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Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Introducing Highlights Of MSX

Hereby I promise that I will show some of the good sides of the MSX system.
But I cannot promise I will make more Highlights posts than Failures...

In the end for every Failure there were always MSXers that found some kind
of solution for it.

I like the MSX because you can easy make your own programs in Basic
and the  MSX system is so flexibel you can add a lot of things to do more.
What kind of things ?
You will read it in the Highlights posts...


Introducing: Failures of an MSX

Everybody who have seen this blog, knows I still like the MSX-system more than any other computersystem.
But there are some things about MSX that made me real dissappointed in the system itself.
So here I will make some noise about these.
I promise I will make also some posts, why I like the MSX-system anyway.

While checking for some anti MSX picture, I stumbled on a anti MSX group (ofcourse with members of the CBM /Commodore/ clan)...
But do you MSX/ers know where the FAC stands for ?



TnC House Classics presents: Acid Folk

Love it. Hate it. 
There is no inbetween, when you hear the first notes of this house classic.
 
Never knew that bagpipes music really could be enjoyable. But Perplexer did it. 
I loved the song because it crazy, funny ( look at the scottish guy in the clip trying 
to follow the house beat), dancable and still not outdated.

And I am very proud owner of Acid Folk the album by Perplexer
Every song has it's own style and there are more songs that could have been classics, 
like House Train ?
My personal choice is...Vary Speed...the way the song speeds up, great way to start
a (old-skool) party...

Here you can listen to a small part of each song of Acid Folk The Album.

PS: The 2nd song Da Capo was also released as single, with a video featuring the same beard-guy, but less funnier.
The song itself with the famous theme from Richard Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra was not catchy enough, here is the video to see for yourself...

Monday, April 27, 2015

The AACKOSOFT Tribute (The Leftovers Mix)

When I was done editting "Popcorn" I wanted to create an stereo version of the song
( we all know an MSX has only mono sound).
So I tried some filters on the left and right channel and the result suprised me.
I liked it a lot. 

After uploading the tribute to Youtube I had so much video and pics with titles left. 
I decided to make a second video with all what was left after releasing the first tribute.
(now you know where the title came from, although I almost named it "The Doggy-bag Edition..." )
And this time with stereo music and mono speech ( the opposite of the first tribute) 
and intro-screens and -video's instead of gameplay video's. 
But I had too many intro-screens and less music, so I had to remove all intro-video's from the storyboard. 
I even added a stereo version of the intro-music of ICE at the beginning, 
cause it was a shame not using it and so I had more time to show intro-screens. 
Try listening to this "Leftovers Mix" with headphones to enjoy the stereo effect of 
the music at its best (ahum). 

Dont blame me for the strange speeches, that's all part of the tribute.
Have fun, or be annoyed !

Final last words about AACKOSOFT in general (which are not mentioned in the Tributes itself:
Some of the games AACKOSOFT made, are still MSX game classics and in general
the graphics were not bad for an MSX-1 game.
But I miss that extra that made Konami games so good, most AACKOSOFT games repeats itself after 1 level.
But I bought their Games Collections anyway,there were enough games left worth playing...

Hereby the link for that other Tribute The AACKOSOFT Tribute (The Leftovers Mix)


If you wanna play those AACOSOFT games used in the Tributes:
Mediafire
Gavitex


Do you wanna have all AACKOSOFT speeches used in the Tributes:
Mediafire
Gavitex

 

Sunday, April 26, 2015

The AACKOSOFT Tribute by TnC

At the beginning of 2015 I installed my modified MSX-2 NMS8280 computer in the livingroom and start playing MSX games.
I collected over the years a lot of them, but this time to get a list of my favorites for 
future posts for my blog.

I played "Oh Shit !" again and remember the good times we had when I demonstrate 
the game at a game-party in a kantine of the korfball club I was a member of.
Well, I was the only one with a computer, so not much competition. 
It took more than 10 minutes to load the game from tape, but soon at every "game over" everybody was shouting "Oh Shit !"

Then I played "Time Curb", "Robotwars" and "ICE" (still dont know what to do with these diamonds) and an old idea popped up...let's collected all speeches in AACKOSOFT games by playing them and record at the same time.
 
In an very old schrift with handwritten MSX info, I found almost every speech of AACKOSOFT games I had to played
 But I found more than just MSX games on the disks, some forgotten musicfiles for MuSiX, including the famous MASH theme and the song from Booty/Kick It with some drums added. 

While I was playing the games I noticed that AACKOSOFT used the same music over 
and over again, so to make The AACKOSOFT Tribute ( as the project name) more enjoyable for the viewers, I decided to use 1 of the MuSiX files.

