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Playing with Alchemy : C64 Music Playback on Flash 10.

UnitZeroOne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:15:58 +0000

It's been silent here. Next to tripping to Tokyo to speak at Adobe MAX in Januari and doing some small jobs, I'm doing a very, very cool Flash 10 Project utilizing the upcoming Papervision for Flash 10. For some optimization parts I've been looking into using Alchemy as an easy way to write optimized bytecode. As opposed to what some people took from my previous post on Alchemy, I don't hate Alchemy. My point there was that if Alchemy can perform that well, so should ActionScript be able to, with the standard compiler.

Now, that being said, all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. With no time to spare during the morning, daytime and evening, I took the laptop with me to bed last night, and decided to do something I didn't do before, port something with Adobe Alchemy. I decided upon a long time thing on my wish list; SID Playback in Flash. What is SID ? Well, SID stands for Sound Interface Device, referring to the MOS6581 and it's a programmable audiochip as used in the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. I grew up with the Commodore 64, and the audio it produces is still something I hold dearly. You are quite likely to have heard a SID chip before, if you listen to the radio, as it is quite a possible you've heard one of these baby's scream. Good recent examples are :

Bastian - You've got my love. (the beat in this song comes from Jeroen Tel's Rubicon).

Nelly Furtado - Do It (controversy all around, Timbaland blatantly stole Glenn Rune Gallefoss's version of Acid Jazzed Evening).

De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig - Hollereer (Produced by Bastian, C64 lover himself).

My interest was more playing back the old C64 tunes from games and demos. Keep in mind, an average SID file is about 2kilobyte to 10kilobyte; a perfect Small Web Format for all your music during preloading needs . Now, this is something I have been working on before in Flash 9, using the FC64 project, the amazing Flash C64 emulation effort by Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall. Last year, I even made a start with porting FC64 to Flash 10, but that needed to be dropped in favor of actual client work. SID Playback is something different from playing back .mod .xm or .mid files, as the SID chip doesn't do much on it's own. Essentially, a .SID file is an executable meant to be ran on the 6510, the Commodore 64's CPU. So to playback the file, you not only need to emulate the SID chip, but also the 6510 and the needed registers / memory.

Software emulation of the SID chip has been around for a while, and all modern platforms have a way of playback SID files. Winamp plugins, command line utilities for conversion, it's all there. As is there opensource code to do this. There's libraries for most major languages. So, after a bit of research, I decided upon the Linux version of TinySid. This library is small enough and well optimized. It looked simple to port, so I went at it. All in all, 4 hours later, I had this baby up and running! (And an unhappy girlfriend who isn't into the nerd thing, nor is she into listening to chiptunes whilst trying to sleep). Considering my very rusty C and a little hack around I had to do for the audio output, Alchemy shows off it's feathers here. Many kudo's to the Alchemy and Flash Player team for this effort. Just now I spent half an hour building a tiny interface using Keith Peter's Minimal Components, and collected some songs; and here it is.

TinySidFlash (open link, requires Flash 10).

My favorites : Politik and Science (A C64 version of Coldplay's the Scientist), Morphing and Turbo. Yes, I love Dane's tunes!

There's no code yet, as this is still very rough and unfinished work. I'm pretty sure that when I get time again, I'll have a go at LibSidPlay instead, since the overall emulation in that library is a lot better.

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Triangle3D : Small Flash 10 3D demo. Over the last days I've spent some time twittering...
More play with Alchemy : Lookup table effects. After the overwhelming response of posting the sources of...
Help me test! Flash VSync and Screen Tearing. So, here's a post where I am asking you,...

Papervision3D + Water Simulation = Waterballs

UnitZeroOne — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:49:48 +0000

You always have projects lying around that are to be finished...but probably never have the time for...

Today Exey Panteleev posted some creative use of Papervision3D and the Shaders in 2.0. Accompanying to his post he asked if it would be possible to run water simulation with Papervision3D....

Actually, yes...
Water Ball Experiment 1 Water Ball 2(cpu burner alert!)

