Leveling Up Tracker Time with Glowing VU Meters in the Byte Cellar

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Blake Patterson
D'ESIGN LED VU Meter bars

Lately, I’ve been spending time in the evenings listening to tracker tunes on my Gravis Ultrasound-equipped 486 PC. My go-to player program is Open CubicPlayer for DOS, which does a great job of both accurate playback and adjusting and sorting samples to work as well as possible within the GUS’s 1MB of wavetable RAM.

Now, of course I like das blinkenlights (as one does), and OCP offers a number of satisfying ways to light up the phosphor during MOD, S3M, IT, and XM playback. Recently, however, I spotted a free-standing LED VU Meter on the web that looked like it might be a welcome addition to my tracker player setup down in the Byte Cellar.

The unit is available from a variety of sources scattered across the globe, each of which seems to refer to the device by a different name while offering it at a different price. Digging around a bit, I have come to the conclusion that the actual name / description of this thing is something close to: “D’ESIGN R12 Rhythm Lights Voice Activated RGB Music Light LED w/ Pseudo Tubes.” Whew. It’s about 3.25-inches tall; 11-inches wide; has 12 LED bars, each in a tube with a mesh in front of it for a nixie-tube sort of look, all in a nice wooden frame; has a variety of color and display modes; and picks up on sounds in the room as input for its VU meter display. After initially seeing it offered at a higher price, I found it elsewhere for about $90 USD.

And, I love it! I have it sitting on top of the Tandy 1000HX, just down the desk from the aforementioned 486 (it’s an AMD 5×86 160, actually), and it adds enormously to the overall vibe of the room (which I wrote about in my last blog post) while listening to these tracks and watching demos. I usually run with the green fading-up-to-orange color scheme, as it reminds me of the bars in the original Soundtracker that I spent hours in on my old Amiga 2000, way back when.

The video above consists of a few quick and dirty clips I took with my iPhone to give a feel for the setup in action — forgive the crudeness. It’s an amazing little device that is really giving me my money’s worth as far as the enjoyment it brings me during tracker time. And, I kind-of want a second one….

Posted in DOS / Win PC, Just Rambling | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Vibing With Some Tunes and a Retro Wave Slideshow on the Apple IIe

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Blake Patterson

Recently I’ve gotten into a little synthwave electronic music, listening in the evenings to enjoy a nice drifty, nostalgic vibe. I’ve got Hue color lighting and a couple of LED arrays (from Divoom) to show pics and anims down in the basement Byte Cellar to help set the mood. I’ve also got five desks full of computers and displays arrayed around the room…and it occurred to me that getting a few retro wave slideshows running down there would add to the vibe considerably, especially given the number of lovely, glowing-phosphor CRTs in the mix.

So, I started with the Apple IIe.

The enhanced 128K Apple IIe is capable of displaying “double high-resolution” graphics in 16 colors. (The Apple //c and IIgs support this mode, as well.) Only a relatively small percentage of software for the Apple II supports this mode, including games like King’s Quest (and many other Sierra games), Airheart, Rampage, etc. Dazzle Draw was a very popular 16-color drawing program that utilized this mode, as well. The programs that use this mode have an effective color resolution of 140×192 but, as all pre-IIgs Apple II graphics use NTSC artifacting to generate color, there’s some “play” in the technique, and several recent software applications written to convert modern images to the Apple II are able to generate DHGR images that could not be easily drawn or pixel-arted on the II with any of the tools available back in the day. I discussed these modern converters in several posts (linked at the end of this one) and used one of the tools I discussed, tohgr (macOS & Windows), to convert the set of images I wanted for the slideshow.

I was pleased with the results of the converted images I had chosen and put as many as would fit into a standard 800K disk image file (the size of a ProDOS 3.5-inch floppy disk) along with auto-booting slideshow software. In the end, there are 45 images in total, including the vibey rainbow Apple logo image from the 2022 “Peek Performance” event that I converted and discussed earlier (linked below).

