Goto80 Interview for Wall Magazine

A quick interview with Goto80, filmed at H2Ö Festival in Finland.

Yerzmyey Interview on Matt Chat - Part 3

Teletext40 Looking for Submissions

Teletext40, a website dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the teletext (yes, it's this year, coming up in September), is looking for art submissions. See page 102 and up (mind the subpages!) for details.

A dedicated editor is to be released soon on-site, until then you can use CebraText, miniTED, or just a plain ol' graphics editor. And if you're too lazy to draw something yourself, you can also send them a photo of your cat. LOL! See page 150 and up for more info on that.

And even if you're not intersted in submitting at all, I'd still recommend to take a look at the site, it's obviously done with a lot of care and love for detail.

[demo] Small men with old devices by SquoQuo

Rather boring Atari 8-bit intro, but it has some sweet POKEY music by 505. The prod even got 1st place at Buenzli's combined 64/4k compo.

Download and info

Beep: Game Music Documentary Kickstarter

A kickstarter is currently underway to create the world's first documentary on the sound and music of video games. The main initiator behind this is Karen Collins, a well known researcher on chip and game music. So chances are that this will be a quality product, and I therefore recommend backing the project.

Read details on the Kickstarter page.

[album] TTFHB - Serious Musician

Do you remember the times when I used to post some chill out music on Sundays? Well, not today mwahahaha... Behold, the new EP from The Tin Foil Hat Brigade. Just by looking at the cover art you should be able to tell that that you can't pass by this Gameboy trash punk masterpiece.

There's a limited run of 50 cassettes available, so check the bandcamp page if you'd like one.

Spectrum Today Issue 00 Now Available in English

Issue 00 of the new Speccy-related PDF magazine Spectrum Today has been translated to English. The original Slovak language version came out in May, so the contents are still reasonably fresh.

Put together by ellvis of zeroteam, the mag is an excellent read. Originally, I wanted to just quickly browse through it before posting about it here, but ended up reading the whole thing because it's just so well written and put together.

On 28 tightly packed pages, Spectrum Today covers mainly a lot of the great recent game releases which I somehow never get around to reviewing here. It also looks a bit into the demoscene, and has a very nice section on programming aimed mostly at beginners.

Download Issue 00

Lotus (Amiga OST) in 1-Bit

4throck brings you this beautiful 1-bit/Tritone rendition of the Lotus 1 Amiga OST.

[album] Intergalactic Nomad by Tronimal

Some fresh, dark DMG tunes from Wuppertal, the hotspot of German chiptune. The strongest release by Tronimal yet, this not only demonstrates how to do Gameboy dance music the right way, but also contains some beautiful chip ballads with vocals. Includes a contribution by Tom Woxom, and samples by little-scale and yours truly.

Chippendales Discography Released on Soundcloud

No, it's not what you're thinking. Chippendales was an chipmusic collective that was active in 1999-2000, producing some of the finest tunes ever on the Amiga. The group consisted of Zandax, Chavez, Beathawk, Vent, Abaddon, Goto80, Curt Cool, and Tempest. Unfortunately they disbanded quickly after legal threats over the name, and realizing that few people cared about their music in that time. In Tempest's words,

"Back then chipmusic was very unfashionable and - to be honest - nobody in the demoscene gave a shit about what we were doing. We were almost 10 years too late for Amiga scene (demo/intro packs, crack intros etc), and 10 years too early for the current chipmusic craze."

A pity, really. Fortunately, the music has been preserved, and now, 14 years later, the group has released their discography as a soundcloud set. Thanks guys!





See soundcloud.com/chippendales-1 for the playlists. The original MOD files can be found here.

Wizwords Writeup on Mastertronic Cover Art

Neuron Zapper artwork by Mark Brady

Wizwords has a new article about Mark Brady and John Smyth, who created almost all the game cover art for Mastertronic back in the day. A brief, but enlightning read. Find it here.

International Teletext Art Festival Starts Today

Two is better than one by Nadine Arbeiter

The International Teletext Art Festival 2014 starts today! Check it out on ARD starting page 850, ORF/ORF3 starting page 470, SWISStext starting page 750, and arte starting page 700, or go to see the exhibitions at rbb Berlin, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, or the ARD stand at the IFA Berlin in September.

[album] 4 by Lain2097

A rather eclectic set of gloomy, industrial-technoish music made with a 4-track tape recorder and various chipsynths including midiNES, AY3, SammichFM, and more. Probably not everybody's cup of tea, but I quite enjoyed the dark mellow mood of it.