As one of those things I never finished and probably don't have time to finish within the next month or so, I have two examples of Papervision3D running interactive water on top of a sphere.

Disclaimer : these things are hacked together experiments from a couple of months ago...as a result performance isn't to good. I'm sure that given some time they can run smooth, without burning your cpu to the ground. Hope you enjoy anyway

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Triangle3D : Small Flash 10 3D demo. Over the last days I've spent some time twittering...
Goodbye, Papervision. Last week at Flash on the Beach I had...

Pssstt..Adobe…MAKE SOME NOISE!

UnitZeroOne — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:25:35 +0000

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Today : 3D Girl freaking me out, isometric engine & Gnash beta.

UnitZeroOne — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:06:19 +0000

Ok, so I wanted to post this one earlier; an extremely realistic looking 3D interactive portrait of a girl....it's kind of weird looking and a bit spooky, don't look at her too long It's impressive though.

So, what is this ? Well, a bit of simple research (read, firebug) led me too motionportrait.com. Unfortunately, that's in japanese. That site has the same girl on it, as well as links to several other implementations of the technology...including this hilarious one : hige-chen (love that tune). But also, to the still very cool Rec-You campaign. I'm betting we'll see a couple of more implementations of this in the near future.

Another thing that caught my attention today was a mail from the creator of the isometric engine ffilmation. Very nice work indeed! The name is derived from the old-skool filmation engine, used to create various gaming titles for the old 8-bit platforms. Looking forward to see progress on it. Related : also, make sure you check out the Alternativa3D engine which was previously isometric only also, but now "full 3D"..impressive stuff.

A bit late, but I didn't see any MXNA post on this; the first beta for Gnash is out. From the release post : "Gnash is a GPL'd SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes.".

Gnash already made the news last year, but this time they've got a beta...

Honestly, I'm not really impressed. One of the goals for this release seems to be to make youtube work on it. I don't think this means that good to the Flash community. Even if Gnash grows up (and eventually supports SWF9 / AS3), I don't really like the idea of "another" player. In my opinion, if it becomes a broader supported version of the player, it will just cause rips in the ubiquity and cross-platform nature of Flash....something which is undeniably one of the biggest strenghts of the platform.

What Gnash might provide is a deeper insight of the workings of the Flash Player, which might eventually enable us to optimize our code for it more and more. It might also inspire Adobe to make the Flash Player available on more os'es ? Let's hope so. Maybe someone will port it to the Iphone

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Goodbye, Papervision. Last week at Flash on the Beach I had...

A very cool Papervision3D code blog.

UnitZeroOne — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:52:56 +0000

Over the last months I spent alot of my time developing with and on Papervision3D. Most notably alot of the new features of Papervision3D 2.0 have been part of daily work and development. Now I have yet to see someone uncover all of the posibilities with the current alpha, next to people as mr.doob and zeropointnine (and many more, yes).

It's incredibly inspiring to me to see that the goals and purposes I personally had intended with the Papervision3D 2.0 source code is being picked up this well. Don't get me wrong, there's still alot to do...but in essence it seems to work for people ! I guess seeing your work being put to use by others in ways you wouldn't or would've expected is a big part of the pay-off in OpenSource development. It's both educational and inspirational to see how people are using the architecture.

(As a side note...in the FITC Amsterdam video on Lee Brimelow's blog I'm noted as aformentioned zeropointnine...which is wrong....obviously, I'm that other three word number like dude....UnitZeroOne...Lee....)

Anyway, I stumbled upon note.x when I got my traffic report. It's all in Japanese but I'm really astounded by the quality of code and work. It's a very nice blog indeed, go and check it out.

Some other very good resources on pv3d 2.0 include : pv3d.org, papervision2.com, actionscript architect and of course fellow team member Andy Zupko.

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Goodbye, Papervision. Last week at Flash on the Beach I had...

AS3 3D : These demos will blow you away! Watch! Really!

