xCellence in bits

I know quite a few C64 enthusiasts, even I count myself as one although not very active in the past few….years, however you need to hear this.

What happened here is that two creative coder made a player routine which features:

• two SID channels
• four digitized playback channels in 8 bit
• full filter control
• no NMI required!
• free rastertime to do something useful

If you’re familiar with the C64 you know what it means. If you are not, the SID is capable of playing 3 channels of generated sounds, it acts as a synth. Digitized sound replay was made with a glitch in the past: whenever you changed volume, the chip made a “tick” so they used it for sound playback in 2-bit and sometimes 4-bit. However as the new version, called the 8580 came out this bug was fixed. No more digi playback for us.

As usual, creativity came and the guys made the playback with frequency modulation, sacrificing a SID channel in the process. This player however plays 4 channels of sound on a single SID channel. This is some very neat coding and softmixing in the background. Mind that you have only 0.98MHz and no sound DMA at all!

You also have to code your player routine in 6510 assembly and and the shorter the better. Being one who actually coded his own player routine, I can say that it’s not easy. Coding a player is one thing, coding a good player is different. There are a lot of things to take into account and even more optimizations you have to do not to run out of precious rastertime.  Of course a player routine means nothing if a capable artist won’t make it sing,in this time it was Fanta who is a very talented composer.

Looks like someone did the impossible again. This platform is full of surprises.

“While the VIP2008 demoparty was held in Lyon (France), Moonove and Willbe revisited some of the most famous themes composed in Amiga and PC demos. To each buddy his favorite style : while Willbe did remix well-known 2000’s newskool classics from Little Bitchard, Dune and KB… Moonove gave his vision of the early 90’s oldschool era, exploring the music of Jogeir, Nuke, Moby and so many others.”

The previous paragraph is cited from the demovibes main site which I already written about a while ago. However, this new release from them is different: it’s an actual LIVE arrangement. Of course the recording itself is a re-creation but it gives a certain feeling how it sounded on the stage.

Willbe and Moonove are two respected composers on the demoscene and they’re here to give us a very fine mix of some popular demoscene tracks. While I don’t agree with all of the arrangements, it’s pretty nicely done: each tune was given a brand new polish. For sceners it’s a must have and I have no doubt the already have it. Or maybe they have them both!

There was another event, this time performed at Main party #3, Marseille, France. Another brilliant arrangement, this time they went for a more laid back approach but the same feeling is all there.

It’s good to listen even for non-demosceners, who usually always asks that “ok, it’s nice but where is the lyrics?” Well, the second one features some! Although a bit dirty but it’s the remake of the original, it should be like that.

Since I work with Solaris I recently realized that there are two ways to get the popular and very common AMP functionality: either to use the software the comes with it or get get/compile your own.

The first approach often doesn’t provide the necessary version level or functionality since an operating system is not a software bundle, it gives you the way to run and work with the OS, you’ll be able to serve HTTP or use databases, but if you want something newer or more optimized, you were on your own.Until now, this is what you had to face with. 

Since it’s about Solaris, there’s SunFreeWare or BlastWave which is good for all the other stuff which is GNU - or if you prefer the GNU equivalent of them. UNIX is never about comfortable sysadmin experience, it’s rock solid but also without any cushioning and indulgence - it’s about getting your hands dirty!

Both opensource collections are awesome, BlastWave even gives you pkg-get, a tool Debian GNU/Linux users might be familiar with and a lot of opensource packages. But what happens when you really need something really optimized for your platform?

CoolStack is a heavily optimized and well chosen software bundle which originally was aimed CoolThreads servers. I’ll write about that in detail a bit later, but CoolStack is worth a post on its own.First, it has everything you need for AMP, it even has a CSKamp package for that. It’s also optimized for SPARC/X86_64 which makes up the main line of Sun hardware today. The neat thing about it that it won’t replace any of the older versions but installs into a rather convenient /opt/coolstack location and yet, it’s more than it says on the box:

• It has alternative web servers such as Lighthttpd and ngnix,
• It lets you to install packages seperately if you wish,
• It provides its own Perl and Ruby,
• It kindly registers itself with SMF so you won’t have to fiddle with it,
• …and last but not least, since it’s made up of free software, it’s also FREE

Solaris also has a neat feature called “zones” which *roughly* means partitioning an OS instance into separate containers. It also can do some funny things like IO-balancing, resource capping, but the point is that usually the /usr folder from the global instance is inherited. Since it’s common to all zones, you may not write into it. When you want to run your own services from /usr, you’re either have to run it from a global zone - but what’s the use of that?

