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A Red Storm brewed some Beatles

Earlier this evening while listening to “I am the Walrus” by The Beatles my wife asked how I knew that song. She wasn’t familiar with it you see. I replied that I had heard it used in a Commodore 64 demo and then spent the next few minutes wracking my brains for the name of that demo.

I thought it might have been made by Nato, and the title started with “Red” but nothing jumped out at me. Then I thought of Fairlight but again, nothing there except some of their demos were produced with another group, Triad! Yes, that was it!

Triad created Red Storm in 1992, it’s not the most technically sophisticated demo but it’s one of my favourite C64 demos ever. It has some nice effects but I really loved the Zoo TV inspired visuals and poetry. The music was great too, but I didn’t realise it was covers of Beatles music. Granted, it was done on a C64 SID chip so it has that 8 bit sound but it still sounds great. ‘Course, that might just be my nostalgic ears playing tricks on me.

What do you think? Yay or Nay?

Android gaming with an Xbox 360 Controller

This afternoon I took delivery of an OTG USB cable for my mobile devices. I’ve previously blogged about using a PS3 controller with an Android phone but I was curious how well my wired Xbox 360 controller would work.

Plugging the OTG cable into my Nexus 7 and then into the Xbox controller was of course simple, and I had mixed results with the couple of games I tried. If you’re willing to root your Nexus 7 you can install another app that makes it easier to get things working but even with a stock Nexus 7 it worked.

First off I tried Frodo and Vice, the C64 emulators. I thought they might have support for this. Unfortunately not. Luckily Mupen64 Plus, the N64 emulator, does support an external controller! I had to redefine a few buttons, and the left analog stick but I was soon leading the races in Mario Kart 64!

I tried Shadowgun: Deadzone next. It was my first time playing this multiplayer over-the-shoulder third person shooter. The game picked up my controller perfectly! All I had to do was invert the Y axis as I normally do. I’d like to say I kicked ass but I didn’t. I got one kill to six deaths before I gave up. Looks like a good game, but it must be next to impossible to play on a small screen.

I wanted to try GTA III but I never got past the loading screen on my Nexus 7. Dead Trigger is next on my todo list. That should be fun.

I used the OTG cable to connect an external USB flash drive to my devices too. Unrooted the Nexus 7 ignores it unfortunately but my Galaxy S II picked it up and displayed a familiar USB storage notification. Here’s a video of someone playing GTA III on an SGS III. I really have to get that game working on my Nexus 7!

C64: Wanted Dead or Alive

Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” as played on a real Commodore 64. The song was digitized on an Amiga, downsampled to 4 bit audio and copied onto a 3.5″ inch disk that the Commodore 1581 drive could read from. The song data was streamed in realtime from the drive to the tiny 64Kb of memory in the computer and fed to the SID chip for our aural delight. I presume the screen has been blanked to save processing power, or the data for the sample gets dumped into screen memory.

This did require an Amiga with the Perfect Sound digitizer. I hooked up the CD player to the digitizer and then using a custom routine on the Amiga, my brother would convert the data to a 4 bit sample. Then we used a null modem? cable and Novaterm with a cartridge port adapter to transfer the data to a 1581 floppy. Quite a bit of work went into this.

20 years ago I recorded my own voice onto a cassette saying the word “Ozone” (the name of my demogroup) and I figured out how to sample my voice using the Commodore cassette deck hooked up to the C64. I can’t remember now what memory register it used, I’ll have to search my disk images or examine a C64 memory map one of these days. The quality was terrible but if you knew what was being said you could make it out. It had to be kept short because I’d ran out of memory! I think I used it in the last part of my demo “Awareness of Reality”. (via)

Tie-Tanic

Disney bought LucasFilm did they? They’ll ruin Star Wars will they? Doubt that. Even fans consider the prequels a low point and I’ve never been a fan of the series myself so this Star Wars Titanic parody made me chuckle.

SMBC posted this on the facebook page: “Worrying that Disney will ruin Star Wars is like worrying that a second iceberg will dive down to hit the Titanic.”

Star Trek all the way. Fight! (via)

The Wonderful End of the World grows Companion Cubes

As part of the Potato Sack promotion last year a number of indie games received updates featuring content from Valve games. I didn’t take much notice of them at the time but I just found out that The Wonderful End of the World got a secret level with companion cubes! Love the cover of the similarly named Portal song!

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