I recently found three Gameboy DMG-01 in good shape so I’m doing another round of modding.
This is the first one. It’s a black Play It Loud with a total of eight mods. Black + Pink. My first in this color combo.
Mods: White backlight, Bivert chip, Prosound to headphones, Bass mod, Decoupler on powerstrip, new screen, new buttons, new silicon parts.
After completing around 25 projects refurbishing and modding old Gameboys I took a bit of a pause to do something else.
I set my sight on old transistor radios. I previously did a re-capping of the Braun T220 and after that project was done I bought an 1955 Braun SK2 on Ebay that was in need of a lot of love.
I won’t lie, this project has taken forever to finish. I did all the rookie mistakes, but hey that’s the best way to learn something new, isn’t it. Finally it’s completed and I can show you some photos. And if I may say so myself, damn it’s beautiful.
This is what I did:
It’s time for me to once again write something about the music I’m listening to at the moment. Yes it’s time for another I recommend post. First I must apologize. Yes I know I’ve been lazy but to make up for that laziness here are four of the best albums right now, IMHO. Hope you enjoy.
Try to say that title ten times without faltering. This artist is new discovery for me. Cinematic, atmospheric, pulsating and sometimes danceable deep, in this his sixth full-lengther.
New electronic weirdness and playful melodies from the British duo and veterans comprising of Ed Handley and Andy Turner, both actual original members of Black Dog Productions.
A fairly new mix-album with a very tasteful selection of genre-traversing laid-back atmospheric grooves from the pride of Copenhagen.
Another new artist discovery for me. This reminds me a bit of Kauf, with that same distinct retro-feel, mainly because of the sounds and effects that was used. Great songs and melancholy allover.
The advances in computer generated imagery is moving forward in such a breakneck speed that it’s hard to keep track of it all. It seems like just yesterday when Google announced Deep Dream. Today that looks like ancient technology compared to the latest in computer generating algorithms like This Person Does not Exist and Deep Fakes.
I found another cool and very creative tool called Ganbreeder that lets you select images and “breed” them with each other. The idea is simple but I doubt that the code behind it is. It works like this: You select an image and “breed” it with one or several other images. You can set the level of the “genes” of each image, meaning increasing or decreasing the chance of the characteristics of the image (shapes, colors etc) making it to the end result – the child. Then you can use that said child image and breed that, and so on and so on.
It’s a bit tricky at start to get anything good out of it, but with some practice, well see for your self below.. The whole affair is till pretty low res but there should hopefully be a pro version available soon, where you can save your results in higher resolutions.
Check out more of my Ganbreeded images here
After six months, 118 hours of game play and 3700 kills I finally finished all the main quests and most of the side quests. What a game and what a feat to make something that is so interesting and surprising all the way to the end. Truly impressive.
Here are some of my best in-game photos from Assassins Creed Odyssey (PC).
There have not been much music released lately that I liked enough to recommend here on Fogelberg.com. That was until yesterday when London based Haelos released their second album Any Random Kindness. Lots of great tunes and melodies on this one. Their music has been described as “dark euphoria” and an “angelic combination of male-female vocal interplay and atmospheric soundscapes.”
Amen to that. Instant favorite for me.
This is one of my own modded Game Boys. It used to have a cyan blue screen but yesterday I decided to try out a silver screen that I had recently acquired. I also tried new off-white silicon buttons. It looks great I think, though I have still not decided if I like the feeling of the new buttons.
One of the things I have found when choosing color combinations for modded Game Boys is that it usually looks better if there is a high contrast between the color of the shell and the screen. Meaning if you choose a dark shell, use a lightly colored screen and vice versa.
I haven’t listened to The Chemical Brother for a very long time. Saw them at the Sonar Festival a few years ago but apart from that I think I stopped following them somewhere around Push the Button in 2005. Don’t know why really, but I suspect I just grew tired of their sound at the time.
Fast forward a decade or so and their latest album No Geography is out.
I’m surprised to say it’s really really good. I like it a lot. Good tunes.
For close to one year now I have been refurbishing and modding old Game Boys. It started out as a fun project where I wanted to learn something new and test the limits of what was possible to do, without investing a lot of money or time. It has been fun but this Game Boy pictured above is likely one of the last I will do, if not the last one.
I’ve grown a bit tired on doing this and since it’s getting harder and harder to get hold of second hand Game Boys in Sweden that are in good enough shape to work on, now seems like a good time to move on to do something else on my spare time, like making more music again. Also my source for most of the spare parts are located in the UK, which as you may know are very likely to not be a part of the EU soon, meaning there will be extra costs for customs for everything ordered from there.
Anyway, so please enjoy this last or one of my last modded Game Boy DMG-01. It’s an original shell in great condition with new green plastic screen and see-through buttons. All the usual mods for greater image quality and sound. Perfect for the serious retro gamer or LSDJ / Nanoloop Chip musician. Available on Ebay as I’m writing this.
In this week’s list of recommendations automatically and specifically handed to my by the all-serving algorithms of Spotify I found this newly released gem from Amsterdam-based Harm Coolen and Merijn Schotte Albers, aka Weval.
As usual these days, no doubt the result of me training the recommendation engine for god knows how many hours, it was once again correct in assuming I would like this. So thank you once again Spotify for showing me another gem that I would probably never have heard otherwise.
The songs on Weval range from blissed-out retro-chill-pop to more experimental trips into the land of 60s string reverb. Somewhat similar artists with this sound, at least in my mind would be Washed Out, WorriedAboutSatan and Chrome Sparks, to some extent. There are singing or pieces of singing on all the songs and it’s always run through some sort of effect, like pitch, phaser or harmonizer. The selection of effects heightens the overall retro-feeling on The Weight. It sounds 60s, but yet modern and fresh.
My favorite pieces of music so far are the title track, Are You Even Real, False State of Mind and Same Little Thing.
Released on Kompakt.