Gameboy Art by Tom Markey

November 24th, 2008

Gameboy art by Tom Markey

Tom Markey
Gameboys.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a series yet. More of just tests or samples, but i can’t stop doing work involving them so maybe very large series on the way?

Drawings. Other artsy lo-fi stuff. That’s what Tom Markey is doing. And some LSDj tunes. Go check it out.

Download: Quarta330, live at Back To Chill, Tokyo

November 22nd, 2008

Quarta330, live at Back to Chill, Tokyo

Whether you honoured the nihilistic ritual No Music Day or not, you should check out this liveset by Japan’s Gameboy Dub warrior number one. He’s a genius, not only in composition, but sound design. He manages to get a sound that’s sooo crisp, yet so smooth.
The rest of the stuff on that page is pretty good too. It’s mostly livesets/dj mixes of tasteful electronic music like dubstep and other styles.

10% discount on Gameboy gear from Nonfinite Electronics

November 11th, 2008


Nonfinite Electronics recently teamed up with CrunchyCo, an independent group of inspired individuals who are into lo-fi music and arts. To celebrate this, Nonfinite is offering a 10% discount on all of his products. (He has everything from Prosounded backlit Gameboys to Gameboy flash cartridges in his shop.)

But hurry, the discount is only valid for two weeks from now! The coupon code for the discount is available at www.crunchyco.com.

Gameboy Prosound Tutorial

November 11th, 2008

Gameboy Prosound
xero/the.fontvir.us has just released a DMG Prosound tutorial. His tutorial is pretty much foolproof. (Or shall I say n00bproof?)
For those of you who don’t know, Prosound is the name given to a modification done to a video game system to improve the sound. (Important for chip musicians!) Typically it’s appplied to a Gameboy, but people have done similar mods to systems like NES and Sega Master System 2. A prosound mod usually works by bypassing any audio amplifier in the console, which works well for use with a mixer, but not so well when plugging in headphones directly into it. (But you can keep the original jack for use with headphones)

New vinyls: Squarepusher - Just A Souvenir and Quarta330 - Sunset Dub

November 4th, 2008

Covers

Squarepusher - Just A Souvenir
Squarepusher - Just A Souvenir

Quarta330 - Sunset Dub / Kode9 - Samurai (Quarta 330 Remix)
Quarta330 - Sunset Dub / Kode9 - Samurai (Quarta 330 Remix)

Info

Cat#: WARP161LP
Side A: Squarepusher - Just A Souvenir.
Star Time 2, The Coathanger, Open Society, A Real Woman, Delta-V, Aqueduct, Potential Govaner
Side B: Planet Gear, Tensor In Green, The Glass Road, Fluxgate, Duotone Moonbeam, Quadrature, Yes Sequitur

Buy from Warpmart

Cat#: HDB007 (Hyperdub)
Artist: Quarta330
Side A: Sunset Dub
Side AA: Kode9 - 9 Samurai (Quarta 330 Remix)

Buy from Warpmart

Comments

Despite my quite cynical and widely misunderstood (Boohoo) review of this album, I knew from the start I just needed to get it on wax. And as promised in that post, I did. :) Sunset Dub is Gameboy dub by the Japanese virtuoso Quarta330. This one was actually cut so deep and loud that I almost didn’t need speakers, hehe.

Electronic components (Pictures)

November 2nd, 2008

Before my local shop electronic components, Labb Elektronik, (RIP) shut down, they gave away free bags with random stuff. These pictures are the result of sorting the components in these bags. Most of it is pretty useless for what I want to do, apart from building tube circuitry, where the capacitors and high wattage resistors might be useful. But some of the things are pure eye candy!

Each picture has a title attribute - hover an image to see a tooltip, or click it to go to its flickr page.

I fixed my headphones with these orange wires Old school high wattage resistors

Plastic capacitors Capacitors

Electrolytic capacitors IC chips

Mystery Gameboy MIDI videos…

November 1st, 2008

Rumours say that these videos may have something to do with an upcoming Gameboy MIDI project of mine. Rumours also say that these rumours might in fact be true! Until more news arrives, check out Arduinoboy.

(The videos are silent)


Glitching a Gameboy from Gameboy Genius on Vimeo.


Gameboy hex numbers (Read the description!) from Gameboy Genius on Vimeo.

DS Brut - Nintendo DS hardware interface

October 28th, 2008

DS Brut
DS Brut is a slot 1 DS card with a number of interface pins (UART TX/RX pins, plus 5 general purpose pins) It can be used for things like hardware sensors (Light, temperature or maybe accelerometers) or communicating with external devices. But more interesting is the possibility to send and receive MIDI or perhaps even synchronize DS music software with LSDj or Nanoloop by emulating the original Gameboy serial protocol. Neither is possible yet, but the DS Brut is completely open source, including the firmware for the onboard Atmega 168 microcontroller, which means that it can be implemented with a little effort.

So, what are the pros and cons with this device? The big pro is the price tag - 26 euros for a DS hardware interface that can do virtually anything is really great. (There’s also a UART only version for 19 euros.)

The only real con I can see with this device is that it has no onboard memory. This means that unless you have a custom firmware and a slot 2 backup device, you’ll have to do cartridge swapping to use DS Brut. I imagine that in the long run, the cartridge swapping will wear out the interface pins and cause loose contacts. I’m not asking for the DS Brut to be a replacement for my M3 card, but for the next revision I’d like to see a few kilobytes of memory that can hold a small bootstrap to start code from a GBA cart or elsewhere. A couple of unused pins on the microcontroller could easily have been connected to the relevant pins on the Slot 1 bus to keep the door open for adding a bootstrap in a future revision of the firmware.

Apart from this minor remark, DS Brut is a promising piece of hardware that opens up many interesting possibilities, including sending and receiving true MIDI.

Link: DS Brut

Download NES, SNES, Gameboy, C64 and Atari ROMs

October 24th, 2008

This site looks pretty darned good. No popups or spyware, and all the ROMs you’ll ever need. (Except for Bahamut Lagoon >_< )

http://www.romdot.com/

Eight great ways to sync your boys

October 10th, 2008

Sebastian Tomczak of GameboyAustralia and Milkcrate has posted a guide comparing eight ways of synchronizing Gameboys running LSDj and Nanoloop to each other and other gear for music production.

Link: So, you want to sync your Game Boy, huh?