Sadly I had already used my 1st choice "Axel-F" for an other video. 
I wanted the music to be non-classsic so I had to choose between "Dremo" 
(from Booty/Kick It games), "Theme from MASH" or  "Popcorn". 
Well..."Dremo" was a very sort, boring song, "MASH" was a very bad version 
of the original, so "Popcorn" was the less worst. 

But just as most of the MuSiX files at the end of the song , they all scr... up.
I had to edit the 2nd part of "Popcorn" a lot trying to fix most of the errors. 
Lucky for me I had the original manual of MuSiX...

After a lot of time I had the song "Popcorn" ready, speeches collected and raw video's 
of the gameplay. Let's put them together! 
Nope, all my video editing programs crashed after adding music, speech, pics and video's. 
So I created first all the pics with titles, a soundscape with Popcorn and all speeches. 

At that time I noticed that "Popcorn" was a little boring too, so I added as intro the music of Time Curb and between mainpart of Popcorn and the outtro the music AACKOSOFT used in too many games (like "The Meaning Of Life").
I tried to find and record every speech in AACKOSOFT games,  so I played other games  of AACKOSOFT, but found only the "Panel Panic" speech besides the others I already found.

While I am writjng this, I remember there was some female speech in the game 
"Red Lights of Amsterdam",  but it sounded terrible and afterwards I don't regret 
I didnt using it. 
It just didnt fit in The AACKOSOFT Tribute I had in mind...
 
I collected all games with speech from my own diskcollection and from www.nitroroms.com, a website full of games of old computer systems ( like MSX ). 
It has a lousy search engine, but you can download fast and without any waiting .
Short tip: Try to search for just 1 word, more words give bad results (none).

When you watch the video of The AACKOSOFT Tribute,  try to listen with headphones 
to have more fun...

One last quote; all speeches may sound be bit strange together, that was on purpose...
Like it or hate it, I loved it, although it took me so much time to finish it.
Almost 4 months spare time...

Here is the link to: The AACKOSOFT Tribute





Thursday, April 2, 2015

TnC House Classics presents: What Time Is Love ?




The KLF itself made 3 versions of this song, a boring techno song, a euro-dance version and a  dance-rock version. The links will follow at the end.
There was a time a big Dutch warehouse V&D sold a lot of house CD collections for just a couple of Euro's.
I was interested in all kind of house music, so I bought a lot of them.
On a "best of old skool" techno CD I found "What Time Is Love". I really liked it at first, but after 5 minutes I realized, the song was just a long intro for...I dont know.

But when I heard the second version (in a car on my way to get some large computer cabinets for my work together with a co-worker), with the rapper and much shorter duration, it was really hot stuff.

The last version (America) was nice, because of the rockriffs in it, but for me it was also goodbye to KLF
If you recycle your old stuff and release it as something new, you will  be soon forgotten.
Bye Bye KLF.

The links:
The Techno version (with also a boring video about sheeps)
The Euro-Dance version (with the rapper) or a video with a Psychedelic sauce
The America version (with the rockriff and rocksinger)

TnC House Classics presents: Instruments Of Darkness (All Of Us Are One People)

To start off the serie I knew I had to take this one.

Actually it's a remix (or remake) from The Prodigal of a song of The Art Of Noise.
It was the openingstrack of The Fon Mixes of the Art Of Noise and it blew me away.
The orchestral hits combined with zooming basslines, crazy ritmes and... and...

You should not drive and listen to it at the same or you will be driving twice the allowed max speed. (Watch the video if you dont believe me...)
The video is kinda wierd but at least it''s not boring and does some justice to the speedrush in the song itself.

This mix was also included in "The Best Of Art Of Noise" (7" Works).
But maybe an better mix of the same Art Of Noise song was on the 12" versions edition
of this "Best Of" 2CD pack.
It was called "Instruments Of Lightness (Life Beyond Transformation) , I always tought it was The Prodigal once again, until now.
S1000 that create the mix, using The Prodigal version combined with some more club house related stuff and samples from Art Of Noise itself.
The break and the slow speed up is crazy, until today I have never ever heard it again
in housemusic.

I could not found a video with good audio quality, so I search and found this link.
Dont know how long it will work, hopefully long enough to let others enjoy.
Sorry to say, I don't know much about S1000, but discogs never fails.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Introducing a new serie of posts:TnC House Classics

I like to do a short introduction on a new serie posts, called TnC House Classics.

There a tons of classic house music that should be mentioned here and released on uncountable "best of" releases, but to be a TnC House Classics...
It should to follow the following rules:

1) TnC has still at least one version of the song on CD.
2) TnC has some special memories about the song itself.
3) TnC still likes the song.

To my suprise there were more songs that I want to call "TnC House Classics" than I guessed at the first time.

And maybe after more than 10 posts I can try to make an long mix out of these
TnC House Classics...