MagicEngine

[!=]

_Intro__

Just wanted to share this with the pc engine development scene here: last weekend, TPOLM organized, like it does from time to time a sort of live music festival over the net, called "Lazy Sunday Radio."

The 9 hour show was streamed on the net, and played in barcelona at the NIU
http://www.tpolm.com
http://niubcn.com

This time we got to try out providing live visuals together with the music (which partly consists of live dj-ing or even live music making)

_Now on to the PCE related part__

Why is this on topic here? Well, I did a session that weekend with just a pc-engine duo, a multitap and 2 controllers, that's why.

Now to share a bit of information so as to not make this a shameless plug:

Were used/abused:
- A tototek flashcart.
- A pc-engine duo plugged to a video capture card.
- Winamp to get the live audio stream.
- NSV Cap encoding and streaming both live video and audio back to a server.

The visual effects/materials are created before hand and I flashed the rom to a pce flashcart. They consist of a set of "effects" or operations. Pressing different buttons on joypads will append operations in a ringbuffer, which is constantly getting read at a fixed rate. (This quantizes the operations so as to make them a bit more regular)

Another challenge is to create complex interactions out of simple joypad commands. For this reason, I devised a scheme where the main buttons (I and II) act like drums, that either create an instantaneous response, or extract an event from a pre-renderered/pre-created sequence of events.

On the development side of it, I experimented with doing away with assemblers and most tools. Basically the rom is produced by a c++ program on the pc. Tiles can be produced by coding first an opengl renderer, whose result is then translated to vram-ready tiles. C++ here acts as a sort of very customizable macro assembler/linker. I think readability/productivity can be improved that way, because you can regroup common operations around datastructures, their storing in rom/ram in a single class. The class then forms a coherent library.

It was roughly prepared in 60 hours of work. Some bugs remained. The dissolving square effect is actually partly-voluntary, partly involuntary, as vram to vram DMA transfers are done carelessly

You can download the show(s) in .nsv (and .ogg format for the music only) from:
http://lsr.tpolm.org/sets/lsv20060319/
http://www.tpolm.com/archive/lsv200603/index.html

My set is neq+sushibrother.

[ccovell]

Some pictures of some of the effects would be nice.
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http://www.chrismcovell.com

[Keranu]

Awesome!
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LaZer Dorks

[!=]

I figured out since each session was separately saved it wasn't too bad. Especially, even if you're not pleased with the visuals, at least the music should be fun.

Also, I didn't focus here much on particular effects, since I'm new both to the 6502 and the pc engine hardware. (I never programmed for any of those two last month) The focus was on interaction between music and visuals, and how one can play a visual "instrument".