Offline
Geneva, NY

OK, I think I'm gonna get one of these, which pisses me the fuck off cuz I know I'm gonna spend hours making meticulous and ridiculous ANSI scrollerz and not music.  Dammit.  But I have a pretty elaborate MIDI setup and I look forward to the future firmwares and what I might be able to accomplish with this piece.

Offline
Central Pennsyltucky

lol bleo!
Yeah, the "Ansi Midio" demo on youtube that rolls in a few seconds took me about 3 hours from drawing to midi. That's why I don't have dozens of videos up yet. But man, you feel good when it's done.
I have a "laptop free" module prototype running pretty well now, should be out in October & the current firmware works with it. (I use a Yamaha QY, but any midi source works except those crappy midiman plastic controllers)  Next firmware is a PC "speaker synth" & LOGO visuals synth on the board right now.
(turtle down, left 40....... spirograph style vector graphics). Can't wait to see what you do with the ANSI!

Offline
Geneva, NY

Wow, the future of this thing sounds exciting.  Right now, my live setup is reliant on a lappy (VST what!?!? shhh) so the "laptop free" module isn't as important to me, but I have lots of external MIDI gear I'd love to try w/ it.  MIDI guitar?  Piggy tracker MIDI!?!?!

I'd also love to see a mode that operates the same as the original pocket vblank, just with MIDI as the incoming source instead of audio....

Offline
Minneapolis

Dag, I need to polish off my BBS and host it, you're beating me to the punch. XD

Offline
Geneva, NY

Hey, just thinking out loud here... how feasible would it be to code an ANSI->MIDI conversion tool?   That would save some serious work.

Offline
Central Pennsyltucky
bleo wrote:

I'd also love to see a mode that operates the same as the original pocket vblank, just with MIDI as the incoming source instead of audio....

Already in there! There's a visualizer mode that can just blow midi characters on the screen in real time with optional mirroring effects controlled by CCs.


An ansi -> midi tool is possible and probably easily written in processing or some such language, but it's not a perfect correlation. I had to squeeze out some of the less used characters and marry the foreground/background palettes, as ANSI is a larger data set than midi. The way I set it up, you'll pretty quickly memorize the character sets which makes drawing on the fly a bit less about translation & more about drawing.

I draw my design on graph paper, and just type the midi into a tracker line by line, like reading a book.

Offline
Geneva, NY

Ordered and mega psyched.

I'll see if I can convince a coder friend to help my lazy/dummy ass out with the conversion tool.  I know it would be much easier for me to work on the ANSI in pablodraw, sticking with the characters and palette limitations.

As for your graph paper idea... I have the vblank/jyk blip shirt, maybe I'll try transcribing that as my first experiment!