My Stylus

My stylus, currently, is a shard from a SNES, harvested by a combination of hammering, levering, and just pulling really hard.

One day, you'll get pissed off that you don't have an inline head bit, too, and you'll resort to this for opening up your Nintendo consoles.

On this occasion, I had smashed open the yellowing grey box to extract it's Audio Processing Unit, a small metal box manufactured by Nintendo's favorate hardware partner, Mitsumi, which features the SPC700 processor (S-SPU), a special purpose DSP (S-DSP), two 32K SRAM chips by Sharp and Hitachi, and a NEC Digital/Analogue converter. It's rather hard to believe how unusually sophisticated and advanced the SHVC-SOUND module is.

The SPC700, specifically, is an interesting piece of hardware. It's a somewhat simple microprocessor with six registers and 250 opcodes, with addressing for at least 64K, and running at 1024Hz. It's part in the APU team is to load instructions into it's internal RAM and execute it. Since the SNES' APU is just a glorified wavetable MIDI device, it's one megahertz speed is on par (most MIDI data transmission rates are set to 1MHz by default).

Most people will hear "the SPC700 was designed by Ken Kutaragi" and instantly turn into a Sony fanboy. For those of you who walk this path, I kick you. The SPC700 is, in essence, a really fancy sequencer. It takes note data and delivers it to the S-DSP when it needs to be played. The real genious is the DSP itself.

The S-DSP was, apperently, not designed by Ken Kutaragi, but by some poor peon who got backstabed by Kenny when he decided to hide the poor man's name from the public (and maybe kill him. I wouldn't doubt it if he did, too; he's just that freaky). The S-DSP is capable of storing its samples in a compressed form, making the minimal amount of SRAM three or four times more useful; it produces eight seperate channels of independant pitch, pan, and gain, all being controlled by individual ADSR envelopes, echo, and various digital filtering effects. The S-DSP is, in a single word, "Bomb."

So, I smashed apart my SNES (don't worry, it was broken anyway) for this litttle box. My plans for it? A PC interface for hardware sound synthesis (or is it sequencing? the line is somewhat vague there) Now, I can use those SPC music packs that have traversed the web to play awesome music, like the soundtracks to Chrono Trigger and Actraiser. If I can learn anything about hardware design, I may even be able to make a standalone music box out of it. The box only needs 5V, and (supposedly) Basic Stamps are easy to program. Now all I need is money and time.

SUMMER VACATION!

High performance on a budget

I wanted to write a good article on how this new graphics card has made my computer awesome again, my oppinions on Assassin's Creed (which I finished) and Bioshock (Which I havn't finished, and probibly won't because I'm afraid that the story will be ruined by its ending), or perhaps throw you all off by reviewing Windam XP instead. But it turns out that I'm too absorbed in playing these games to review them. I'm going to finish my installation.

Here's a screenshot of Windam XP in the meanwhile:Anyways, since I actually have a video card that wasn't made in the mid-sixteenth century now, I'm going to install GRUB so I can use linux with the ever-sexy KDE4 with all of it's prettyness.

It's International Akir-Music Appreciation Day!

Yes, it's time once more to listen to music butchered by DJ AkirIkasu.

First, the two most memorable songs from Actraiser.

Intermezzo

and

Filmore. Or at least it was Filmore untill I totally botched that one.

Props go to Yuzo Koshiro. He's just that awesome.

I got
a copy of FL Studio today, so the next song was made in it in a very different way. I still don't understand how to work it, but I discovered a wonderful feature; a soundfont player. Since I'm a big fan of the Mother/EarthBound series, I found a MIDI arrangement of Monkey Love Song on VGMusic.com, changed the default MIDI to the GeneralUser MIDI soundfont, then let FL Studio do the rest. Then I rendered the song in 32-bit float with 512-point sampling and used Audacity to convert it to crappy MP3. Flac may come soon for this song, but most likely not.

So, go listen to Monkey Love Song

And the crappy version of Filmore.

The Game is Spyware!

I was going to review another PS2 game, probibly Odin Sphere for it's most awesome animation, or Silent Hill: Origins, for it's utter stupidity overall. But then I got wrapped up in Gay Pride, which was insanely awesome in every way imaginable - and I only got to go to the parade, none of the other events of pride week.

- And I was about to write about it, but then I turned on the Disney Channel, and was surprised to see that something halfway interesting was on. That was Spy Kids 3: Game Over, better known as Spy Kids 3D.
Since I've been thinking about video games more then usual, the movie had appeal to me. It's a parody of video games in general, with a bit of satire on gamer culture mixed in (which is probably going to become hopelessly outdated if Nintendo's Wii has anything to say about that).

The whole purpose of writing this stupid little mini-article was to point out probibly the greatest irony in the history of filmmaking.
Anyone who's played practically any early DOS CD-ROM game would know about the Full-Motion-Video craze. The incredible amount of storage space (compared to the then-standard 1.44Mb Floppy disk) suddenly available to the majority of consumers prompted game developers to create games with what was previously unavailable: videos. Then they went to extremes and made games based on videos only. Thus we begin Digital Pictures' entire lifespan. Digital Pictures made games like this; nothing more, nothing less. They had the coding abilities of chimpanzees. Unfortunately, they had the acting and directing abilities of chimps as well. Just like every other FMV game developer.

... I just wanted to point out the irony that Spy Kids 3 was a parody of FMV games. Damn, I'm long-winded.