Maybe I should watch B5 sooner rather than later. The XO sounds like someone I’d get along with. 
Definitely, do. And the movies.
I was privy to the mailing-list “jms speaks”, and he went into the whole deal with the execs, and laid down the law, else no deal.
First, it’s to be a 5yr arc. Not 4yrs, not 6, not 2, not 10. 5.
Second, no one is to change anything in his scripts, not rewrite sections, not so much as move a comma.
He kept total control of the series, kept it coherent, kept it as close as possible to his “vision” which he had in the shower (I kid you not), and most importantly, kept the suits out of it.
And it paid off. Things in the background you see in S1 would figure prominently in S3 or later.
Details, details, details…
In contrast, look at “Andromeda”. EXCELLENT first season, then bobsledding downhill from there after Sorbocles got his mitts on it. S1 didn’t spoon-feed you anything. One ep you’d hear feral kids referring to the “one-stoff”, and you had to figure it out on your own they were talking about the First Officer (abbreviated “1stOff”!).
After Sorbocles got to it, it turned into “Hercules In Space”. Barfights, warlords, shoot-’em-ups, completely dumbed down and more “action” than anything remotely cerebral. <gag/>
ha that is a long time ago, hearing those notes 
That MIDI sounds! The exact same music styling as my old time favourite arcade game: Raiden III. I played that for hours on my Intel Pentium 233MX machine back in my college days. The sounds is relaxing, while being cool and playing god. Kill them all! fusion moves! I played 2P by myself (left hand = keyboard, right hand = joystick) just to get the extra killing projectiles
- Clemence
Andromeda definitely went downhill… especially in season 4. And then season 5 was a completely different show with the same characters. If one must watch, stop after season 3.
It seems now I need to find a Raiden III soundtrack. A quick look on youtube shows it has some nice sounds I might be able the dial in on the new toy, but I can’t hear much behind all the explosions.
Anyway, those CV (analog control voltage) outputs I thought I’d never use on my Keystep? It turns out they do some neat stuff when I plug it into other analog equipment. I tried that this morning. Also, I need to find a better video editor; this was really awkward to edit.
Ow, ow, ow! My bat-like ears were really picking up those high-freq notes…
Yeah, probably the freqs were getting too high (Nyquist limit) and getting aliased down to lower freqs.
Sorry, I checked and it turned out that I played the older version: Raiden II. I like the Raiden II music better than the newer version
I have not much clue about the technical stuff but that was fun to hear! The reproduction of all those high frequency sounds by my simple little HP computer speaker is amazingly good btw.
Ah, yes, Raiden II sounds like its music came from a classic FM chip. Probably the popular Yamaha one which was standard on sound cards (Adlib, Sound Blaster, etc) for a long time.
… google …
Oh, not quite. The Adlib chip was a YM3812, but Raiden used a YM2151. Pretty close though. The PC version probably used the Adlib anyway since that’s what would have been available.
I don’t have a FM synthesizer, but a friend offered their Volca FM for cheap and it’s vaguely tempting. I like the sound of traditional analog synths better overall though. To me, frequency modulated digital synthesis sounds like the texture of plastic, the musical equivalent of paintings made only with pastel colors, like visiting a display home where every piece of furniture is brand new and every last detail is staged to make the house look lived-in despite being completely devoid of life. There’s something nice at times about the artificial clean-ness, but most of the time I prefer the scratchy dirty rawness of a subtractive analog synth.
While FM synths meticulously build up sounds one sine wave at a time, producing a very clean sound with a tidy spectral graph, what I used is nothing like that. The subtractive analog synth approach is to belch out all the colors simultaneously into a giant spectral rainbow from one horizon to the other, but filter out some of it before it hits the canvas.
Mathematically, square waves are the sum of an infinite series of sine waves at harmonic intervals. You can think of it kind of like the ripples caused by throwing a rock into a still lake. But of course that’s too simple, so most synthesizers provide lots of ways to make the canvas quite a bit dirtier than just a single square wave. It’s harmonics on top of harmonics as far as the eye can see, interference patterns, like a bunch of people throwing rocks into the same lake all at once. This makes really massive sounds which totally fill the sonic space. Then filters contain the mess, somewhat, by dynamically changing the shape of the lake. This cuts out some frequencies while amplifying others. It’s messy and fun.
Good FM can be really good though. For example, “Cave Bouncer” by my friend tenfour:
That requires more precision than I generally care for though. I typically paint the broad strokes and then get bored and move on.
It was y Intel Pentium 233MMX, Creative 24x CDROM drive, (crappy) Creative desktop speakers, 32mB EDO RAM, VooDoo something VGA Card….I couldn’t find the PC version of this Raiden II. Sounded a bit different.
I don’t know, was it the speaker I used didn’t have basses, or I already forgetting how it really sounded. Will try to get the .exe file of the original game in my stash later.
My first “real” active speaker was Altec Lansing ACS495 bought it secondhand for ~USD 60 in 1999. And it has been my only desktop speaker until today, sounds so much better than my bluetooth UE Megaboom.
Once I get the file, you can try to install it. Extracting the MID should be simple enough.
I think my dog hates the high pitch sounds. He howled at some parts then hide under the workbench
It’s funny you mention that. I almost said something about it in the video, something along the lines of “Warning: Cover your dog’s ears”. Normally I cut off the extra-high frequencies, but in this case I was having fun playing with Nyquist aliasing.
It probably sounded different because the PC had a different FM chip than the arcade machine. It likely didn’t use MIDI, but rather some sort of tracker-like music format. In either case though, the music files are a sequence of instructions, which notes to play at which times with which instruments, not actual audio. It’s like sheet music. Getting sound out of it depends on what sort of instruments those instructions are sent to.
