software beep the duckhunt doa?

Reaching the end of a fairly lazy weekend, at least in terms of leaving the house - time to do a little ffwd updating with the 'cool stuff' scrawled on this here Post-It(TM) note, don't you think?

Firstly, for fans of bleep-styled retro videogame-ish noises, there's a double treat for you. Aleksi 'Heatbeat' Eeben's music-disc for the Commodore 64, 'White Box', was released at the Alternative Party in Helsinki, and is now downloadable from his site. You can run it in emulators like Vice, and it features 32 SID-chip toting tracks, each one with 'liner notes' in the form of scrolltext from yours truly. Where, in this case, 'liner notes' refers to a load of old surreal claptrap I made up on the spot, themed loosely to the song. Here's an example scroller, for the song 'Rock 'N Roll Butterfly':

'Fluttering. Fluttering by. The butterfly flutters by, and its role is to rock. Why rock? Didn't the butterfly's parents bring it up right, that a caterpillar should always respect its elders, to stay away from the devil's music, if you flap your wings too hard you'll crash and burn? But then, butterfly was all new and running with a bad crowd, staying up late, going after the exotic, pricy nectar. Soon, his colors were faded, and his proboscis was wrinkled, but it didn't stop him. After all, the lived-in look was how to rock it, as a rock n' roll butterfly. A cat mauling. A hailstorm. A jaunt inside a schoolbus. More and more ragged. Until something happened, and it stopped being rock, and it stopped being roll, and it started being wrong, and promise gone wrong, and things unfulfilled. You can only rock and roll if you have the art, the grandeur, the legend to back it up, the butterfly realised. Otherwise, you're not rock, or roll - you're just broken for no good reason but self-destruction.'

So, uhm.. yeah - at least Aleksi was pleased with the end result, and I was flattered to be asked. The new tracks from 'White Box' are likely to be released on Monotonik in MP3 form sometime soon, alongside the music-disc itself, so watch out for that.

In the meantime, out on Monotonik now is Blasterhead's 'Killbots EP', a rather smart rave-infested beep-tastic Nintendo GameBoy-based EP from a Japanese videogame musician whose claim to fame is working on various rather risque PC hentai dating games. I spent a few months courting him to appear on Monotonik after hearing a live set of his online, and this Little Sound DJ-based EP is an intelligently bangin' use of the GB sound chip, I reckon. Check it, you might like it.

Oh, and a quick update - the software section we're working on for the Internet Archive is going decently, but probably won't be ready for a while. It'll hopefully be before Game Developer's Conference, where I'll be leading a roundtable on 'Preserving Videogame History' - hopefully we can get some good ideas and support for practical schemes going there. Looks like I may also be on a panel discussing software preservation at the next Wizards Of OS conference this June, though that's pending confirmation. But I'm itching to get something real and substantive unveiled - we'll see how things go.

Other than that, fun stuff I did recently included wandering down to Surplus Computers with a fellow Slashdot editor who was in town, and finding some weird TV game called the Super Joy, which I worked out was some kinda odd Famicom in a N64 controller after I got it home, hah! Even better, it has a port on the bottom that Famicom (Japanese NES) games will fit into, so I could finally try out my NES multicart that I picked up a few months back at a garage sale - the only notable game on it is the Tengen version of Tetris, though. Oh, and on a related note, I noticed recently that the Game Music Base has archived my .MOD music from an Amiga shareware version of Tetris, though they've pretended that they're 'Arranged / Remixed tunes', when they're just completely different tunes for a Tetris clone - go figure.