Grab the disk image and feel the vibe on your own Apple II! (CRT definitely recommended…)

3.5 inch floppy disk icon
RetrowaveVibePics1_800K.po

Related Byte Cellar posts:

Posted in Apple II | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Q&D: Enjoying Some Demos on the Amiga 2000

Posted on February 17, 2024 by Blake Patterson

Over the recent holiday, I spent some time upgrading, working on projects with, and generally polishing off a few of the vintage systems in my collection and, as such, ended up having some pretty great retro fun with them. Not all of these endeavors warranted (or, well, ended up getting) a full post here on the blog, but I have been sharing the good times via my Mastodon, YouTube, Flickr accounts, and the like. And, while my posts to those platforms generate some fun conversation, I would like to better include such “smaller” activities on the blog, here. As such, I am going to start making the odd “quick and dirty” post that captures something I think readers might like that’s just sort-of happening in the moment. These might consist of a video clip or a few photos — and probably not a big, in-depth text dive into what I’m doing. “Q&D” posts. I hope they’re a positive addition.

This is the first.

Last night, I fired up my Amiga 2000 ‘020 and started running through some of the demos installed on its SCSI2SD volumes. One that I really enjoyed was Gagrakacka Mind Zones by Disaster Area, an Amiga Original Chipset (OCS/ECS) demo that took the first prize at the Oldskool Demo compo at the Flashback 2015 party. After watching it through, I pulled out the iPhone 15 Pro Max and did a quick and dirty capture of the demo running on my dual-screen A2000.

(The system next to the Amiga is a 5×86 160MHz DOS PC that shares (thanks to the Indivision ECS scan-doubler in the Amiga) the dual-input 19-inch Sony CPD-G420, the best looking CRT monitor I’ve ever owned.)

The (many) demos created in recent years for even the base, 8MHz Amiga models are truly a sight (and sound) to behold.

Posted in Amiga, Quick & Dirty | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2023 Edition)

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Blake Patterson

‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the twelfth annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow (which I think we could all especially use this year). With scanlines. Enjoy!

I’ve been a computer geek for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying The Holidays even longer…

I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time. And, apparently I wasn’t alone in this, as Benj Edwards explains in his piece, “The Oddball, Nostalgia-Inducing Christmas Tech Art Of The 1980s And 1990s.”

Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until 2010 (the year before I began writing these posts) when I was inspired to seek out the demo I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers. A year later, I fired it up again and watched it run through it’s 16-color, pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greetings. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from the good ole’ days and present them here, in order to try to share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.

The following list of demos ranges across a variety of platforms of olde and is sure to bring the warmth of the season to the hearts of any and all retrocomputing enthusiasts who behold it. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!

Be sure to also have a look at the dozens of demos gathered through the years in the 2022 edition, the 2021 edition, the 2020 edition, the 2019 edition, the 2018 edition, the 2017 edition and the 2011 – 2016 editions of this post.

Amstrad CPC — Christmas Demo 2023 ‘Joyeux Noel’ by Kukulcan (2023)
Apple II — 2023 Christmas Demo by Deater (2023)
Commodore 64 — Xmas 2023 Compo Invite by Fairlight (2023)
Baffa-2+ — Xmas Demos 2023 by Augusto (2023)
Continue reading →
Posted in Holidays, Multi-Platform | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Era of American Computer Magazines Has Drawn to a Close

Posted on December 23, 2023 by Blake Patterson

I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these intervals kept me comfortably up to date on the state of affairs in the PC hardware world (not to mention making for a nice timeline of my significant travels). Thumbing through these issues a few times a year, I got an overall feel for what was the state of the art in PC CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, RAM technology, and so on. I’ve got all of these issues over there on the shelf, handy to look back on when trying to assess this or that mildly-vintage system that might come my way.

But, when I flew to Boston this spring, I couldn’t find my copy of Maximum PC on the newsstand. It wasn’t at Washington National or at Logan, on either end of the week-long trip. A few days later when I was back in town, I checked the local Barnes and Noble for the current issue and wasn’t able to find it there, either.

It was then that I did a bit of searching on the web and was rather alarmed to find Harry McCracken’s recent Technologizer post, “The End of Computer Magazines in America,” subtitled “With Maximum PC and MacLife’s abandonment of print, the dead-tree era of computer journalism is officially over. It lasted almost half a century—and was quite a run.” I somehow didn’t see this coming nearly as well as I should have and I very much lament that the April 2023 issues of both of the aforementioned magazines’ were there last.

Creative Computing magazines

Ever since I got my first home computer on Christmas morning, 1982, I have been buying and reading computer magazines. Some general — Creative Computing, BYTE, Compute!, Personal Computing, Computers & Electronics, Pen Computing, Next Generation, etc. — and some platform specific — A+, InCider, ’99er, AmigaWorld, STart, INFO 64, NeXTWorld, etc. — these magazines riveted me with the promises of upcoming software, hardware, new systems, and the like in a world before the internet when monthly magazines like these were how we knew what was coming. They were what got me excited about the Next Big Thing.

