Video for my Nintendo Game Boy track Crunchy Beats
MVGEN is a really cool site where you can upload your music and get a crazy music video for it. Check out this retro thing it made for my Game Boy track Crunch Beats (Extended Version)
PocketCHIP, a portable device based on PICO-8
I got this in my feed a few weeks ago and boy does it look awesome. The PocketChip is like the Commodore 64 all over again, only more hipster and in 2016. Also it’s a lot cheaper than the C64 back in the day, only $49 intro price.
So what does it do? Well, games of course and there seems to be lots of them. And it comes with tools to create your own games or change the code of all existing. Also you can make chip tunes on it, and there’s a sequencer for creating more “professionally” sounding tunes. Click here for more resources on Pico-8 game development.
I also like the technical limitations of the device, as it says on their website: “The harsh limitations of Pico-8 are carefully chosen to be fun to work with (and) encourage small but expressive designs…”
Pictures from the Commodore 64 scene in the 80s, part 3: Furulund August 1989
In my little series featuring Scandinavian hacker parties I visited in the late 80s, we have finally come to the grand finale: Furulund, Skåne, Sweden 25 – 27 of August 1989. This was, to my knowledge the third and last meeting held in Furulund. I believe me and my friends in XAKK visited all of them.
Unfortunately, this is the only one where I actually took some pictures. At the time XAKK was about to leave the Commodore 64 scene. I and Vivace were working on a game that was never finished. We had only one more C64 demo left to do, Bound to be best II which was released in May 1990.
A Swedish friend of all things C64 and retro, Jimmy Wilhelmsson wrote an article about this “Hackathon”. It’s in Swedish and you can read it here.
-
- Lots of people hacking at the hacker conferance.
-
- Visitors at the Furulund Hacker conference.
-
- More visitors.
-
- Vivace, Cleo and Jolly Cracker/JC. All from XAKK.
-
- People looking at stuff, with Kim Isaksen.
-
- Kim Isaksen looking at stuff. Is that Mahoney leaning over him?
-
- That’s a younger version of me. Knatter of XAKK
-
- Vivace (XAKK) and other visitors watching a pirated movie on VHS.
-
- Mr Bacher (XAKK) pointing at stuff.
-
- Some guys from Starion? Kim Isaksen in the back.
-
- Even more visitors. Do you recognize anyone?
-
- Vivace (XAKK) testing the quality of the structure.
BitRumble, an 8-bit polyphonic synthesizer and sequencer
This could be interesting when it’s finally released. Still under development, there’s not much info available on the BitRumble, except that it has 5 channels with separate analog-like synthesis and a 15 step sequencer with 8 selectable patterns.