Jeroen Derwort MSX Basic Games Colection

At Google week 20, 2017 I mentioned Jeroen Derwort website already, about his music composing and programming.

Now I found out he was also a very skilled MSX Basic Games programmer. Need proof? Check out this page



Yes, he also uses WebMSX so you only have to press START on the picture of the game you wanna play.
I really think WebMSX is a unique way to play MSX games without installing any software.

Want some "editor picks"?
Here are some: Airplane, Letter Attack, Flying Doctors, Island Adventure.

Watch out the difficulty of most of the games is hard, sometimes because of the lack of a manual in the game itself, mostly cause in MSX Basic games, timing is more important than fast reflexes.

There were a few games that stopped with a syntax error, mostly a question mark, that must be replaced by a comma.
I tried to download them and lucky for all of us, Jeroen Derwort allows it, check out the map with all the MSX Basic games here.




 

Other Music Stuff: Ladies First (TnC Tapes)

I had enough of all dance/house music so I searched in my old Tape Collection for a bit of less electronic music. Found: the Ladies First tapes.

Four tapes full of female singers in different genres, like grunge, trip hop, rock, pop-rock, pop and down-tempo. No idea which artists or which songs were on the tapes (probably I had noted only the tracknumber of each album on a piece of paper in the original tape-box).

So I listened to each converted tape and listen to the lyrics to find the title. It was very time consuming and I was also not happy about the audio quality. First I normalized the volume and it sounded like playing a CD under a woollen blanket. So I cranked it up with a compressor in Audacity. 

The result was: the volume and stereo sounds got maximized and sometimes even clipping. However I decided to keep it this way, raw sounds fits the music and after all...it's still a ferro tape conversion with it's limitations. 

Before I started uploading it to Mixcloud (without tracklistings, cause I was afraid Mixcloud would banned it if the same artist is more than 2 times in each tracklisting), I had an idea to create an image for each tape, with pictures of the albums of the artists on each tape. Photoscape  had the perfect solution for this, called "Page" and within 15 minutes I had created the 6 pictures for these Ladies First tape sides.

Here is the link to first tape. In total there are 6 sides to listen too. Have fun, I hope you enjoy to listen to this 90s music as much as I did, when I tried to find the title of each track. 
The Ladies First collection contains following artists (in random order):  Alannah Myles, Zoë, Sass Jordan, Madonna, Ruby, Natalie Imbruglia, Meredith Brooks, Alanis Morisette, Niagara, Portishead and Garbage.

I posted more tapes on Mixcloud, check this page.

Shooting Stars by Bag Raiders

This song came to my attention when I watched with my son an endless series of memes on YouTube. I didn't know what memes are, but it's mostly a short video with a duration of less than 1 minute, that should be funny. In lots of those memes, the original audio is replaced with some music. So when I watched the funny "Fat man does amazing dive"  


I just liked the music very much, which was "Shooting Stars" by the Bag Raiders   . from 2009 !! And the original video clip in Synthwave style (=80s style) is very enjoyable.

The original song seems to have 2 different parts that glued together by the 2 guys from Bad Raiders and not very good.
Part 1 was a bit sad and part 2 very happy.
So I had a plan to break down part 1 and 2, so you would here the refrain (part 2) more often and make the couplets of part 1 less monotone.

I made some preparations with Audacity, but then I started to search for remixes/mashups and this (Sol James Remix) seems to have the same idea and more, so I stopped with my own "radio edit".

However, I found lots of remixes/mashups and memes from 2017 !! So after 8 years, the song is still very much alive on YouTube.
Of course lots of rubbish, stolen ideas and failed trap music attempts, these below are my favorites that are in my opinion much better than the original.

Best Mashups:
Bag Raiders Vs. Amy Meredith - Shooting Stars (Double Trouble Mash Up) - YouTube
Smash Mouth - Shooting All Star - YouTube

Best Remixes:
Bag Raiders - Shooting Stars (POOLCLVB cover) | Deep'Paradise - YouTube
[Melodic Dubstep] | Bag Raiders - Shooting Stars [Refract Bootleg] - YouTube
Bag Raiders - Shooting Stars (Elephante Cover) [Premiere] - YouTube
Bag Raiders - Shooting Stars (Sol James Remix) - YouTube

Good remix, but when Kuba Te sings, it's awful:

Bag Raiders - Shooting Stars (Kuba Te Remix) - YouTube

Just like the original but the colors and the road follows the music awesome.

Bag Raiders - Shooting Stars ft. Rhys (Audiosurf Video Remix) - YouTube

As always if you want more: wiki

MSX Google week 20, 2017

Today I wanted to see what Google could find when you search for MSX and sample. With sample I ment digitized voices or music, but Google's first result was a bit weird.

Check this: http://msx.website/msx-vitus .

Are they selling viagra pills ?

I got a couple of real MSX result back, so here we go:


01) https://www.msx.org/forum/msx-talk/trading-and-collecting/rare-msx-sample-carts-ebay
Well, this had nothing to do with audio, just raw versions of the official games.
You really must be a fanatic MSX collector to buy these. I prefer original second hand version in the original box with a manual.

02) http://www.generation-msx.nl/software/toshiba/toshiba-home-computer-hx-10-sample-program/release/4080/
Another none audio sample, but I really like to see those Toshiba demo programs.
The MSX-1 graphics are not bad at all.