CoolStack runs entirely from /opt/coolstack, makes it easy to just drop what you need into a zone, then start using it.If it sounded like a commercial, it’s not a coincidence, but a great effort from Sun to keep up with the latest software versions in a professional way. 

(No, I have nothing to do with Sun, directly. I work with them but anything mentioned here reflects my own opinion)

What about considering the following specifications:

• Motorola 68000 CPU at 7.14 MHz
• 256K RAM
• 256K ROM
• 640×512 resolution
• 32 colours
• 4 audio channels
• HAM6 colour mode, 4096 colours

Not too spicy? Well, this is from 1985, when the first Amiga model appeared. Compare it to specs from that time. Looks better, isn’t it. When a bunch of nerds also appeared at CES in 1985, the machine looked like a pile of boards and wires, attached together. One of the engineers, Dave Haynie desribes it like this:

“At CES 1985, they had a fairly complete Amiga 1000. The OS wasn’t working fully, so they did have to bootstrap some of the demos from a Sun machine. But everything they did actually ran on the Amiga 1000 hardware. Bil Herd and I met Dave Needle and RJ Mical at that show, and wound up drinking beers and taking the A1000 apart in their hotel suite one night.

The Amiga 1000 models are rare today and most of them still work. They still boot from disk, unlike their bigger brothers. They have everything that makes them an Amiga: custom chips (Copper, Blitter, Agnus, Paula, Denise), own operating system, (KickStart 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 on disk!).

There’s one more thing that makes them special: I’ll get one of these puppies tomorrow. After almost two years of travelling around the globe, finally it will reach me, hopefully in good condition! I could blame a few nations and people for this two years. Incredible amount of time and money went into a seemingly simple task: to deliver a 20+ year old machine to me. Neither Hungarian customs, English couriers and USA delivery companies were able to fulfill this. According to its previous owner,

“This machine has more miles in it than in my SUV”.

which appears to be true. The machine come to me and went back 6 times! This is a real traveller and I only hope it still can be powered on.

Normally, we got used to plug a headset into a headphone and the accompanying microphone jacks and be happy with it. Normally, this is how it works with el cheapo pc soundcards, on-board or not.

But technical terms can be confusing: I wasn’t surprised that my ***** value headset stopped working, its microphone, to be precise. Went and bought another one for £5, it’s not unbearable.
After a few minutes I was reading forums and documentations what I had missed.The line-in obviously didn’t work and I wasn’t alone with the “problem”. Then a good soul finally explained: the jack we call “line-in” is really a line-in, not a jack-in. It needs a powered input.

While it’s good news for audiophiles, I definitely will opt for an USB headset, because all the cheap headsets are out of question, no matter how good the built-in microphone is.
So far nobody complained and probably Apple thought that headphones should be enough and musicians will have a good input to play with.

What about us, simple end-users?

There are a lot of reviews of the latest Ubuntu release (codenamed Hardy Heron) so I decided to write something different, from a developer and system administrator perspective.

As a desktop system, it definitely has some flaws, just like if they were rushing to release this version: it has firefox 3 beta 5 by default (known to be unstable) and some other rough edges but still, it’s not officially final yet. So let’s get down to some other details:
First off, I noticed that the default kernel it comes with is 2.6.24 which should be good but for some reason it hogs the system completely, while the previous 2.6.22 kernel doesn’t. Same parameters, same boot arguments and different behaviour. Ok, after switching everything off, like ACPI and friends, the system still has tendency to eat up the whole CPU with a single process - or so ‘top’ says, sometimes even 9999% by itself! Now that’s weird, it can’t be happening so did a little research what is going on:
The dual AMD system I’m using is a true SMP one, which means two TSC-s per CPU and time really can go backwards with it. Linux does have a workaround which doesn’t let it to go idle and won’t conflict with the different “clock speeds”. Sadly, this kernel missed it.

