1

(73 replies, posted in General Discussion)

"You have that backwards": I'm starting to think you're right...

Well if that the case, zan-zawa-veia sorry not about frighten you but about misunderstanding  you.

What a mess! smile

2

(73 replies, posted in General Discussion)

" fuckin folks spent a good few years memin it up and talking down strong opinions about chiptune as drama, perhaps cos there were so many kids involved"

Sorry again, but I didn't know any of that.
Must have been horrible reading similar things here and recollect all that time, years with those folks insisting to you with the same strong opinions.

Believe me you are safe now, this is a forum, a virtual place were people share ideas within boundaries.
Accusing someone you no nothing about and who doesn't know you, of strange intentions towards kids, well that's odd. Right?
And just a bit outside these boundaries.

And, btw, the metaphor I used was the kind "society as drama" and chiptune as an actor maybe.
So next time you don't understand or don't agree with something don't be afraid, it's OK.

3

(73 replies, posted in General Discussion)

What?
You felt threatened by communists talking to you and your friends for years about "chiptune as drama" ( sounds exactly  like my previous post, isn't it?) and felt the urge to alert the others.
Oh my.... this is huge!

I'm speechless....
Sorry sad

4

(73 replies, posted in General Discussion)

Thank you Bit Shifter and breakphase but I wanted to say too many things and without having the necessary language skills. It's nice that you had the right mindset to see through it.

You made me try again smile

Basically I stand with those that think the punk similarity to be real.
Not so much about the music in itself it's more about the role that these kind of cultural movements ( punk, chipmusic, diy, etc..) play in the society.

This ideas are already here, several posts, let's take for example thegostservar's observation (harmony, dissonance). It's large enough, it's about the relationship between the musician and the society or, even better to my goals, between the musicians (as a group, one specific group, one scene, one genre) and the others, all the others.

With a similar perspective in mind I guess we can safely say that the punk advent brought a certain "dissonant taste", for example to the English society. I was a little kid  then and wasn't there, but it has been described to me like a working class movement, a bottom-up type of movement. Make sense to me.

Thirty years later a different group of people started to look at their old toys with new eyes and instead of throwing them away like any good citizen... you know the drill.
This is a gross approximation of what actually happened, I know, but I need it to point out a few things:

1) A deceptively simple act like choosing one tool over another could be, today, as dissonant and fascinating as for punk was, I don't know... growing an eccentric hair style.

That is related to power relationships of the society.
A dissonant movement to play his role, to be fascinating, has to bite somewhere.
Power relationships are favorite targets, they are based over many things: brute force, symbols, media..etc. Coexist mixed in various ways in different societies in different times and they have a huge role in shaping people's behavior.

Now, I don't see any punk air cut put up that much of a scandal in a wester city today.
There are places where using old hardware is nothing to write about because it is their regular way of doing and thinking.

In a more "values" oriented society a bigger part of its power relationship are based upon certain symbols or more upon authoritative figures like the Pope, the President, the Queen...  But these relationships change, relatively fast. Some groups of people come up with new ways to superimpose their willing to the others, elites change and also "dissonant" movements, as reactions, have to change too.

You know where I'm going, it's been phrased before as the "anti-consumerism" aspect.
It already gave us good fruits like small shops, different little-scale economics, new relationships. We don't want to underestimate this, this is biting, it's one part of the role. It's biting where it hurts, power relationships.

2) Different groups of people in different times can play the same role.
That is to be expected, it'd better be. Societies evolve, people too.
Roles, instead, look to be much slower changing.

Do we really have to know all that stuff?
Well at least, in this topic, that is a possible answer. 

So, playing the same role, how that sounds?
Sounded weird to me, that much I know, like puppets.
Social facts transcend every single one of us and they can be so strong you can't do anythings but to comply. It is who we are after all, social animals.
On a more positive side we are a special kind of animals, supposedly clever.
Social facts are not always so strong and I think that oftentimes we, as single individuals, can choose our roles and how to use them.
These punk, chipmusic, diy... related roles smells a lot like the kind you choose for yourself.

Merry christmas, love you all.

5

(13 replies, posted in Other Hardware)

There are various Yamaha YMF7xx based PCI card, these chips contain an OLP3 for legacy support. If you can find one or two, they are usually cheap, it's possible to control them with Freq Monster 801: http://fm801.kewl.org/help/windows/
I guess that's another option even though I never tried.

6

(73 replies, posted in General Discussion)

Scratch all that before.
A summary of my previous attempt: I can't use the forum to teach myself English.
Sorry guys, you're wonderful smile

7

(73 replies, posted in General Discussion)

******* self censorship ******

Yes that is the kind of connector I was referring to and it seems to me you did the right connections there.

I don't know about Sk-5 specifically but be aware that old casios are notoriously lacking any kind of protection against reverse supply polarity.
Beside not working does the keyboard show any sign of life at all?
If the power LED does not light up at all there's the possibility that the problem could still be around the power supply rails.

I think so, I'd clean the area and after having figured out were the PCB traces are supposed to route the three pins, solder some wires to redo the connections.
Electrically this usually works but it will not be the strongest  in mechanical terms, looks like at least two PCB pads are gone so the connector will not be properly fixed and so it will be prone to break the connections again.
Better to change the connector with a panel mount type.
Hope this helps.

10

(97 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Don't know if it's really worth considering, but anyway...
YMU757: 2OP FM, multitimbral capabilities (up to 4), low power consumption, integrated DAC, sequencer(!?), 20 pin TSSOP (manageable), serial interface.

Edit: Looking at the data sheet, it's really weird to control.

11

(10 replies, posted in Atari)

Really nice!

12

(9 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Hi,
to burn AVR ATmega644 I've used AVRDUDE (Opensource free software) in a Xp machine and an Arduino ISP. It worked with some quirks and was another chip but I suppose it is doable in this case too.
Sprite's projects are astonishing, sooner or later I'll have to try this one it looks promising.

13

(3 replies, posted in Releases)

Thanks Unicorn and thanks Frostbyte! smile
If someone is interested here is the SID file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7382601/Rock_n_Roll_Robot.sid
No voice though, karaoke ready!

14

(3 replies, posted in Releases)

Being a fan of both Alberto Camerini and the C64's SID some years ago I covered up "Rock'n Roll Robot" (1981) using only this mighty chip and since then this file is floating around my computers begging to be finished but I never did.
Ultimately a pinch of limiting and here we are.
The song is basically made of two mono tracks, one is played by a C64C (8580R5 SID chip on board) loaded with SID Factory, thanks Laxity.  The other one is a recording of the same Commodore singing the song with BASIC programming and an Italian speech synthesizer called "La voce" similar to the better known SAM, thanks to the Systems Editoriale and Ready64 folks for this nice software.
There's actually a third track, only few seconds long, that I've used to double the main voice. It's done with an older C64 breadbox with a MOS 6581 inside that sounded better in my opinion, more musical in a way, but had the cassette port broken. I've found "la voce" only in tap format and wasn't able to port it to D64 so I couldn't really use that computer to sing.
Despite the title lyrics are Italian.
Hope you enjoy it, cheers.
http://soundcloud.com/ermangaver/rock-n-roll-robot

15

(21 replies, posted in Trading Post)

PM'd you.

16

(54 replies, posted in Other Vintage Computers & Consoles)

Bump!
First Piggy Caanoo version :-)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/323652/lgpt_caanoo.rar
Thanks to Marc Nostromo.