![You suck at protoshop. No, you [i]really[/i] oo.](http://blog.gg8.se/images/you-suck-at-photoshop-you-really-do-your-awful.png)
The Chinese pirate Dell PSU
October 20th, 2009When I bought a used Dell Latitude D600 a couple of years it didn’t come with a power supply, so I had to get one online. I found a PSU on eBay that looked legit for $50. When I got it, when first thing I reacted to was a faint smell of electrolytic capacitor, but the PSU seemed to work well enough. As time passed by I started having slight problems with it. There was interference from the PSU when plugging it into anything audio related. (Unplugging the PSU killed the interference) This intereference was even so strong that it could make the LED on my Arduino Protoshield glow faintly. I tried plugging it into a grounded power outlet, with little difference. Later, the cable dried out and cracked open in several places, which I fixed with cable ties and hot glue.
But heck, I just blamed the dry cable and smell of electrolyte on the fact that the PSU had been lying on a shelf for a few years, and in general, Dell’s crappiness. After all the thing looked and felt solid, and BIOS reported it as a genuine 90W Dell spply. But so came the day when the cable broke seroiously and I had no choice but to open the PSU and solder the cables in place. I was pleasantly surprised that the PSU case was easily forced open, until I saw the inside.
The untrained eye might not be able to see what’s wrong here, so let me explain. First off, the actual PSU is mounted inside a case that is way too big. This is in itself is a clear sign that the thing is not genuine. But what’s more, do you see the 5 metal plates taped together on the side of the PSU? An advanced high precision component? Magnetic field absorber? No, that’s simply a weight with no other purpose than making the thing appear solid. And the really crappy thermal grease that should never have survived past the year 2000. What’s a lot less noticeable is the small thing at the bottom left of the case. It’s a two-pin serial EEPROM, which only purpose is to feed the laptop a few bytes of information that will lead it to believe it’s hooked up to a genuine PSU.
Let’s look under the shield.
The left picture shows the mains power connector. Ground is not at all connected, which it normally should be to help filter out interference. No wonder I had those intereference problems. Also notice the guck on the connector which was even worse before tried to clean it with flux. The right picture shows the rectifier which is not mounted straight. While this is not a functional problem, it’s a sign of bad work. Also, the shield was not connected anywhere meaning it did not have the noise suppressive effect it might’ve had if it was connected to eg ground. Not shown is the leaking capacitor which most probably contributed to the interference as well. (Because it couldn’t properly supply the switching circuit with current fast enough)
Here’s the bottom of the PCB. Notice how dirty the PCB is and how a lot of the surface mount components are not mounted straight. Also notice the solder joint at the bottom center where the parts of the joint have a slightly different texture one with more and one with less corrosion. This is a sign the soldering of these two component were not done at the same time.
The solution to all this? Well, I tried to fix the PSU, but gave up - it was just too crappy. So I took an authentic Dell PSU which was working but had a different connector than the one on my computer. So I spliced the cable from the PSU with the connector for the pirate PSU. Instead of just covering the wires with shrinkwrap, I decided to splice the cables using a small board, for two reasons.
1) So I could connect the serial EEPROM and make the computer think it’s using an authentic PSU. This time with good conscience since the PSU is authentic, only that the PSU has no way of telling the computer.
2) So I could fix the cables to the board with cable ties and thus decrease the tensions on the cable solder joints.
And then finish it up by covering the whole thing in hot glue for protection.
Lo and behold, no more interference, not to audio equipment, not to my body (!), not to the oscilloscope when analyzing something important.
Downtime and new hosting
October 20th, 2009If you’ve been wondering why my blog was offline or threw an error for some time, it’s because the palce where I hosted it up until now was a shell server, Nic Nac Project which got hacked (rooted). As a result, every file on the server named index.php got corrupted, and possibly other things too. At the moment the NNP server is offline due to this problem.
However, my decision to leave NNP had nothing to do with the hack, but was a decision I made because Binero had a campaign where they offered dirt cheap web hosting for existing Binero domain owners. So that’s why also took the step to finally rid myself of the long domain gameboygenius.8bitcollective.com and switch to the much shorter and easier to remember blog.gg8.se. Because of that I have a clean backup of the files from right before the hack. (Perfect timing 
) Currently redirects are in place from gameboygenius.8bitcollective.com which should take care of any blog posts, but any other files or stuff previously stored on the server (Including some images, although most of my images are stored on Flickr) will not work for now. Everything will be 100% within a few days though.
