unlock.

Guitar Hero vs. C64

Unlock — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:44:56 +0000

A friend of mine, CCP, recently showed me the latest PlayStation hit: Guitar Hero. I felt this was a funny game and figured out that there is a similar PC conversion (originating in the demoscene, of course) called Frets on Fire. Now what is this game about? Imagine you’re a rock star, playing rock music on a gamepad/joystick replacement being built into some cheap plastic guitar. Five colored button replace the strings of the guitar, a up/down button simulates hitting the chords. For the PC conversion, you use your keyboard: F1 trough F5 for the strings and ENTER to bend. Interesting, you say, but how is this related to the C64? I can tell you: Some crazy mind called Toni Westbrook had the idea to create a hardware interface to be able to connect one of these plastic guitars to the C64. His project/game is called Shredz64 I felt this was worth mentioning because C64 hardware extensions are always cool.

Toni has a journal page where he reports on the ongoings on the project. Up to the of writing, he already managed to read buttons states and display them on the C64 screens. As far as I know, the hardware interface is more or less finished and he’s now working on implementing a game that support the guitar. As the SID tune lover I am, I imagine this will be very cool. To play SID tunes with a guitar is certainly interesting. I just wonder if Toni has been thinking of the fact that the C64 only has 3 voices. Let’s see what’s going on with this project in the future.

Read Toni’s journal at http://freedomirc.net/~megaboz/shredz64/.

Similarities EP

Unlock — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:36:19 +0000

Genox did it again and, despite all the prophecies of doom, released a new EP. This time it’s called “Similarities” and features 5 tracks, including the previously released Transatlantic Fiberglass track (which I already mentioned in Demoscene Music Favourites).

Those five tracks of electronic music are an excellent soundtrack for work hours as well as for chill hours. There’s everything, from downtempo blips to faster beats, broad noise and melodic soundscapes. Beside track 4 “Transatlantic Fiberglass”, I like track 2 “Melobotter” most. That’s just music as I love it from Genox. Track 1 “Ninjagirls” seems to be a firstie to me: Genox operating a vocoder - nice feature and a really nice track. Track 5 “Orbit” comes with these typical musical cliffhangers I adore so much: The music’s constantly thrilling me, all the time it seems to be breaking out and the main part seems to be near, but it keeps going and going. A nice floating melody with that pushing beat. Excellent! Finally, track 3 “Streamtrain” has the shape of good old Genox sound as we know it. Experimental noise and a vast amount of bleeps and blings all over.

Go grab this high quality music pack of electronic sounds from archive.org. And Genox: Thanks, you made my day!

Update 31/01/07 Genox asked me to put my little review to his archive-org site. See it.

Visiting iTunes

Unlock — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:18:26 +0000

Recently, everybody was speaking about iTunes and how cool it was. I decided to give it a go. Because I don’t own any Apple hardware and thus no MacOS, I had to chose the Windows version which seemed to work well too. Playing around with it showed it was fine, with a few drawbacks:

Playing back Ogg Vorbis files crashed iTunes
You need some weird Apple iTunes Music Store account to easily load cover art
No hot folders - my old MP3 collection, sorted by folders and filenames is not really compatible with the ID3-tag based iTunes structure. Some work ahead ;-)
I have no iPod

I was easily able to solve the first drawback: A new Quicktime component needs to be added to the QTComponents directory of the Quicktime installation. The component can be downloaded from http://xiph.org/quicktime/. But what’s that? Replaying .ogg-files still crashes iTunes. Something like one hour later, I discovered that there was another Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component in the /Windows/System32/Quicktime directory - deleting it made iTunes easily play Ogg files.

I still do not have any clever solutions for the other drawbacks - the hot folder thing can be tricked by just adding the same folder to Quicktime again and again - it is clever enough to not add tracks twice.

Oh, and I finally created an account at last.fm - nice thing, but err… what do I use it for?