UnitZeroOne — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 22:39:00 +0000

This years Assembly demo party had a very strong browser demo contest up and running. 2 Entries really stand out, and if you want to be blown away, have a good look.First up :ADHDTV by Evoflash & BombSquad (download)Evo and Bombsquad have done an awesome job here. When I was in Finland at the beginning of this year (-22 degrees celcius...damn), I met up with Jalava, and he told me about this demo they where building...based upon a modded version of Papervision3D. As it is now, this has become a demo which is built on top of Away3D, which was in turn based on Papervision3D (although, honestly, it's an engine in it's own right)Awesome job guys.Our second place competitor :Continuum by Minority (download)WOW! This one made me lose my bragging rights as the only one who did bumpmapping, phongshading and cellshading in Flash 3D. Also, they got realtime shadows in there! WOW WOW! WOW! Good job guys, looks fantastic.We better speed up in getting all our new stuff in Papervision3D, before these guys surpass us even more.Speaking of which; people have been complaining a bit about us not getting the materials out yet. We are still working on it hard, and we are on the virge of getting the new materials (which are now not materials anymore, rather then shaders in). Biggest problem ? Time. I need to finish some commercial work, then go on vacation this Saturday. But hey, they'll get there, and then the entire community can enjoy shader goodness.Now, back to work.(btw : the last 2 official browser entries : 1 silverlight demo, and 1 js demo. Spots 1,2 and 3 are Flash Go Flash).[UPDATE] Also spot 4 is taken by a Flash Demo. Thanks Jac, sorry for not posting it earlier.

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Really great BMW site / 3D game.

UnitZeroOne — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 06:43:53 +0000

This link just popped up on the Papervision3D mailing list : PursuitAcrossEurope. I really like to see how more and more campaigns are being based around game like or entirely game environments lately. The use of real time 3D on this one is very nice, it's quite fluid for Flash. Very nice.

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Nice Video & 3D Audi minisite

UnitZeroOne — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 19:50:50 +0000

I haven't been in Amsterdam / Flash Fabriek office that much lately, so I totally missed out on the production of this Audi site for the Amsterdam car fair (RAI 2007). Check out the video, graphics and 3d Flash production on the Audi Minisite :It's showtime!

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Cool Flash pseudo-3D game interface.i

UnitZeroOne — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 03:37:23 +0000

While chilling out in a hotel room in Finland, I found this slick looking pseudo 3D interface, with an adventure like feel to it. It seems to be called renderhjs. It's got a kind of pseudo isometric engine type, doing some texturing and having sprites around. It's cool, check it out.For all those interrested, PV3D is updated steadily, but not as fast as before, since I am spending my time in Finland doing a rather cool Flex project which is draining some energy (that, and being in a hotel room, which I might add, is a rather uninspiring environment to code in). I'm for sure doing more Flex'ing then PV3D'ing at the moment. I'll be sure to put some more Flex postings on here again in the near future.Check it out.

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Some nice pixel art & cool java / Flash coding.

UnitZeroOne — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:34:28 +0000

Dutch coder/designer Arjan Westerdiep has some nice work on display at Drububu. Take a look! That's all I had to say, I'm back to Flex 2.

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Impressive Flash Demo & even more impressive FP Driven Desktop

UnitZeroOne — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 23:34:52 +0000