03) https://supersoniqs.com/projects/
These guys make new additional hardware for MSX, the PlaySoniq is their biggest project.
You can play with 2 monitors, better audio, play old Sega Master System games and...
Commodore 64/128SID musicfiles. Can you believe that ? Play Commodore 64 music on your MSX ?

04) http://www.grauw.nl/projects/#msx
Again not much samples, but some free MSX Musicdisks and Magazines are always welcome, dont you think ? I am not complaining.

05) http://smecers.appspot.com/SDCC_msx/index.htm
I am not sure what this is, it seems some kind of new program-language to create MSX-DOS programs with MSX-1/-2 graphics. Maybe just like Philip MSX-Logo.
The main page is linked to another website with some dull chess game.
I dont know, where this MSX page came from, a lazy webmaster forgot to delete ?

06) http://www.jeroenderwort.nl/muziek-programmeren/
This guy made music on MSX with Moonblaster and Moonsound, programmed his own music-editor and made some nice songs. He quit years ago, but from his first attempt
( Jer Musix Disk ) he made a video with 37 views and nobody liked it, so now he got 38 views and 1 thumbs up.

That's al for this week. It's a lot of different links, but I hope you find some of them special
enough to explore.

MSX Google week 19, 2017

I was in no condition to program/compile or edit music/videos, so I decided to look for MSX listings witg Google. Back in the days if you wanted new software cheap, you could buy a computermagazine and type over some listings.

If you were lucky the listing works all at once, most of the time you were tryiong to find typos. I did a lot of typing over listings, I even bought a couple of books full of listings when I started with MSX-ing.
It was very educational to see how those listings work, so I could improve them.

01) http://msx.hansotten.com/magazines/mccm-disks/
Yeah, there are more sources to download those MCM/MCCM disks, full of listings and other MSX-stuff. It can be handy before you stsart to type over a listing from a MCM/MCCM magazine, right ?

02) http://www.amusementfactory.com.br/msx/kmg/?p=0&l=en
Not much to do with listings, but free download of a MSX-2 remake of the original KONAMI Knightmare is hard to resist. The music of level 1 got several remakes in the MSX music-scene. The best one I found on YouTube was this: https://youtu.be/y0b-bi7TMd4
(not made on any MSX...)

03) https://msxcassettes.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/toshiba-home-computer-hx-10-sample-program-19xxtoshibajpen/
I searched for samples, but in the end, this link fits more at the Google search for MSX listings. If you look in Ficheros , you find a lot of Spanish MSX games I never heard of and also a couple of listing compliations, I hope.
Start you Google translate and play those games on your MSX-Emulator !

04) http://members.ziggo.nl/the.incantation/
Again MCM/MCCM disks full of listings, but also a nice collection of MSX/PC tools you never knew they existed. Take a good look around here, I really liked FDsave and FDload, but a manual or something is not included.
Too bad, now we have to try and hope for the best.

05) http://www.illusionware.it/msx%20LD.html
Nothing to do with listings, but this rare website had some info about a very curious MSX hardware combo, a Palcom MSX-1 computer and a Pioneer LaserDisc player. There were a couple of (NTSC) games made for this special MSX, so in Europe you could not play those (PAL standard). Search the titles on YouTube, great cutscenes, but great gameplay ?
For example check out Astron Belt of Sega . Or search on YouTube with "MSX Laserdisc" to get plenty of Laserdisc gameplay

Well, that's enough for now, if you weant more links, check the next post.

Hollow Talk - Choir of Young Believers (The Bridge Opening/Closing Theme)

Recently I watched not only 2 "Death In Paradise" seasons, but also 3 seasons of "The Bridge" ( or should I say "Bron/Broen" ). They are very different from eachother, however my wife and I liked to watch both mixed up on our TV. The dark "Bridge" with the funny "Death" made our TV evenings very enjoyable.

Note: I watched the original 3 seasons from Denmark/Sweden, not any remake. I never liked detectives that need 10 episode to tell a story. But in any season of "The Bridge" every episode reveals part of the solution and leave you with new questions. That is impressive story-telling. Ofcourse the main-actors Saga, Martin and Hendrik play their roles amazingly true and you could believe they are real people in a real-life serie. It's not my intension to tell you what happened in Season 1,2 and 3, but I will give you a brief description.

Season 1: Saga and Martin work together against a serial killer, who turns out to be a ex-collega of Martin.
Season 2: Saga and Martin work again together again a eco-terrorist group, Martin gets arrested after murdering his ex-collega.
Season 3: Saga and her new partner Hendrik work together against a serial killer, who wants to destroy his family and everybody around it. In the end both dont work for the police anymore.

Not only the script, the actors, etc are excellent, the Opening and Closing Theme is really a tune you wont forget. It starts slowly and fits in the dark adventures of Saga and her partners. Then all at once at the end of each episode the second part of the song hits you like a hammer (and you have to adjust the volume of your TV).

The song is called Hollow Talk from Choir of Young Believers , I listened to the original on YouTube, but I believe the edited (shorter) version used in The Bridge is much better.
So I search for an ending with good audio, here is the ending of the final episode of season 2, when Martin got arrested. Check it out, and you know why "The Bridge" is such a great detective serie.

In November 2016 they started with season 4, the last season. Martin, Saga and Hendrik will be present, but we have to wait until in 2018 the serie can be seen.

Finally, even the car of Saga is as famous as the actors, an old Porsche 911.
There were plenty discussions about which model was used in "The Bridge" (all 3 seasons).

Try to watch this serie, if you like detectives, this is the real thing.