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T7ES - Dil Pe Mat Le Yaars' Revenge
(03 Jul 2011 at 00:25) |
Toldja! This is a cover of Graham Smith (of Kleenex Girl Wonder)'s song Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar, ostensibly for his upcoming covers collection disc. Graphic to illustrate: 
Dil Pe Mat Le Yaars' Revenge
The original song is one of the best off of Yes Boss, which is my second favorite G. Smith invention. If you've got time, listen to the original first. My version is an instrumental chiptune thingy. Unlike Graham's pithy piece, mine goes jarringly all over the place, but does at least visit all of the melodies in the original. "Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar" is Hindi for (I think) "Don't take it to heart", which is how I justify the excursion to "HEARTLE$$" in the middle. "Yars' Revenge" is an (I think well known?) old arcade game from the Atari era, "cleverly" reillustrated with authentic piano roll above. To proceed, Get MP3. | |
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My 48-hour videogame: Priority Cats in ''It's dangerous to go alone. Take sis!''
(03 May 2011 at 00:45) |
I made a new video game this weekend for the 48-hour game programming contest Ludum Dare! For the contest they announce the theme at 10pm on Friday, and you have until Sunday night to crank something out as quickly as you can. You're allowed to supplement your hacking and drawing and musicing skills with beer and whiskey and coffee, which I did. Not a lot of sleep though. My game:
Play Priority Cats in the browser
The theme this time was "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!" which is pretty ridiculous. I suspect vote fraud. The line comes from the old Nintendo game The Legend Of Zelda, where at the very beginning of the game a man in a cave gives you a sword and says that. Like as if giving an 11 year old a sword is a recipe for safety! Here at Tom 7 Radar we are big proponents of sword safety (not really. Some people in the computer science department circa 2003ish logout party have some stories about me and swords. But seriously who keeps an actual real sword in their closet at a party?). And there is a fairly famous internet "meme" (that means "picture" in internet language) that is a picture of someone holding a cute cat with that caption. So my game is about a brother and sister cat who go on an adventure outside the house for the very first time. Go ahead and play it (after turning on your speakers) if only for the cat animations and theme song. The controls are pretty intuitive but realistically frustrating! The ending is not too hard to find. If you collect everything then there is a small additional reward.
Also: I recorded 4 brand-new songs, which are available in the soundtrack zip file. And then I made this timelapse video of me programming and drawing and drinking coffee, which has pictures of my screen and also of me touching my beard a lot, via brand-new webcam. I'm goin' all out here, guys. | |
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New T7ES song: I Have A DRAM
(17 Jan 2011 at 17:27) |
Apologies to those who are bored by obsession with primitive waveforms and their unusual composition. But the thing about obsession is that you gotta keep doing it, so on Martin Luther King Day we have a new T7ES song:
Tom 7 Entertainment System – I Have A DRAM
Nerds alone will get the joke, but did they know that Dynamic Random Access Memory was patented in the same year that MLK died? No, because nobody knows that stuff, not even Jeopardy-playing proto-Skynet futurebots. Anyway I Have A DRAM is pretty long at 3m50s, but it contains a lot of different ideas, mostly around its weird morse-code rhythm and conspicuous dissonance that seems to be pervasive in my click-tunes recently (the other thing about obsessions is that you get new ones). Dare I claim that I've mastered the minor second? Guess it's on to some microtonal shit.
Ludum Dare followup: My game "Disco? Very!" came in 18th place in the contest, which is pretty good. (There were 242 entries!) No medals, though. Next time. I ended up rating a lot of games over break—it's one of my favorite parts to see all the different ideas and also provide nurturing feedback—and there was some memorable stuff. My recommendations: Mother Robot had an inventive play mechanic and nice atmosphere. Grand Mystic Quest of Discovery was an impressively complete NES-like (NESque?) platformer. Time Pygmy is an "Achievement-Unlocked" style exploration game with outstanding graphics, which felt a lot to me like Maniac Mansion. Dry Voices is a mysterious platformer whose conceit is frankly too clever for the LD format (spoilers and my handmade map in the massive review I posted to the game). Dinosaur Dance-Off is absurd but compelling. | |
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New T7ES EP: little o
(30 Dec 2010 at 16:44) |
The year's almost up, and in my "2010" folder there was only one Tom 7 Entertainment System song (Around The World). What gives? To rectify the situation, I took all the good 2010 drafts starting with the letter 'o' (loosely defined to include the digit '0'), polished them up and wrote a new one this morning, thus creating the four song little o EP:
little-o.zip
Or get them as individual tracks: olimex, opera pro, omision, 0-day weekend. Or don't. It's a free country.
Since it's a free country, I also have the following free bonuses, actually kind of by request:
Bonus #1! Soundtrack for Disco? Very!, my Ludum Dare game I just posted about. Available as disco-very.zip or three tracks: Theme from, Underground Bathroom Complex, Dance C.
