sinclair44

Yay it's up, looks to be awesome... I've got Azureus set so I'll listen in the morning. Congrats on the release guys!

I just tried it on some Sonic 2/3 chiptunes, and what ends up happening is that, with minimal stereo usage, all the notes end up mushed in a line in the center. There are some evenly-spaced "bumps" along the line, representing the chords, but you can't really see too much in the way of distinguishing the instruments. That said, Lava Reef Zone 1 does look kinda cool; I'll see what I can do about a video. EDIT: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5463088612673910678&hl=en (I just uploaded this, so the tags won't be live for a few hours, but the video plays fine)

Not having Windows, I have absolutely no idea what's wrong, sorry. The port is extremely old, so you may want to try some sort of legacy compatibility mode or something, which IIRC Windows has buried somewhere. If you're really desperate, burning and booting an Ubuntu LiveCD and running it from there is always an option.

Synaesthesia is the coolest music visualizer I've seen. It doesn't so something silly with the waveform, but is much more "musical"; as I understand it, it does a Fourier transform, displaying the frequencies along the y axis and displaying differences in the two stereo channels in the x axis (and doing some other cool stuff with color that I don't totally understand). Basically, you see higher frequencies near the top and instruments primarily on the left/right channels on the left/right of the screen. In this way, the visual is extremely representative of the music, e.g. you can often see individual instruments. Explanations don't really do the program justice (nor do screenshots); you really have to see it for yourself. There are three methods for this: Best, yet most difficult: Run the software yourself. Unfortunately, it was written for Linux, which I realize that a large majority of people don't use; the Windows port is of a very ancient version, and, since I myself have a Mac, I haven't tried that port. Brief instuctions: Linux people, your distro probably provides a package, I know Ubuntu at least does; if not, building from the source archive is easy. Mac power users, I've got a set of source patches I can send you, but it only runs in X11 and requires esd for input; if you didn't understand that then building it yourself on a Mac is not for you . Windows, sorry, don't have an Intel computer, you're on your own. Since most of you are not going to be able to run a recent version of the software, I've prepared some demo videos. Of course, I used OCR songs, specifically Disconnected and Journey's End, which IMHO turned out rather cool. Easiest and lowest-quality: I have uploaded the videos to Google Video. The visual quality is pretty horrible, sorry about that; I had only the low-bitrate XviD files (see below) left to use, and re-recording was out of the question due to the pain involved. It's still watchable (though I suggest you set it to "Original Size" and not fullscreen ). The more annoying problem is that the sound was down-mixed from stereo to mono, so you loose the panning effects which are reflected in the video. Disconnected on Google Video Journey's End on Google Video Fairly easy, fairly good quality: I have the videos in XviD format, but with no sound. This is for a number of reasons (save my bandwidth; save your bandwidth if you already have the mp3; etc). The links to the OCR page for the songs are above; if you start the video and the music at exactly the same time, they'll be in sync, which is very important for it to look right. Disconnected XviD video-only download Journey's End XviD video-only download (Some stuff to look for include the lead instrument in Disconnected about 1/3 up from the bottom, and pixie's voice as a pink blob in Journey's End at the very top.) I hope you find this as kickass as I do! Any questions/problems/comments, post here. If you find any other (legally-distributable) songs that look cool, I might be able to do another recording or two! EDIT: Videos added later Lava Reef Act 1 (from S&K) on Google Video (the video quality should be much better on this one)

w00t! That's my birthday! Thanks in advance for the awesome and coincidental present (Can't wait!)

Indeed, some awesome homebrew games and emulators. ScummVMDS is AWESOME, as is ircDS and DSLinux (for using retawq, a web browser). pasudoku is cool, and MegaETK is also AWESOME. DSDoom is pretty cool. Haven't tried too much beyond PicoDriveDS in the way of emulation; it seems acceptable, but not great. Assuming you legally own the SCUMM games and Genesis ROMs, all of the above is perfectly legal. DS piracy is of course not, but I could see a good argument for loading DS ROMs that you own for the ease of having them all in one place. In short, DS homebrew is expensive but waaay worth it.

w00t-age. Too bad I can't stay up tonight... I must work all day tomorrow. And then we're leaving for Boston early the next morning. VGDJ on the plane to Boston I guess. Great work guys.