 had seven different BASIC-versions built in. One of them (mode 7) was the Arabic text mode - a complete arabic text editor with abilities like searching, replacing, printing, and could even format floppies, according to Salwaan.

Unfortunately, Salwan doesn’t know of any text art on the Al Warkaa. I haven’t seen much arabic text-mode stuff at all, actually (if you know of any, please get in touch). To get an idea of the possibilities though, here’s a chart showing how the characters looked in the MSX-computers (copied from msxblue).

The platform battle in Iraq was between MSX and Al Warka. Atari also released arabic computers (and ROM-upgrades for hebrew), like the rare Najm 65XE from which the first picture is from. The most popular MSX-version in Arabia was the MSX 170 which was called Al-Sakhr (“the rock”). While MSX was popular in many different countries, the Al Warkaa was mostly found in Iraq. MSX-users had professional Arabic manuals at hand, but the Warkaa’ers relied on photo-copied English manuals that were mostly focused on BASIC. Salwaan writes:

That’s kinda how Warka guys ended up losing in most head-to-head competitions to MSX guys, the best we can do is draw stuff using BASIC commands and may be binary-load an image from disk to accelerate displaying bitmaps a little. They were doing hardware-sprites and full-motion graphics…

If anyone reading has more knowledge about arabic demos or text-mode things, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail info at goto80 dot com. Finally, a big thanks to Salwan Asaad for sharing this!

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:

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.

Amiga Apes and LSDj in Libraries

Archeopterix lives in Marseille and collects old hardware. Plenty of computers and consoles but also video cameras, keyboards, etc. I visited him after the Micromusic #5 festival and hung out with him a bit.

This photo is from the Game Heroes exhibition at Mars à L’Alcazar in Marseille, which he organized. The gorilla (built by Mégalo) is built from plastic guns, and his head is playing Amiga 600 games. The human ape is VJ Kissdub with his amazing PXL-2000 video camera that uses cassettes.

Monsieur Archeopterix also told me that he gave a Gameboy with LSDj to the library, so now people can go there and borrow it just like a book. I really like this idea, and he is trying to expand this to the rest of France. Let’s see if LSDj-Johan will file a massive law suit to destroy all libraries in France!

What seems to separate Archeopterix from other computer collectors is that he’s casual and playful and messy. Things just happen. He’s happy to share things and there’s nothing mainstream or academic about him. His place is more like a flea market than a museum, and you sort of just stumble across BASIC 1.0 for TO-7 or an Intellivision music keyboard or some strange storage media.

It makes me remember how the chipmusic scene was 10 years ago, before people had started to build fancy peripherals, research and reflect on the tools and cultures (like I do) and well, be very serious about things in general. Before it became infected by the standard tricks of art, pop and science. Maybe it’s time to GO APE again! Or Archeopterix.

Lft’s Chipophone: Playing Chipmusic by Hand

Linus Åkesson, aka Lft, is a programmer and musician who has mentioned featured several times at Chipflip. He works a lot with combining the aesthetics of chipmusic and “classical” music. He uses soundchips but also programs custom “soundchips” using microcontrollers, often with rather impressive programming. Perhaps not surprisingly, he has a background in the demoscene. In Reverberations he simulated the hands of an organ player with delicate Assembler programming, and executed it on two C64s. Technique and concept in a tight interplay: yum-yum!

In a way, the Chipophone turns this approach on its head. Here, it is hands that simulate chipmusic rather than the other way around. The Chipophone instrument features some of the most characteristic aspects of chipmusic software: arpeggios, slides, looped bars and noise-attacks. Consequently, a skilled pianist can play chipmusic in something similar to a chipmusic platform (8-bit CPU, 1k RAM, 8.5k ROM) and add all the typical chipmusic ornaments with the hands. It’s quite surreal to see Hubbard’s Spellbound actually being performed by hand:

I think that this is qualitatevly different from using, say, Chipsounds and a MIDI-keyboard. The Chipophone is not an emulation – it’s a music instrument that is inspired by the aesthetics of chipmusic. Rather than using modern equipment to mimick something that it will never be, this is a custom-made low-tech platform using an oldschool organ interface. Surely this would inspire musicians to perform in a different way, compared to the hi-tech VST-world.

According to the 00-decade’s discourse of hardware purism, where chipmusic has to use certain soundchips, this is of course not chipmusic. But considering the Chipophone’s low amount of RAM, ROM and CPU and its low-level implementation of typical chipmusic effects, this is a refreshing alternative to the, eh, mainstream chipmusic (LSDj with default samples).