Just back from thailand, and as expected there's alot of stuff lying around needing to be looked at. But I couldn't wait with posting these little gems.1st is one I found was released at the Assembly 2006, a if not 'the' demoscene event of the year. Lookup demoscene on wikipedia if you are confused now, but in short, for the noobz : very skilled programmers, designers and musicians bundle their forces to create the ultimate winner demonstration of tech, style , eye and ear candy, hoping too win in their chosen category. These categories change per 'party', but main categories are demo (the main event), 64k (demo's with a maximal size of 64kbyte), 4K (same as previous, just in 4kbyte), wild(might be video, might be web, or mobile, console like xbox etc.),graphics, music, oldskool graphics, music, tracked music, or with the larger ones these categories might be more refined. Assembly is one of these events where there's multiple competitions. One category which has been emerging at several parties in the last years has been 'web'. Anything running in the browser goes most of the time, this means javascript, Flash and Java. Flash used to be very unimpressive, but this years assembly spawned a very cool winner, the nr1 entry is actually a Flash intro.As I've been posting several effects the last year, these effects mainly came from my past as a demoscene enthousiast, and a background in programming on both C64 and Amiga machines. (Who hasn't typed his first lines of code in BASIC 2.0 anyway ? ). The winner demo at Assembly sports some of the same effects, although executed differently. The realtime mandelbrot zoomer in as2 is very impressive speedwise. I just miss some oldskool 2d bumpmapping effects .Have a look yourself : "Who killed Travolta by Evo Flash and Bombsquad"After you're finished looking at that demo, go and run over to desktoptwo.com and check out their insanly cool online/take anywhere/web2.0 desktop alternative.Features which impressed me : file storage (uploading mp3 files will make them available for playback anywhere you log in too), working MSN messenger clone, working email 'program'. And all that running on top of the Flash Platform. Although still in beta, this stuff is very impressive already. I was surprised about how quickly I found myself feeling comfortable using the environment.I'll be upping some new source files and demo's for AS3 / Flex 2 / Flash 8, as soon as I find time to finish them up.

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Triangle3D : Small Flash 10 3D demo. Over the last days I've spent some time twittering...

Cool Flash video campaign : Mini’s “ave a word”.

UnitZeroOne — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 19:30:36 +0000

Flash Fabriek partner Sander was nice enough to point out this link to me : http://www.aveaword.com/. Interrested as we are in these kinds of campaigns, it's really cool to see high quality video campaigns taking off like this. I bet we are going to see more and more of this stuff. The video is still more or less the main feature, but in this site they are already pretty innovative with it. Question is, how does your campaign stay cool after video in campaigns is more or less expected, instead of 'special'. Flash Fabriek has been involved in some new ideas, and these will be coming out on a short term. I'll post them in this space as soon as they are their (although I might be on holiday, which will mean a bit late).Anyone got any idea who made this campaign ?Update : Sander just found them; the agency : Glue London, the production : idiotLamp.

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Interresting new blog : id-review.com

UnitZeroOne — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 06:23:35 +0000

While I am still to busy to get the 1001 things on the shelf done, and actually will take 2 weeks off from everything to travel around thailand with my danish girlfriend, you might want to read Christians new blog on Interactive Design. Have a look, have a read, and put it in your feed list.If I come to blogging something in the next week, I will, otherwise; see you all in three weeks!

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House of Tomorrow : In english and Cannes Lions

UnitZeroOne — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 02:59:14 +0000

I almost forgot : the house of tomorrow made the cannes cyber lions shortlist! No matter if it wins or not, this is already something we are all very proud of. For those of you who are non dutch, and would like to know what it's about, there's an english demo available at : http://www.hethuisvanmorgen.nl/english/. If you navigate to the family's living room, you'll even get subtitles.If you're at Adobe Live 2006 Netherlands tomorrow : be sure to check the showcase Elvin and Dagan will be doing on this. See you tomorrow!Update : I just noticed that the shortlist the house of tomorrow is in the same list as Comcastic. Wow. This is amazing. Only to be with the last 10 in that category with something co-created by some of my all time flash heroes, like Branden Hall and Eric Natzke...

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OMG! OMG! A C64 emulator in ActionScript 3!

UnitZeroOne — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:14:00 +0000

GOOOOOD MORNING! I switched on the msn this morning, and Sidney was there immediatly to tell me about one of the milestones in Flash development. The start of a Commodore 64 emulator written in ActionScript 3.0!!!!. All I can say is : OMG! Wow! After Darron posted his Chip8 emu demo, I had a short look java 6510 and Z80 CPU emulators, deciding that building a full spectrum or 64 emulator would take alot of time and energy. Now who would have thought it would be Darron Schall Claus Wahlers) again to finally do it for real!!!R-E-S-T-E-P-C-T GUYS!!! Can't wait to see Deus Ex Machine running in the Flash emu.

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