Bonus #2! Soundtrack for is lands?, my Ludum Dare game from the summer. It's guitar music, all in zip: is lands? sdtk. | |
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My 48-hour videogame 'Disco? Very!' for Ludum Dare #19
(20 Dec 2010 at 01:58) |
This weekend I made another game all by myself, for the 48 hour game programming contest Ludum Dare:
Disco? Very! The way this works is they pick a theme on Friday night at 9pm, and then everybody makes a game for the weekend based on that theme. That theme this time, chosen by lowest common denominator vote, was discovery. Since I can't resist the 'misheard it' gag (deployed last time with islands → is lands?), my game this time is called Disco? Very!. You can play it right now in almost any web browser, because it's made in Flash. This is a dance platformer (I also like to invent a new genre) with moderately charming VGA-style graphics, lots of dance animations, a boss battle, and three new T7ES songs as its soundtrack. Plus this time there's actually something to do, and you can win the game, and it almost seems like it's on purpose! So best is to just play. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out, and I was efficient throughout the weekend, though it is also sad all the stuff that got left on the cutting-room floor. For example the original intention was that when you die it plays the sound of a vinyl record scratching and the screen says: Disc over? Y! and when you win, it shows you pictured on a dancing magazine, and it's like Dis cover? Y!, etc.
I recorded a video of my screen throughout the weekend (only stopping it when I was leaving the house or sleeping), so you can see my nausea-inducing window-switching habits. It's kind of funny to see the graphics being drawn, at least. Its soundtrack is truncated versions of the game music. | |
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T7ES - Around The World
(11 Oct 2010 at 01:28) |
It's unusual for me to cover a song, but sometimes it's a fun challenge. A friend is making a compilation of only covers of Around The World by Daft Punk, which is an catchy but extremely simple and repetitive song (with a great video by Michel Gondry) popular about 13 years ago. My concept was to take the song in as many different melodic directions as possible, in contrast to the original. I like the way it came out. Here is the MP3: Tom 7 Entertainment System - Around The World (Daft Punk remix), and here is the cover art (which makes more sense if you watch the video):
Tom 7 Entertainment System - Around The World | |
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Song, scissors
(13 Dec 2009 at 10:18) |
 Here is another new T7ES song, Theme from alaplantine.
Also, remember those mega scissors from post 976 that allow you to shred important papers quickly and easily? Probably not. I do, though, so when I'm at my friend's house for dinner and he's like, guys, mystery time: WTF are these mega scissors that I found in the drawer and what are they for? I know the answer. And then I shredded an important credit card, which was not easy:
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New T7ES song: 12% of 360kb
(22 Nov 2009 at 17:37) |
New Tom 7 Entertainment System tune, 12% of 360kb.
Tom 7 Entertainment System - 12% of 360kb | |
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Death Row Candyland
(12 Sep 2009 at 11:32) |
Here's a new Tom 7 Entertainment System song, Death Row Candyland. It's possibly most ambitious one ever, except for the cover art:
Tom 7 Entertainment System - Death Row Candyland
I couldn't figure out how to easily get that diagonal candy cane stripe look in 10 minutes, so instead purely vertical bands which are like their own mini prison inside the letters.
Now you want to hear me overanalyze? This song is kinda like theme from rt2i in that I spent a lot of time on it (like multiple nights), a lot of which was on texture. This is highly unusual for me. I'd go back and listen to it and think, hmm, this particular transition seems to lose too much bass, and then fix it. I didn't stop until I listened through the whole thing and thought there were no undesired jarring moments, cheesefest notes, boring off-pace repeats, or missed opportunities. (Usually I just crap it out in an hour or two binge with all default settings, and hope for the best.) I like the song better than rt2i though because I feel like the basic tune is more sound. I started with what you hear in measures 1–28 (intro, intrigue theme, main echo theme) which loop so nicely and which would easily have been the whole song in 1999-era T7ES. I really liked the twisty uneasiness of the chords and (especially) the echo theme. So I decided to embrace and extend, and the end product has at least 5 distinct parts, and maybe counting the counterpoint something like 9 or 10.
Another way this is similar to rt2i is the way that the melody from the main echo theme shows up in 3 totally different places, changing its meaning each time. I am in love with this trick these days. (For sure it's in Zürich bigtime.) It is a good challenge to pull it off (usually it means adjusting something rhythmically or melodically, and can easily lead to a muddle if clumsy) and I think that the self-reference is so damn satisfying. IMO the part in the coda where the echo theme comes back (gently telegraphed in the square waves in the prior pattern) is completely fucking epic. To me in the narrative of the song it's like something odd but familiar finally making sense. | |
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Sans Pellegrino and a bug
(23 Aug 2009 at 17:21) |
Here is a new T7ES song called Sans Pellegrino.
Tom 7 Entertainment System - Sans Pellegrino
— ❧ —
Related: I have been working on several different pieces of audio-generating software and hardware. One of my favorite things about doing this is the crazy ways that stuff can fail, and the unexpected sounds that result. My most current thing is some microcontroller-based sound generation for secret project EG. As part of testing it I created what I think is my first actual chiptune, in the sense that the music is generated by a microchip dedicated to the purpose, not some software emulator or hi-fi MIDI synthesizer. Here is Sensations (chip error); the sound quality is very bad because the only way I have to record this is to hold a mic up to a speaker. It starts out fine but goes to shit pretty soon. What's actually happening is that I'm not making the realtime deadline for emitting samples (chip is only 12mhz) because I'm doing too much computation when there are more than 2 notes sounding simultaneously. Because it's basically deterministic and only generating sound, this actually just slows down everything: the length of the notes and their corresponding pitch, by a factor depending on how many simultaneous notes there are. I had a good laugh about this.
I'm usually very careful when programming microcontrollers because it's way harder to debug than in a regular computer, if you get it wrong. I'm proud to report that this was compile/flash/test #2; the first didn't do anything because I forgot to increment the index into the song; the third worked exactly as I wanted. More on this project soon, I think. | |
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