Yay, my Mac crashed!
October 16th, 2009
Last night, my Mac crashed. For real. The thing core dumped without warning or apparent reason. Maybe because I’m using MacFUSE/NTFS-3G? A very rare occurrence in Snow that I’ve stumbled upon? I’m not sure, but I shat brix when I saw it.
Also, notice that despite the monitor, this is not a Hackintosh. As the text says, it’s a MacBook, apparently version “3,1″, which I’ve connected to an external screen and keyboard because the internal screen and keyboard are broken.
Plogue Chipsounds Promo EP out now
October 10th, 2009Chipsounds:
Renoise MIDI parameter control:
The promo EP for Plogue Chipsounds has been officially released. My track Ecchi6 is an experiment where I tried to, as faithfully as I could, transcribe an existing LSDj song into Renoise+Chipsounds. I was careful to respect the channel limitations of the Gameboy (Only use 4 channels at any one time, and kill offending notes) and use the same settings and and identically designed effects as far as possible. One example is the emulated wave channel echo where I actually created a second CS instrument with a lower volume to emulate the effect used in the original song. Here’s the original for reference.
Although this type of reconstruction is non-standard usage, I’m pleased to say that even if there’s a small difference in sound between the original and the the CS version, I somtimes got confused as to which track is which during my A/B sessions.
The track was a Gameboy track, and even though I’m not closely familiar with other chips, I can tell that the SID emulation sounds pretty good. And with the help of the “Wave Sequence” section, you’ll have fine grained, tracker-like control of any parameters you choose. Quite simply put, it beats the s*** out of any other single chip emulation VST currently available.
Chipsounds is set for next week and is a must-have for anyone who’s seriously interested in chip sounds but don’t have access to the real hardware.
Need an 8-bit Wordpress theme made!
September 19th, 2009I’m planning start a LSDj tutorial blog aimed at the medium level userbase. But for that I need a Wordpress theme. It should ideally be reminiscent of LSDj somehow, and it should of course look as awesome as possible. Any takers? My e-mail addres is below this post if you have questions.
Marty Kraham, aka TV Death Squad is the worst chiptune thief ever
September 19th, 2009Originally published 2009-07-19 and later removed. Republished in 2016 following the news that Marty Kraham has been sentenced to 5 years in prison for having unprotected sex with multiple people while lying about being HIV and Hep C positive, which he was diagnosed with as early as 2007. If you have had sex with Marty Kraham, you should get tested for HIV and Hep C if you haven’t already.
Sources: 2014 chipmusic.org thread, 2016 chipmusic.org thread, News9 news story, Koco news story.
The buzz in the 8-bit community the last 24 hours has been Marty Kraham from Oklahoma, who promotes himself as a chiptune artist under the name of TV Death Squad, but whose whole repertoire seems to consist solely of material from other artists. Here’s a recap of the discussion about him. What started as any Myspace kid uploading Random (Note, the artist known as Random) songs, continued as a successful search for other songs he might’ve plagiarized and ended up as a fruitless attempt to find something about this guy that isn’t fake.
Let’s go through this guy’s merit list.
His Myspace, now empty, contained a number of songs, most jacked directly from 8bitpeoples releases. Here’s a list made by Sycamore Drive. Likewise, his Youtube account no longer exists.
April 16 or thereabouts at Electronic Game Expo 2009, he is “playing live”. Only problem is that the track playing in the background is “Eight Vic Day” by Ten And Tracer from an EP called Dark Before Dawn, released in 2002 on netlabel 8bitpeoples. Download here. The only people playing live in that video are the kids who are playing around with Marty’s effect/noise boxes.
Camera: John Wells
see comments for fraud
These videos were sent to the local production company Above the Bar Productions for editing, about the same time and quite possibly from the same event. The music plagiarized in the first video is “Croatian Love” by artist Mesu Kasumai and the second one is “OK, So The Ninjas Went To Space…,” from Psilodump’s EP Mutiny Of The Robots.
It should be noted that Above the Bar responded quickly and condemned his actions strongly. They’re just a production company that happened to get this tape sent to them for editing.
These two were recorded at Game Core Gaming Convention on September 12. In the first video he makes the mistake of plagiarizing one of the most plagiarized songs in the modern history of chiptune, Random’s Sitge’s Savepoint from Bad Joke EP. His only contribution is to add some very crappy effects on top of the song with the Kaoss Pad in his keytar. He claims that he played it only as a demo to the visuals in his Kaoss Pad, which is a lame excuse since it doesn’t explain why he danced like a wild child, doesn’t explain why he pretended to play on the keyboard and definitely doesn’t explain why he uploaded the uploaded the song to his Myspace and absolutely positively doesn’t explain why there doesn’t seem to be any original material from this guy at all.
In the second video at about 0:35, notive how he picks up his Gameboy, without an audio cable running into it, rocks out for about ten seconds, then probably realizes his mistake and puts it back to rock out with the keytar instead.
The problem here is that people don’t realize that just because people release their music for people to listen to it for free doesn’t mean the music is open for reappropriation. All music on 8bitpeoples is released under a Creative Commons license which permits free listening and redistribution, but (Depending on license flavor) but enforces attribution and restricts the production of derivative works as well as commercial exploitation by 3rd parties.
What is missing (Unless someone downloaded a copy they can mirror) is the video where he’s selling his Prosound DMG. He demos it by playing a SID tune and pretends (badly) to push the buttons in sync with the music. Just as badly as he pretends to play his keytar in those two videos.
What about that keytar btw… That’s the only cool thing about that guy, he ordered a custom made keytar from circuitbender Cosmic Blooper. It consists of a Microkorg XL and a Kaoss Pad on the side.
According to CB’s blog post Marty was in a hurry to get it. My guess is he wanted something to hold in his hands during his big show at GCGC.
So what else…?
LSDj shirts for sale… Hmmm…
Look whose name we have here! Yep, it’s marty again. While I’m sure Johan doesn’t have too much against people selling LSDj shirts, it’s mifts perfectly into Marty’s image as a poser and plagiarist.
(Go look for yourself before while the shop is still there)
And this is how he looks with his custom made keytar. Stereotypically, he looks more like a “tough guy” than a chiptuner. Just look at that pose, priceless!
But there’s one piece missing. When I googled him, I found his Twitter.
His only two tweets are right after each other on April 20, the unofficial stoner day. It’s not a stretch to think that he was high when writing those. (Notice how he writes 4:20 as a time of day, not a date) That’s when I start to draw conclusions about the guy. Probably a bit of a stoner. Basement dweller who lived a little too long with his parents and got a little too much for free. A guy with too much aspiration and dreams of fame, and too little inspiration and skill to match up. A guy who can afford to buy a bunch of effect and noise boxes and video game consoles but doesn’t have a clue how to use them for music, but still don’t want make a fool out of himself in front of his family, friends and fans.
At that point I don’t know if I’m supposed to hate him or feel sorry for him.
Update:
Here’s a conversation between Random and Marty. Judge for yourself.
TV Death Squad
random,ive had the whole world pissed off.. FIRST off i am a VJ, not a musician… i specialize in visuals, i am no different than an 8 bit dj with vocals… i have done nothing but help promote how bad ass your music is and even do visuals over it.. EVERYONE at the event knew who wrote every song, thats why i had the setlist with the artists names !! i can understand why your pissed, but it sincerely is not what you think.. anyways, if you or random or wik are upset ill remove any promo for you guys.. let me know
Random
Hi,I have a hard time believing you because:
1. You are clearly making some sounds in the beginning of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRCqzJEA0yw. VJs don’t make sounds as far as I know.2. You have a Game Boy on stage, and you pretend to play with it. Why would you do that if you were a VJ only? You are obviously pretending to play the music.
3. You are listed as a live performing band on the Game Core website (http://www.gamecorecon.com/events.html)
4. You say everyone at the even knew what music you were playing, but some one from the Game Core crew has commented on my website (http://randomizer.se/2009/09/another-music-theft/) saying “If we knew we would not have let him play that is BS.” - and if the organizers didn’t know, I simply don’t believe you when you say “EVERYONE at the event knew who wrote every song”.