I have interviewed Lft for my (nearly finished) thesis, where we discussed the aesthetical elements of chipmusic among other things. The Chipophone is a very clever way to bring these stylistic elements into a postdigital context, where it is motor skills that condition the music rather than tracker-skills. He demonstrates it so elegantly aswell, by playing some songs from “the chipmusic canon”. Hopefully this can be an inspiration for chipmusicians to experiment with improvisations and performances, rather than doing another playback gig.

Update: btw, look at his combination of 480 bytes & piano: The Swan

C64 Graphics – Data or Light?

There is a very geeky discussion about C64-graphics over at CSDb, which is strangely annoying and fascinating at the same time. It is essentially an argument about what a C64-image ‘is’, or perhaps more correctly, how it should be represented at CSDb. Is it the raw pixel data, or is it the way the image looks on an old CRT TV-screen?

From a data-materialist perspective, the image is archived most correctly as pixel data. Nobody in the thread disagrees with this. The discussion concerns the screen shot, and whether it should be modified to look like it does on a CRT-screen (by re-constructing a ‘correct’ palette and using a TV-emulation). It is a question of what is the most ‘accurate’ representation of the image.

By STE’86

STE, a commercial pixel artist from the 80s who was active in the demoscene-ish universe Compunet, wants CSDb to “let me display my work in the manner and spirit it WAS created in. and let ME be the judge of that being as how i actually did it 25 years ago and may indeed have some recollection of what it looked like”. His idea of the image is a construction of e.g. two things: memories and screens. The way he remembers the image is not necessarily what was actually on the screen. Even if it was, his CRT-screen was different from those of others. Furthermore, his PC/Mac-screen might show graphics a bit different compared to your screen. Nevertheless, his point is that an archive such as CSDb should not modify the images in anyway, because for one it’ll be a huge problem to update it as the emulator improves.

The problem is that some images need some kind of filter/emulation, because they rely on the blending that PAL-artefacts create. In short, C64-graphics looks different on modern ultra-sharp screens. Bogost describes the inaccuracies of emulators in terms of texture, afterimage, color bleed & noise. These can be vital aspects for  pixel artists who work with CRT-screens, of course.

By Joe

What’s funny is how the technical discussions runs into a little halt half-way through the thread. It’s discussed if we can actually tell the difference between palette-issues and TV-emulation. In fact, the cause of the whole thread is revealed to have been an anti-alias issue in Firefox that was interpreted as a case of TV-emulation. For me, this is a little reminder to not get too stuck in technical details that, when it really comes down to it, is not something we are aware of anyway. In another way, it’s a reminder of what makes demoscene forums great!?<

Video Selection: Midsummer Haze

Exotic Escapes & Learning in Text Mode

After the previous teletext post, I found Teletext Holidays where you can browse current teletext travel ads online! Follow them on Twitter here for all your teletext holiday needs. A great service indeed, and I hope they pay me well for advertising their advertisements.

I like how the raw commercialism meets the blocky graphics. When you have 160 characters to set on a resolution of 23 x 39 characters in 8 colours, there is no room for fancy marketing. I doubt that current ad campaigns could be translated into teletext with much success. It just requires too many signifiers. Teletext fits better with a raw kind of product+price marketing. Have a look at Lektrolab’s teletext exhibition Microtel (2006) and all the advert-aesthetics in there aswell.

But teletext is also about news and education! Check out the Christian teletext edutainment by Bill Geers at his youtube-channel. And don’t miss the 10 episodes of Hands Up at this channel. Robots, cowboys and worms in hot air balloons, in the name of sign language!

Seriously, this is some very impressive work. I am not sure if this is all teletext. I mean, teletext is a lot more limited than the arbitrary use of colours in e.g. ANSI and PETSCII. Here you have to waste a character to change the back/foreground colour of the next char. Also, I don’t know how teletext animation works. Is it possible to broadcast longer animations than e.g. this one? Anyway, I guess they were not designed to be broadcast on teletext, because it doesn’t have sound. So, was teletext software really that good to animate with? Am I expecting an answer?

Below are two pieces from the Microtel exhibition. First by Videohome Training (Gijs and Marieke), and the second one by Drx (from Bodenständig 2000). If you want to make your own Teletext graphics, check Lektrolab’s tutorial.

If you wanna step up the obscurity yet another notch, get into the British teletext bureaucracy! First, try to understand how the different standards and providers and companies and channels worked in the 1990s. Then try to understand the present status of teletext, which seems to involve illegal text mode shout outs. Start here. You can see what people in Stoke-on-Trent think here (?!) and see a sentimental selection of highlights here (?!).