And now, basically all American computer print magazines have vanished. Some have gone online in various fashions…but it’s not the same. Coming to realize that this reality had crept slowly upon me was a sad moment.

Continue reading →
Posted in Multi-Platform, News | Tagged | 8 Comments

Thinking Back on ‘Turbo Pascal’ as It Turns 40

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Blake Patterson

November marked the 40th anniversary of Turbo Pascal, the first Integrated Development Environment (or IDE), which allowed a user to quickly and easily write a program in the Pascal programming language and see it compiled and linked — all in one go — with an executable dropped to disk at the end. Much simpler a process than the traditional model of programming in a text editor, using a compiler to convert the source into object code (often over several passes), and running a linker to integrate any required libraries, Turbo Pascal was friendly, fast, and cheap. Created by Anders Hejlsberg, the development package was released by Borland in November 1983 at a price of $49.99 for both CP/M and DOS-based systems.

Created by Niklaus Wirth in 1970, Pascal is a small and efficient procedural programming language that is easy to use and, thanks to its structured programming nature, was often employed as a language for learning programming concepts at a level higher than traditional, early BASIC. It is in this capacity that I had my first hands-on experiences with the language in an A.P. Computer Science class I took in high school during the late ’80s. Here, at its 40th anniversary, I thought I would share the memories I have of spending time with Turbo Pascal.

Having joined the ranks of the home computing on Christmas morning in 1982 and become instantly swept up in all of it, I quickly learned BASIC (in the backroom of a Singer sewing machine store down at the mall, which is a story on its own) and was poring over computer books and magazines constantly. So, I had heard of Pascal. In fact, Texas Instruments offered a UCSD Pascal p-System for my beloved TI-99/4A, which allowed the system to access a large library of Pascal programs out there via their P-Code card which provided a virtual machine for running these platform-agnostic programs, though I never owned that hardware.

Flash forward to my junior year of high school when I took the aforementioned A.P. Computer Science class, taught by the late Col. Ken Jenkins, at Hampton Roads Academy in Newport News, Virginia. At the time, the school had a computer lab full of Apple IIe computers used for teaching BASIC programming and for typing classes. For the APCS class, four or five DOS PCs were setup along the back wall, featuring lovely, amber MDA displays (pictured). These were the systems our small APCS class (I think there were only about five or six of us) used for Pascal classwork, which was done in Turbo Pascal v4 for DOS. (In retrospect, they should also have dropped Z-80 cards in a few of those Apple IIes — the CP/M version of Borland’s IDE ran well in that environment.) The class was a lot of fun and it was great getting my first taste of procedural programming. (And there was a particularly memorable anecdote about a lesson on the unary minus, I recall — but that’s a story for another time.)

Continue reading →
Posted in Amiga, DOS / Win PC, Down Memory Lane, Just Rambling, Multi-Platform, Other Platform, Programming | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Lost Amiga “Four-Byte Burger” Painting Digitally Recreated (And Looking Amazing in Glowing Phosphor!)

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Blake Patterson
test

It was in the late summer of 1985 when I first heard of the Amiga. I learned about the forthcoming system in an issue of Personal Computing magazine that featured the Amiga on its cover and contained an in-depth dive into the what was the most amazing computer — by an incredible margin — I had ever seen. The specifications I read and the photos I saw within made such an impact on me that I wrote a post to this blog about the magazine itself, A Look at the Sauciest Magazine I Ever Owned, about ten years ago.

4 Byte Burger

The magazine’s deep dive into the Amiga (take a look for yourself) featured various examples of graphics created on the system, the most impressive of which — to my eye — was entitled “Four-Byte Burger,” a whimsical and lovely, exploded digital painting of a floppy-disk cheeseburger of sorts created by Jack Haeger, Director of Amiga’s Art and Graphics Department at the time. The 32-color image utilized the Amiga’s 4096-color palette to produce graphics the likes of which I had never seen before. (At the time, I was using an Apple II that was 6-colors only, basically.) A short time later the premier issue of AmigaWorld magazine appeared on the shelf, also featuring the image within, and finally after the launch of the system, “Four-Byte Burger” made its way to the inner covers of the Graphicraft paint program’s user manual which is the source of the high-res scan I was able to secure a few years back.