Ok, now about the highlights: the system upgrade is flawless, the good-old Debian style apt-get dist-upgrade completes with minor errors and most packages are really up to date (read: unstable) with (almost) recent PHP 5.2.4 and a good deal of security fixes.

I am sure everyone remembers what happened in 2003 to the Columbia space shuttle.
While this is a sad memory, Columbia was conducting a physics experiment, namely “CXV-2″ and the equipment used (probably more than one) hard drive to save data.
According to Blocks and Files the remains of the space shuttle are collected and this hard drive was found. While chances of a recovery like this are a bit less than zero, the guys in Minneapolis, Minnesota managed to recover 90% of the lost data! Now this is something that won’t happen every day.
Looking at the drive which came a “long way” it’s hard to tell if it’s a hard drive at all.

This is what I call data recovery at its best!

picture courtesy of Blocks and Files and used with permission.

There was a time when the Internet was a nice place. With no spammers, script kiddies and generally everyone trusted each other. Nice and naive idillic picture.
These days, however it’s completely the opposite. If we expose ourselves, soon we’ll be scanned, crawled, probed and probably exploited. Not even us but websites are in danger too. While I don’t want to debate the intentions of such attempts, here’s a nice effort against them, it’s called Suhosin which is south-korean for “guardian angel”, or similar.
This is a PHP patch and an extension which implements protection against buffer overflows, string format vulnerabilities, logging options, limiting abilities, encryption on the fly and so on…
However there is a catch, a serious one. Say you have a webpage which works pretty well and you decide to protect it even more with Suhosin. Most likely your flawless site will break. Fortunately logs can tell you pretty much of what’s gone wrong and who-tried-what which wasn’t allowed so you can either tell the developer to fix the sloppy code or fix it by yourself.
If you have the files sourceguarded for example…then you’re out of luck. If you have bought SourceGuard (or other encrypter for example) you’re fine. Otherwise….good luck debugging a lot of rubbish instead of readable code.

All in all, Suhosin is here to stay and welcomed.

For those “few” who know what demoscene is, demovibes is a very nice compilation of demoscene music. This collection consists of 8 CD-s, packed with full of scene goodies. Not separate tracks but nice sets by a really good DJ guy, called William Lamy, a.k.a Willbe / Cocoon.

The albums are freely downloadable and one can get a proper tracklisting and cover for them. A bit of negative point is, that these are mp3 files which kills the quality sometimes. Demotunes are mostly stored in .mp3 and .ogg files so it’s not an issue and for those few which are realtime generated or .xm .s3m tracks, should be in a true scener’s collection anyway.
The sets are separated by genres, and provide a very nice listening experience, no matter what’s your preference, you will find your chillout or even dnb tracks.

The sets are more or less coherent and remember, the collection is not about the most popular tracks, but a well mixed and nicely executed experience.

The following albums are available for your kind indulgence:

Demovibes 1 - Slow motion realms
Demovibes 2 - The turbo breakbeat revenge
Demovibes 3 - Pixels in sequence
Demovibes 4 - Visible channels
Demovibes 5 - The mod inside
Demovibes 6 - Decode the decade
Demovibes 7 - Rip is lame
Demovibes 8 - Still kickin bytes

Personally, I leeched all.

Recently I’ve stumbled upon this cute little tribute video for Amiga.
While a lot of people have heard about the Amiga and it’s long story, this small video sums it up pretty much. The best thing that it’s - mostly - done with one, actually. The artist is one of the finest graphicians, called Eric Schwartz.
The video is made with the help of the game Portal, at least with the Credits sequence tune and it fits perfectly. Eric made an awesome job and even included a tribute for our beloved dead who made the Amiga possible.
It’s worth noting that Amiga got a number of bashing during the time, however just a few knows what that architecture is really about. I won’t go into the details now and won’t tout how good/revolutionary it is, however there is always one thing:

There is a lot to learn from forgotten architectures

Having said that, the Amiga is not forgotten, not even a little. MorphOS is 99% compatible with its OS, Nintendo DS uses the same principles for its SDK and so on… Or take a look at embedded/RT systems. Familiar? Well no wonder NASA used/still uses Amigas for hangar management. Simple, efficient, easy to develop for and it does what it needs to. Not what it *thinks* it needs to do.