[album] Untitled by Joss Manley

Some fresh weird glitchy minimal C64 noises by the master of, uh, weird glitchy minimal chipnoises, Joss Manley. If you like this stuff, be sure to give his other new releases a listen, too.

Micromusic.net Is Back

Anybody remember micromusic.net? No? Well anyway, the site of the oldest chiptune network is back to celebrate it's 15th birthday with some new microtunez, microeventz, and other cool stuff. Check it out!

[album] Yolanda by Vince Kaichan

And yet another one of my favourite chip composers has a new release out. Vince Kaichan, the master of laid back chipgrooves, brings you this sunshine flavoured EP with 4 heart-warming Gameboy tracks that make you wish you were hanging out on a tropic beach with a cocktail with one of those silly little paper umbrellas right now.

Blocktronics WTF4 - World's Largest ANSI Art

4636 lines of ANSI art - now that's pretty WTF alright. 24 different artists collaborated to create this giant textmode artpiece. It was presented at the ANSI/ASCII compo at Evoke, where it took first place.

Update: The artpack is available for download here.

[album] Limitless by Jredd

As promised, here's some more SEGA awesomeness, this time for the Genesis/Mega Drive. Without further ado, here's the new FM album from Trevin "Jredd" Hughes. Enjoy!

[album] PSG Series 2 by Tomy

W00t? No decent new chiptune albums for like two months (at least none that really appealed to my taste) and today all of the sudden there's a whole bunch of them? Seems like the summer void is over, horray!

First up, we have something you definately don't hear every day: a whole album with SEGA Master System (SN76489) music, recorded from real hardware. And it's 90 minutes long! Thanks a lot Tomy, for giving this underdog of a soundchip some proper care.

More SEGA awesomeness coming up later, stay tuned!

[demo] rocket science by Bauknecht

Yes! A new Commodore Plus/4 demo from Bauknecht! Results from Evoke aren't in yet, but I would be surprised if this doesn't get first place in the Alternative Platforms compo. Some of the bump mapping seems a bit random at times, but the overall load of stunning effects and the beautiful TED soundtrack more than make up for it.

Update: Yep, first place. Oh, and download is here, btw. If you're going to watch it on emulator, use YAPE, not VICE.

Donate Button Added

Hi everybody,

Ancient Wonderworld is going to celebrate it's first anniversary soon. It's been a great adventure for me, and I would like to take the opportunity to thank everybody who has been frequenting the blog - I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for you.

If you like this blog and/or the stuff I do as irrlicht project, please consider a little contribution to my work. I've added a Paypal donation button on the right, so you can pass a starving artist a few bucks.

Thank you all for your support, and looking forward to bringing you another year of news and updates, finest chiptune music, and random video posts!

Codah's Ark - Sending A Crowdfunded Demoscene Satellite into Space

After recently sending a C64 demo into orbit, TRSI decided to send a second satellite. The tennis ball sized device is set for launch in 2015.

The best part of the project is: All demosceners are invited to take part. You can prepare your own 8x16px or 16x16px logo, which you can then afterwards receive live from space with a DVB-T USB stick and a cheap, easy to make antenna.

Check out the Indigogo campain to find out more.

Crazy Demo Maker

Do you miss the good old days of crappy demo makers? Well, now you can take a trip down memory lane! Russian coder nyuk has created an online tool so simple in usage, everybody can make their own ZX Spectrum craptros with it in minutes. Enter the Crazy Demo Maker.

Since the manpage is available only in Russian, here's a few pointers:

PT2/PT3 music needs a music file, obviously. Grab one from zxtunes, or make your own (eg. with Vortex Tracker)

Splash file is the load/title screen. Takes a standard 6912 byte .scr file that you can create with ZX Paintbrush, for example.

Background is, well, the background image for the main part. Upload another 6912 byte .scr file here.

The GIF file, from which an animation will be created, must be a black and white animated gif with 256 by 192 pixels. It should have a maximum size of 40kb. If the compiler throws a "Too long source! Demo can not be compiled!!!!" error at you, try reducing the gif file size and/or frame rate setting.

The rest should be pretty self explanatory. Happy demomaking ;)

Commodore128.org Is Dead, Long Live The Commodore 128

Slightly old news, but nevertheless important. In case anybody was wondering where the Commodore128.org community went, there is a new forum to be found at c-128.freeforums.net. Long live the Commodore 128!