Around the time of that earlier post, I tried to track down a digital copy of the image, but to no avail. It wasn’t in the Amiga Graphics Archive, or seemingly anywhere else I looked. I came to find out that “Four-Byte Burger,” along with several other early Amiga paintings featured in these magazines, were created with a version of Graphicraft so early in development that it did not yet feature file I/O capabilities. These images were drawn, the CRT display was photographed, and then those lovely pixels were cast into the void when power was taken from system RAM with the flick of a switch.

These images, in digital form at least, were lost to time…like tears in rain.

Continue reading →
Posted in Amiga, Down Memory Lane | Tagged , | 4 Comments

“MuffinTerm”: A Great New Terminal App for BBSing on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Blake Patterson

Readers can find quite a few posts on this blog about my enjoyment of modern-day BBSing — “dialing in” to online Bulletin Board Systems that can still be found out there on the net. I consider BBSing to be a wonderful opportunity to sit down in front of the various systems in my collection and spend time with them — to put them to use. The process itself, involving vintage hardware, I find to be quite satisfying and the online discussions I’m part of in the message areas of these BBSs are a lot of fun as well. As such, there are certainly times when I want to login and check messages but it’s not possible or convenient to go down into the cellar and fire up an old system.

Being primarily a Mac user (when it comes to modern systems), I will usually use my MacBook Air and iTerm 2 or, if I need something beyond VT100 emulation, SyncTerm to login. These work well enough, but I need to have my Mac with me to use them, and of course I often don’t.

A while back, I spent a considerable amount of time (and money, actually) trying out various enterprise-targeted terminal apps in the iOS / iPadOS App Store that claim to offer some of the emulations I need for proper BBSing, but not a single one of them ever managed to pull it off. Some have ANSI emulation but lack the extended character sets needed to render the “ANSI art“-style login screens and menus used by many of the BBSs out there. And, you can just forget about emulation of anything like the Commodore 64’s PETSCII or the Atari 8-bit’s ATASCII character sets. So, proper BBSing on the devices that I do have with me most of the time has been a no-go.

That is, until now.

A new terminal program called MuffinTerm has recently appeared in the iOS / iPadOS App Store and the Mac App Store that is specifically designed for telnet BBSing. Oh, and it’s free.

Continue reading →
Posted in BBS, Handhelds, iOS, Macintosh | 7 Comments

Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2022 Edition)

Posted on December 25, 2022 by Blake Patterson
Pixellated 8-bit style plastic Christmas wreath

‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the eleventh annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow (which I think we could all especially use this year). With scanlines. Enjoy!

I’ve been a computer geek for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying The Holidays even longer…

I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time. And, apparently I wasn’t alone in this, as Benj Edwards explains in his piece, “The Oddball, Nostalgia-Inducing Christmas Tech Art Of The 1980s And 1990s.”

Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until 2010 (the year before I began writing these posts) when I was inspired to seek out the demo I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers. A year later, I fired it up again and watched it run through it’s 16-color, pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greetings. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from the good ole’ days and present them here, in order to try to share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.

The following list of demos ranges across a variety of platforms of olde and is sure to bring the warmth of the season to the hearts of any and all retrocomputing enthusiasts who behold it. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!

Be sure to also have a look at the dozens of demos gathered through the years in the 2021 edition, the 2020 edition, the 2019 edition, the 2018 edition, the 2017 edition and the 2011 – 2016 editions of this post.

Commodore 64 — Christmas Around the World by Kermit R. Woodall (1987)
PC DOS — Sierra Christmas Card 1992 (in VGA, played on Roland MT-32) by Sierra (1992)
Continue reading →
Posted in Holidays, Multi-Platform | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

It’s a MIDI Christmas With the Atari ST for “Holiday Music Week X”

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Blake Patterson

As I type this we are in the middle of the tenth annual Holiday Music Week over at r/Retrobattlestations. For this season’s contest, I decided to interface my wife’s Radio Shack music keyboard with my Atari 520ST using its built-in MIDI ports and let the system do a bit of caroling.

One of the first programs I ever had on my original 520ST back in 1986 was a Christmas slideshow and music demo from Audio Light, Inc. The graphics in the slideshow were drawn by Peter Wickman with Audio Light’s N-Vision paint program and the music was surely created with some iteration of The Music Studio, a music composition program also created by Audio Light.

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Posted in Atari, Holidays, r/Retrobattlestations | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment