album on a cartridge (Page 2 of 3)

i don't think you can just "hack" an image into a program that does not display an image without knowing any asm actually

Yeah, the assumption would be that you had graphics in the can or a buddy to help you with that part. There was someone on here who was patching custom graphics into ROMs for people as a favor for a while.

Which editors? Is it something that'd be good for singles, like with a small pixel graphic on the screen and then it plays the song?

It's kind of the same idea that's behind 1-Bit Music and its successor, 1-Bit Symphony.

A musicdisc, and a cartridge album by extension, isn't a recording in a traditional sense; it's an artifact that allows an exact reproduction of the music in real time on original hardware. A good analogy would be a piano roll, in that instead of being a record, it makes your own player piano (or NES, or Game Boy, or Commodore) reproduce the music on the actual "instrument" on command.

In many senses, both philosophically and technically, this is a more pure expression than a record because an end user gets to experience it literally by the same means it would be performed.

As for cartridge album versus .SAV, J. Arthur Keenes has released a "Deluxe Edition" of Computer Savvy on Bandcamp, which includes either the .SAV or the .LSDSNG files. This is wonderful, and I haven't thrown down yet, but I most certainly will in the near future. For technical people like us, the advantage is that we get to look at how the song was sequenced and examine the details. For an end user, though, it might be difficult to use those uncommon file types, or to be able to get specialty hardware and software to use them.

It also spoils some of the "magic," so to speak: A layperson, when presented with an album on disc or cart, will be totally struck by the novelty; when they have to learn how to go through the process of setting up a system to use a .SAV, the wonderment and mystery are taken away. I think it's a lot easier to get a secondhand game boy and put a cartridge in it for the average layperson, and it's a streamlined package to deliver something unique.

Cartridge albums could easily be limited editions, as well. One could easily make only ten or fifteen in a run, and only produce more when increased demand presents itself. That's not more of an upfront cost than cd duplication or tape dubbing.

That all said, a ROM of the cartridge album could be a happy inbetween.

That's a very good point. A lot of his thesis included hardware minimalism and subversion of form, hence the exposed point to point circuit, but I think it would be interesting if he made a third project that did include a generative/unique-per-play circuit.

Within "Chiptune" as an idiom, both as a subset of Demoscene and in contrast to it, I think it's also a question of artistic goals and what you really want to produce at the end of the day. I'm content with the idea of a widely available net-release MP3 album, paired with a limited production cartridge instead of a physical media recording. However, that does open another issue, which is how closely does the artist want the cartridge as an artifact to parallel a traditional recording meant to compliment or approximate it?

On a very basic level, the interactivity could include song-specific limited user-control; at a very basic level the music could remain unchanged, but perhaps the user has some sort of control over a visual routine. I think something even that simple could justify a software release, yet it wouldn't differ from the complimentary recording enough for them to be anathematically divergent. A more aggressive change could be user control of the arrangement, i.e. adding and removing "instruments" from the mix in real time. I think that "live remix" function could entertain a lot of end users, but it still wouldn't be completely divergent from a finalized recording. At an even more radical degree, entire songs or the entire "album" itself could contain generative algorithms, playing something unique with limited user input upon every execution, with no guarantee of resemblance to a recording.

I've been rambling, but my point is that there is a balance between attempting to express a specific work as both a recording and a piece of software, and it's a thing worth considering at length for an artist interested in doing something like that well.

Last edited by Telerophon (Sep 1, 2012 1:20 am)

I'm not sure if anyone is still interested in this topic. I had the exact same idea. I'd LOVE to get something like this sorted. So much so that I'm reading through Programming the Nintendo Game Boy Advance by Jonathan Harbour. The links people provided had lots of information, but I think if I'm gonna make this happen, I need to start from scratch.

I'll let you know how I'm doing with it. Hopefully have a proof of concept together before too long.

Last edited by BrokenSpares (Oct 31, 2012 10:32 pm)

Right. Done it I think. I've managed to put my own music onto a .GBA ROM file. I know the original challenge was to put it on a .GB file but documentation is just better for the GBA. Hopefully I've not programmed it too horribly for everyone but I think it clearly shows it is possible to do.

https://brokenspares.wordpress.com/2012 … ic-on-gba/

Had a box.com link where you can download the ROM and a copy of VisualBoy Advance (if you need it) I've been waiting to start a new job this Monday so I was able to put quite a bit of time into reading up on how it all works. 

Let me know what you think.

Now I'm going to bed!!!

Last edited by BrokenSpares (Nov 4, 2012 10:36 pm)