5. You had my music uploaded on your myspace profile, and you renamed the tune. So what’s this bullshit about “setlist with the artists names”? Again, if you were a VJ, why would you do that?
6. None of the other videos I’ve found on Youtube or Vimeo have any information of what music is actually played. It really looks like you’re pretending to be the artist in all of them, no matter how I look at it.
To sum it up: things don’t look so good for you in this case. If you still have anything to say in your defence, go ahead, but I doubt it will do anything but make you look even more like a liar.
It’s good that you’ve removed your myspace profile and the videos on youtube, though. “Thanks”.
TV Death Squad
i feel shitty about the whole thing. i took down everything i possibly could of, and have said im sorry to everyone on the list. i didnt intend for
anyone to get this upset. again, i am really really fucking sorry that the the videos were misleading. to answer your ?, the entrancer does both audio
and visuals, that gameboy is a “glitch box”, there was a setlist there at gc. and i didnt rename your song to be a douche, i thought it was called strange place or something.. anyways i have done what i can to try to fix a shitty situation. again im sorry
SGB bootstrap ROM dumped by Costis
September 19th, 2009About 6 years ago Neviksti managed to dump the internal 256 byte bootstrap ROM used byt the DMG (First model Game Boy) to scroll down Nintendo logo, play the po-ling sound and confirm that the cartridge header is in order before allowing the cartridge to be executed. He did so by opening up the epoxy covering the chip and reading out the memory visually bit by bit though a microscope. This was groundbreaking because there was no ordinary way to read the ROM as it was shut off by an internal register after bootup.
Just the other day, costis dumped the corresponding ROM image from the SGB (Supe Game Boy) with a slighlty different method, namely clock glitching. Costis’ method is using an FPGA to run the system clock normally up until the point where the protection register is to be written. At that point the clock frequency is increased to such a fast speed that the write is ignored by the protection register and the execution continues into the user code, which then dumps the 256 byte big code. The operation was surprisingly painless according to costis himself. Next up is the GBC which is believed to have a bootstrap ROM bigger than 256 since its startup procedure is much more advanced, distinguishing between GBC and DMG, and letting the user choose palettes for monochrome games.
For more info, see costis’ SGB hack page.
Gijs’ Gameboy Camera Animation Converter
September 17th, 2009
GB Camera Sav -> GIF animation converter by Gijs Gieskes
mGB with extended MIDI channel support
September 16th, 2009
I’ve had the privilege of getting access to trash80’s mGB code, which of course has given me the opportunity to make improvements. My first improvement is to add support for extended MIDI channels. (1-5,6-10 or 11-15 depending on which ROM you’re using.) This is useful for people who want to use mGB on the same MIDI output as MIDINES, other synths or perhaps use 3 copies of mGB simultaneously with one Arduinoboy. (With three link cable plugs).
In a future hacked version I’ll include the ability to choose which channels to use in the program, and also make mGB play nicer with LSDj. (Not corrupting savs and so on)
GBC Prosound idea
September 13th, 2009Sorry for the blog hiatus during and after my vacation. Before the vacation I came up with a new way of routing the audio cable that I don’t think I’ve seen before. (Feel free to correct me.) Most GBC prosound mods I’ve seen are based in the idea of routing the cable downwards to the bottom of the board.
My idea on the other hand is based on connecting the audio wires to the potentiometer as usual, then routing the cable over the PCB, so that it sits below the cartridge when the GBC is reassembled. The cable would then exit through a hole on the right side of the of unit.
The trick however, to make this mod work, is to cut away a piece of the PCB to make room for the cable. The copper trace that is affected, is relatively wide, so there’s some margin. However, it’s for the power supply, so there’s a small risk that you might need to compensate for the loss in size be adding an extra wire. I haven’t had any problems with this yet, but I guess this would depend on how big a piece of the board you cut away. The only slight problem I had was that the cable just barely fit into the space when reassembling the GBC. But it seems to adjusted itself and it now works beautifully.
Pics:
The wires soldered to the potentiometer. I soldered the wires pre-pot to always get maximum volume and minimum impedance. (I’ll always be connecting it to a mixer anyway.)
The notch in the PCB (Front) - modded vs unmodded board
The notch in the PCB (back)
The hole where the cable exits
Zoomed out
Some hot glue to fix the cable
The final product (Reassembled)
What thinks?
