Recently I’ve been haunted by the cute, funky bleeps and clanks of 8-bit music. Especially pecan medley by an artist named yuppster, which includes a short but stirring tribute to the seminal eighties hit Take On Me, which is notable for its use of rotoscoping.
Feeling inspired, I tried to find out how to make music like this, but it seems that there is no easy way - you have to plug Game boy carts into your brain-stem or compile some somethings. I even tried installing the CPC6128 emulator on the Mac and loading up an old music program, figuring I could use… I don’t know, some Audio program… to record to MP3. but the interface was taking too long and my initial squirt of enthusiasm was soon smothered in the labyrinth of procedure.
It all got me to thinking about the lo-fi music I grew up hearing on my Amstrad CPC 464 and how evocative negative space can be, like the black backgrounds in those old games. Since Wipeout hit the Playstation about ten years ago, all the blank space in video games seems to have been taken up all kinds of stuff, adverts, flashing things, rendered landscapes etc. Sometimes this is how I feel walking through London - it’s like a hundred He-Man adverts a minute, all screaming for my attention. I defy you, He-Man! I am Skeletor!
In the world of Linux, there are few issues that arouse more passion than Gentoo (e.g. AdTI, SCO). Depending on who you ask Gentoo is either the best and most elegant, or the stupidest and most time-wasting Linux distribution on the planet. While there are no shortage of fans (I count myself as one), the anti-gentoo crowd also have some valid points.
* Gentoo is for Ricers: This site is dedicated to exposing the stupid writings of Gentoo zealots. The author compares the average teenage gentoo-user to the sort of boy-racer who annoys the hell out of everybody with his souped-up death mobile.
* Mandrake Expatriate Syndrome: The central thesis of this site is that Gentoo is rather pointless because it combines features from FreeBSD, Debian and Mandrake but provides the worst features of all.
Personally I kind of like Gentoo, but not for the reasons suggested by either of the sites; I dont optimize all that much, but I do like having access to packages that other distros would consider unstable. I also like the community spirit, where everybody seems to be more than willing to contribute eBuilds, fixes and generally help out. I also like the elitism of it - not everybody can get their heads around installing it. Most people who use it will be commited in some way to Open-Source software, plus be at least as technical as me.
On the whole I find working with the Gentoo boxes more satisfying than Mandrake or Redhat. In general, the box that gives me the most trouble in my daily work is a Mandrake 9.1 box, and is actually the machine responsible for serving this page to you.
This evening I re-encountered a problem I came across a while back. It all happened when I was trying to get some comprehensively-named choons by Liberation Jumpsuit from my Gentoo box onto my Powerbook via Netatalk.
Despite having 10 tracks in the folder on the Gentoo box, the finder in OSX displayed the folder as empty. This is because AFP versions below 3 support a maximum filename length of 32 characters, and Netatalk 1.6.4 on my Gentoo box implements one of these older versions. The implementation in OSX has no such problems, so an OSX to OSX AFP connection should have no problems.
I gather from various postings on the web that there is a hack option to enable long filename support which breaks the protocol but works fine with OSX. I’ve yet to find it though.
I spent yesterday trying to get an old ATI Rage 128 Pro 32MB PCI card running on my Gentoo box, in the hope of perhaps turning it into a PVR. I have come to the conclusion that it’s not going to happen, at least not in the way I want it to. Despite the excellent GATOS project, it seems that command-line access to the necessary devices when no X-server is available is not possible.
If you know better, drop me a line. It’s a shame, as the card has some great features, and in theory - at least - could do everything I need.