Release of PAiN

Unlock — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:19:40 +0000

In case you’re wondering what I’ve been up to during Christmas: We have managed to release another issue of the diskmag PAiN at the after-Christmas demo party TUM. This is a notable thing since it’s the first issue since 14 months. Now, a bit more than a week later, I can see that there are around 1300 downloads from scene.org. This shows me, that PAiN is still important enough to be released. We’ll keep it up.
You can read more about PAiN and download all issues from http://pain.scene.org.

Demoscene music favourites

Unlock — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 10:12:03 +0000

Once in a while, when DRS3 (the local radio station for “modern” music in Switzerland) gets boring because of the ever-repeating same charts music, I switch on my Winamp and listen to demoscene music at work. Since a while, we’re firewall-ed, packet filtered and whatever there is and I can’t listen to the Nectarine live stream anymore. I started collecting quite a bunch of demoscene tracks on my local work harddisk which I then load into my playlist. Since now, in Christmas time, you can’t listen to DRS3 because of all the Christmas tunes, I had the idea to enlist my favourite Top 5 of demoscene songs here in my blog. What else do I have the blog for?

Note that these songs don’t necessarily are released in 2006 - it’s just my personal charts of what I’ve been listening to most this year (mostly counting October - December).

Little Bitchard - Choose Zero Polys And Shaders [download]
Paniq - Saturday Bam [download]
Lug00ber - Out The Exits (Extended) [download]
Reed - Tonite Fairlite (Live at Breakpoint 2020) [download]
Genox - Transatlantic Fiberglass [download]

Thank you dudes, for providing me with that much stunning music!

Mobile phone as a remote control

Unlock — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:01:26 +0000

When I recently visited my friend Genox, I discovered the idea to use a mobile phone as a remote control for my PC. He was using his phone as a remote control for iTunes on his Apple laptop. However that didn’t work properly, “probably because of a somewhat bad bluetooth antenna” he said. Yes, a mobile phone remote control working trough bluetooth is a splendid idea, in my opinion. A few days later, I browsed the web for a similar application which would work on my Nokia phone and I found something nice: “Bluetooth Remote Control 2.0″.

Installation worked without any problems and once I managed to get my phone to be connected to the PC via bluetooth, it was also possible to start the Java client on the phone. Unfortunately, the shareware version of the Bluetooth Remote Control only allows a few clicks/commands to be sent from the mobile phone to be PC - I’ll probably have to buy the full version at some point. Why? Because I instantly liked the concept of this piece of software.

There’s a server part of BRC that has to run on the PC. The client part is running on the mobile phone. The server part allows a few settings - but the interesting side is what you can do on your mobile phone, once you’re connected: It allows to steer a few pre-defined programs, such as Winamp or PowerPoint. The Winamp control is easy to use and really cool to allow controlling Winamp while lying on the sofa (out of reach of the PC keyboard). As for PowerPoint, well, I don’t really care about PowerPoint.

The next big thing is something I haven’t really expected to see: It’s possible to move the mouse with the mobile phone. The software even transmits a piece of the Windows desktop to the mobile phone. Like this, I can start programs (click click), read emails (click) or browse photos (click click scroll) without leaving my sofa. All these functions work well and fast, it’s really fun - even if that Windows-dekstop-on-the-mobile-phone feature is more a toy than really useful.

Further functions include file browsing, locking the system (depending on whether the bluetooth phone is in reach of the PC antenna or not), shutting down windows, starting the screensaver and more. All in all, a nice piece of software which a) has really useful functions (mainly the Winamp remote control) and b) offers a few toys for mobile phone freaks, too.

If you want to play around with this thing too, go get download it from the Bluetooth Remote Control website.

The unbelievable: Unlock has a blog/new site

Unlock — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 14:59:30 +0000

It’s been a while since there were changes on my website. Luckily, with today’s tools, I was able to avoid boring HTML typing and so - here we go: I started a new website and blog. I’m not quite sure how I’ll be using the blog, but be sure that I’ll try to post here and there. Please note, that the site will be constantly expanded - it’s far from being finished :-D

For now, the more important part is the actual content of the site: Productions I was involved in, my About page and everything else you can access trough the menu. If you don’t know me, it surely would make sense to visit the About page to get an impression - however, be warned, I won’t fully expose me on here, you better get to know me personally if you want to know more.