Older gaming systems did this sort of thing a lot because they lacked the storage space and processing power to deal with raw audio like wav or mp3 files. So they’d add a hardware synth chip and offload the sound generation to it.
Raiden III seems to take the more modern approach of playing pre-recorded audio files. I’d like to know what instruments they used though, because it has a very crisp and precise analog-modeling synth sound to it and they clearly used a fair amount of automation on the knobs. For example, this track is a blatant example of going wild with a digital resonant lowpass filter.
I wonder how close I can get the microbrute to that sound. I could probably duplicate it almost exactly with a microkorg, which might even be what the original composer used, but it’s a pain to build patches on. It’d be an interesting experiment though.
way beyond my scope of field. I do the gaming, you make the music then.
FYI, I was (again) totally wrong about the game. Checked my old drive. It was the Mountain King’s Demonstar! No wonder the music sounds different. But these games have very similar layouts and music style. Perhaps Demonstar was made as the PC version of Raiden I/II/III which weren’t exist. I went to the bookstore next to my highschool to play Raiden then several years later, during my college time, did competition every saturday nights with the boys. Most boys date the girls, while we nerds, just play arcade games.
It’s a free shareware: Demonstar
- Clemence
LOL, third time’s a charm.
I didn’t play Demonstar, but I played its predecessor called Raptor. Although Demonstar’s composer invented a midi-like music format for FM synthesis (.imf), Demonstar didn’t use it. Instead, Demonstar used .mod tracker music like an Amiga. It’s a sample-based method where you have short pre-recorded instruments, typically just a single note, and then play them back at different speeds to get different pitches. It was popular for a while as a way to get closer to CD-quality audio without using anywhere near as much space as a CD. To this day, some people I know still hold a weekly one-hour compo where they each write a MOD tracker song with the same set of samples, then vote on whose was the best. And, almost every time, Coda wins. Dammit, Coda. Why you gotta be so fantastic? Dude is seriously amazing.
I’ll upload some of my old MOD music eventually, but I haven’t put any online yet. Most of it was pretty terrible.
Incidentally, the Demonstar guy also did the music for the original DOOM game. Good stuff.
I wonder if this green eyelashes are hackable?
https://m.banggood.com/Fashionable-Sparkle-Interactive-LED-Light-Up-Waterproof-Eyelashes-for-Party-Pub-Club-Bar-p-1170806.html
I don’t know about hackable eyelashes, but I got a hackable keyboard in the mail… and of course the first thing I did was to put one of my old demoscene effects on it — water, a wavepool simulation.
I also remapped it to be a little closer to how I normally type.
This is the Model-01 from keyboard.io. I got a PVT/prototype unit, but full production should begin in the next month or so, if anyone wants one.
Both the water effect and the layout are works in progress. First drafts, really. But they’ll get better over time.
Now that is WAY cool! :+1:
LONG Edit:
The layout is something I would have to get used to, but I’ve never really gotten used to the standard keyboard layout. :person_facepalming: I got a “C” in my high-school typing class. The “ergo” keyboard layout makes me want to tear my hair out because I can’t find the keys I want without staring at the keyboard even when I’m almost certain it is a better way. Typing is something I’ve never been good at but anything that makes it more amusing gets my vote. I thought your design was cool and original when I saw the new layout pictured, but the video really brings it to life in ways that a picture simply can’t show… I love what you are bringing to the lighting world in every form. The water effect with the multicolored lighting flowing through that keyboard in a fantastically natural unnatural way is so cool to watch. I don’t quite know how to describe it other than to say it’s gorgeous!
Everyone reading this needs to click on that video to see what you are bringing to life.
How’s the build quality? Seems quite ergonomic (perhaps too much) but I don’t think anyone should skimp on anything you might use for many hours at a time.
I first thought it was this one, but glad it’s not.
Oh, the build quality is great. No complaints there.
The annoying thing is the physical layout. It definitely isn’t trivial to jump in after using traditional layouts. On a traditional layout, each column is slanted like \ . However, on this keyboard, at least on the left hand, the columns are slanted like / instead. This feels like each key on the bottom row has been moved one key to the left, and each top-row key moved one key to the right. For example, v is between d and f instead of being between f and g.
Normally I use a touchpad under the space bar, even on desktop systems, to click and throw the mouse cursor around quickly without moving my hands off the keyboard. This isn’t remotely possible on this layout. Fortunately, it can emulate a mouse and has some keys to move the cursor, click, and scroll. So that helps, and I patched the mouse code yesterday to make it better, but it’s still not as nice as a touchpad.
And there are no arrow keys. They’re available if I hold Fn, but I still miss having dedicated keys for that.
And it’s awkward to hit chords like Ctrl-Alt-Arrows or Hyper-Shift-Arrows. I’m trying to get a “oneshot” plugin to work, to make that easier — tap the modifiers one at a time and it’ll act as if they’re all being held simultaneously. But it’s still buggy. There’s still a month or two before the regular production run starts, IIRC.
The nice parts are that it’s gorgeous and well-made and completely open-source. After typing on it for a week, the mirrored-column-slant thing is easier to deal with. And after I added some code, I now literally have rainbows splashing out from my fingertips on each keypress.
So it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Mostly good, but I don’t know if I’ll stick with it long-term.
Thanks for the quick review. I feel like it’ll be hard to purchase a keyboard without trying it out in person, but I’ll keep keyboardio in mind.
I miss my old MS ergonomic keyboard though.
