New blog o’clock. Pulling up the socks and getting the rock out with my cock out. I can never decide between Arial and Verdana though. Who cares. Put a new (hah, ‘new’) song under Music, which is also headed for a CD (to be released on a magazine whose name temporarily escapes me) being compiled by my good friend Lord Malshun Cannibal Bastard. Speaking of magazines, I was also hilariously in Front Magazine this month, who gave me a respectful mention and even printed a pic of me biting my Amiga 600. Well, my syphus alias, anyway. Syphus is doing pretty well at the moment, damn him. Crayolon’s still in a fucking rut…

Read of the abyss before bed for a sound night’s sleep.

Yaawn

C64 Datasette – you remember it. The Datasette embodies Commodore cheapskatery from start to finish: it was a cheapo alternative to a proper disk drive, it’s got a crudely thrown-together connector with wires hanging out and it’s even got a skinflint mono drive head apparatus. All expenses spared, so that Jack could keep the costs down!

So it turns out they last pretty well. And in this age of 1541 emulators, MMC64 interfaces and the like, it’s sad to see a Datasette sitting unused and unloved. So I decided to lavish about four quid on mine and turn it into a block-rocking pimp star supreme with:

# an internal speaker
# internal 9v battery power
# an external in (for when I eventually get the recording head to work)
# a line/headphone output
# a switch/knob for power and drive motor speed control (though this doesn’t really work yet)
# an unfeasible amount of mystery line noise, which I’m going to pretend is intentional and adds ‘character’.

(more…)

Been done before, but rarely so well. Lots and lots of nice. Reblogged from Trace.

This is really cool – some guys found a bit of sourcecode for the old Grafx2 edit tool and they’ve been working it up into an SDL app with extra features, open source and, most importantly, proper documentation (for the first time ever).

For those who don’t know, Grafx2 was an MS DOS app designed to be a lot like the legendary Deluxe Paint series on the Amiga, with pixelartists specifically in mind. Anyway, PulkoMandy (one guy? Two? I’m not sure) has been describing his progress in this pouet thread and he reckons that when the config tool is finished, keyshortcuts will be customisable. Hooray!

Anyway, a full nine years after the unfinished Win32 beta first appeared, here is the 97% finished up-to-date release