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My obscure DS music rom search continues, deep cut of the day is this odd unfinished DS port of the Teenage Engineering OP-1!?!?!?

Don't really know what it's quite doing but got some glitch looping + distortion going. There's a screen with a line and in+out points where at some point I briefly got a waveform to appear but not sure how... there's one with concentric circles of switches which just seem to make some click rhythms at a fixed bpm??, the keyboard grid in the photo plays notes, and two nice tape recorders which can record what's going on (including each other) and you can 'scratch' with.

Disappointingly it doesn't seem to record from the mic sad

If you hold select and left you can choose which screen is in the top screen

Seems to be no info about it anywhere except this github. Spent a while trying to figure out how to compile it before realising that the included .nds file does actually work on a real DS, just not in my emulator. :-/ https://github.com/efairbanks/op-1

desc from the github page:

This bit of Nintendo DS homebrew is deserving of its own repo. This is specifically pulled from my bitbucket account, and is hopefully the most up-to-date version of this software. It's a digital audio workstation for the Nintendo DS that presents the user with a set of "pages" that represent a particular piece of hardware you might find in a studio. (eg. a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a synthesizer, etc...) It's an ambitious project considering the Nintendo DS's lack of CPU-power, but I'm quite fond of the tape-deck emulation on this thing.

Last edited by Cementimental (Feb 17, 2021 11:14 am)

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OK so on the screen with concentric circles the D-pad turns the clicks into some pretty great fax machine glitch !?

quick bad video:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CK1znPzhHfz/

The code hints at the possibility of disabling muting of the tape while recording, which would be fun. Can't figure out how to compile (it fails, I thiink due to lots of absolute references to files on the coder's computer?!) but might try and edit if i can get that working

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Figured it out a bit more: pressing Y on the tape screens adds a bit of time to the loop. So you can make a long one, play the keyboard then go back and stop recording then edit the silence out by setting in + out points with left + right on the dpad, then up (i think? or down) to trim to that area. Usually that also makes the sound go low-bitrate for some reason, pressing it again can make it go back to normal maybe??

I think the weird circles are for cutting up / sequencing the loop somehow ?! but I can't figure out exactly how that works


Didn't record anything good with this setup yet but you have to admit it looks the part smile

Last edited by Cementimental (Feb 17, 2021 11:15 am)

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Paris, France

This looks very interesting, I'm gonna dig down in the reading about this when I have some more time. Thank you for posting!