CHIP HITS THE FAN 2013

The biggest Chiptune-Festival  in the south of Germany is back! *taading*

On the 9th of November the Gameboys taking control again in the K4/Nuremberg.
The line-up this year is bigger than ever before and of course we have an "open stage" for everyone.

Our headliner this year is "Gamegirl" Chipzel from Ireland. She is well known in the scene and played all the big festivals around the world. We are also happy to announce that Gampoy is our surprise guest from Austria who is rocking the stage next to MELTED MOON, TriAC, Back to Newc45tle (also responsible for the awesome 8-Bit analogue visuals) plus 9-Heart and irq7.

For further information please visit chiphitsthefan.de and the Facebook-page.

PAL vs. NTSC vs. ME

Well - it's a long story and it started a few moth ago when my chiptune bro 9-heart used a device called VBLANK M1 for making visuals at a gig we booth played. Some day's later I thought that could be a nice toy for my shows as well! Then I remembered my  Sega Game Gear with the broken screen which would give that device a nice housing and if I find a small TFT-display, I may use it for the monitoring of it's visuals.
Cewl.
So I ordered the VBLANK M1 and a I also found a perfect fitting TFT at adafruit.

The Game Gear provides a lot of space

The VBLANK is basically a PCB with a microcontroller and a few passive elements. It has a cinch with video composite output and a jack-socket for the audio-input, which is used to trigger the 8bit-style video effects programmed into the controller. It has two wires for power supply and two LEDs. One is the power-LED and the other is blinking if the audio on the input is loud enough. I planed to put the VBLANK and the TFT into my Game Gear and drill holes for the I/O's into it's housing. When I received the VBLANK and the TFT, the trouble starts. The TFT worked well with my DVD-player, but not with the VBLANK. After asking the VBLANK-developer I found out, that the VBLANK is a NTSC device *umpf*. After that short shock I also found out, that the TFT is compatible to PAL _and_ NTSC. So I asked at adafruit and they confirmed the compatibility to NTSC. They also suggest to return the TFT, but I didn't want to give up that fast and decided to test the VBLANK first with my projector. On my projector it works, but looks a bit strange and not exactly like it should. Btw - this is what my projector shows, when I connect the VBLANK: 15,3 kHz, 60 Hz ,720 x 480i.

I found out that there are some PAL/NTSC converters on the market for cheap so I ordered this one. The converter didn't worked as I expected it *grmpf*. You can just see some stills in an interval of a second. Very unsatisfied but enough for the video-monitoring in the Game Gear. The converter is also small enough to fit into the housing, if everything else is removed. After disassembling the Game Gear, I also noticed that I can reuse the power-supply unit, which provide 6V for the converter and 9V for VBLANK and the TFT. It also has 38V(!) because the original backlight of the Gamegear was a neon-lamp!
     

Game Gear neon light and a mirror to bundle the light

Because the TFT supports two composite inputs, I added an additional composite to the Geam Gear, so I also can use it to monitor external video-sources. An additional switch can disconnect the VBLANK from the TFT if the output-level maybe make problems some day to drive two video-sinks. You never know...
All in all a dirty hack, but hey: You can use the whole system also battery-powered! =)

Video monitoring of external sources via composite

Compilations, Compilations...

No new irq7 release for such a long time! Scandal.
Well - as you might notice I was playing a lot of live-shows since the last EP and at least contribute to some compilations. Here they are!

90's Cover Compilation / COUCOU

My first compilation I ever attended was the "90's Covers Compilation" hosted by the Italian netlabel COUCOU. The track "Dark Side of the Moon" nearly didn't made it to the playlist and was added last-minute as a bonustrack. At the time the song was released, it was my most advanced one featuring vocoder-vocals, samples from the movie "Iron Sky" and a complex composition with just one Gameboy. Maybe my own mastering was a bit poor. I tried to make it better and put the slightly remastered version on soundcloud. The whole compilation was really good quality a fun to listen!

80's Cover Compilation / COUCOU

Right after the 90's Compilation, COUCOU initiated a follow up featuring the 80's (guess what's next? ;-) . For that release I decided to have vocals again, but instead of using the vocoder I want to go back to my "Jamie & Me" - roots using heavy distortion on my voice to disguise my singing-skills a bit. Unusual for an international compilation I choose a (even in Germany) mostly unknown, but awesome song called "Polarlicht" by the New Wave band "X-mal Deutschland". I first heard that song also as cover-version by the Slovenian Industrial-Metal band "Coptic Rain" which is one of my all-time favorite. Ever!

PXL -WIN Compilation  / PXL-BOT

 After so many cover-version I tried to made a own song to submit it to the "Chiptune = Win Vol. 2". Well - I failed to get on the playlist of that compilation (which is a really good one but just does not fit to my contributed song or vice versa ;-)
The makers of  "Chiptune = Win" offer me to be on a side compilation which hosts a bunch of brilliant tracks who also didn't made it, but are still awesome enough to be on the "Pxl-Win Compilation". My track "Twisted" was very well mastered by Pxl-Bot and got number 3 on the playlist which made me even more lucky. The positive responses on soundcloud are just astounding!

Back to Koblenz!

Happy to be on the 8bit Breakdown again! Germanys biggest chiptune-series  This time together on stage with my Gameboy-Stammtisch bro 9-heart, Gampoy (all the way from Austria - hey!) and a really cool chiptune-crew from Aschaffenburg called Melted Moon. You can see the whole bunch of Gameboy-addicts on 5.7.2013 in Koblenz / Druckluftkammer.

Back to Erfurt - Retro Party

We are back in Erfurt!

Back to Newc45tle will play his own set plus doing amazing retro-console visuals. I'm also very happy to play again with TRIaC . This time also DJ the_Agent will join us and play music between electropunk and chiptune-disco. There will be also a lot of retro-consoles there you can play with.

Join us at the Retro Party on the 23.03.2013 in the Klanggerüst e. V. Erfurt.

(Facebook-event link)

Live in Mainz!

This line-up will definitely take no prisoners!

Together with my fellow and VJ back to Newcaste we are visiting Mainz. The location BARON is well known for it's chiptune-partys and we are happy to play there together with Stern Fucking Zeit and Lafftak.

8-bit consoles all over the place for your personal pleasure, 8-bit chipcoreorgelpunk in your ear and retro eye-candy will melt your brains. Nothing more to say, just...

irq7 back on the road!