Fall into music-history in hundred blissful minutes. (via)
The constantly brilliant netlabel Pause-Music goes on and on, pushing the boundaries. Alex Mauer is about to release his third album “Vegavox 2″. The special thing is, that the album will be actual released on NES carts.
“What you see in the video is the title screen and part of the first song. Each of the songs feature original artwork by Alex Mauer.”
In a recent interview Rich and Eirik from Pause talk about history, making and goals of the netlabel. Pause started PLUS some months ago. It is a special section on the netlabel, dedicated to game-soundtracks.
“Having been involved in the indie gaming scene for a number of years, and having enjoyed quite a few soundtracks from indie games, I just couldn’t see why there wasn’t a central site for that stuff. So when we made Pause I immediately thought that I wanted a section for that as well.”
How do they come up with all this awesome sound and artwork? Eirik: “I always try to be as strict as possible when deciding upon what to release or not. There’s so many netlabels out there, so in order to stand out I think you need to set the bar pretty high.” Rich: “If we both like it but aren’t crazy about it though, we probably won’t release it. We try to keep a high standard so that the things that we do release are really great. At least, in our biased opinions. And we ask that people send us finished or close to finished releases so that we know exactly what we’re working with.” This guys are outstanding.
The weblog True Chip Till Death got an in-depth interview with Oliver Wittchow, the very creator of the Nanoloop-gameboy sequencer. Oliver tells some very interesting things about the history and the making. I want to highlight some “magic things”, that are also remarkable for the locally interested people. He speaks about the first public performance of Nanoloop:
The first public performance I did with Nanoloop was in spring 1998 at a ‘lo-fi contest’ at the Liquid Sky club, Cologne. I started selling it in late 1999, initially only within Germany. Worldwide sales began in 2000.
You eventually know Pixeljoint. A great community for making and sharing pixelart. They do challenge or competitions on a regular basis and it is somehow a duty for me, to point you to that recent one, that has just finished. The topic was “twenty years of GameBoy”. The challenge was about creating “Mockups” of virtual GameBoy-games that nobody did (so far).
The results are absolute charming, since the origial GameBoy only used 4 levels of grey. You can vote or check out the forum-thread with all submissions. Another good overview of the best contributions can be seen at the weblog Randomrocket. Pixelart will live forever!
What would be the web, if an fresh idea you had would not been already realised by someone else? Welcome Tweetcoding! This is a little contest, where you have to “code in 140 characters or less” of ActionScript-code in order to fill an Flash-applet with life. The first round was already finished with some very decent results.
g.clear();a=mouseX;b=mouseY;c=++i%8/8+10;d=(i&8)<<4; for(j=64;j--;){ls(c*=1.1,d-=0x50580); g.drawCircle(a=5+a-a/50+s(i/16),b=5+b-b/50,c)}
Tweetcoding-Winner piXelero. Check out the result.
Where to start or go to from there?
- Visit the tweetcode-website and check out the first contributions.
- Read about the rules.
- Read the initial announcement.
- Don't forget, that there is also a Tweetcode-Minifier available.
- Let there be Tweets!
Last not least thanks to DjMike for this hot hint! Somethin' somewhat similar is Tweet-A-Sound for MAX/MSP-users.
Rrola – Ameisen (32 bytes, MS DOS, 2007)
Well, Goto80 curated some sort of demo-showcase, dedicated to visuals with less than 256 bytes of space (less than a SMS-message). He says about it:
HELLO DID YOU KNOW? People make visuals that are smaller than an SMS (256 bytes). Since they are not recorded video, they can be changed any way you wish. It is maybe the opposite to all the things that everybody loves to hate: software updates, über-consumption, compatibility, inefficiency, recording, the illusion of the universal computer, and so on. (…) To me these are ideal examples of wo-man-machine interaction, where media materialism meets software magic. Stop recording!
Totally agreed. Read more at Chipflip.
Social Demo’ing on Twitter?
Oh, if we are already on this topic. Did you know, that Twitter features less than 140 characters? It – at least in theory – should be possible without a problem, to use this fancy web-thingy in order to exchange full demos and have this fast updates and community thing also going on. If found some mysterious first approach like this, at the twitter-account of emoc.
Update: Found an interesting article on the birth of the 160 character limit at SMS-text messages.
