My Music Memories: Today of Junkie XL

I was preparing a video serie of my favorite vehicles in Midtown Madness 2, with a Top 5 of trucks, muscle cars, rally cars, planes ( really !!!) etc etc. Just wanna showcase them and do a quick race. Therefor I wanted some race music so I listened to OSTs of race games whom cars have been converted in MM2, like the Need For Speed, Driver, Flatout, Midnight Club series.Then I found this track. and the intro guitar riff kept on pounding in my head for almost a week. So now you will have it too. 

Bye bye. I will read your comments over a week or so... 

I dont know , I like the video clip about a hairdresser making very strange haircuts, 
mister Junkie XL himself. 

After this wonderfull track "Today" I googled for more of Junkie XL, a Dutchman like me. Sorry to say, most of it was boring or not my kind of music. That's a bit strange cause I was in the past a big fan of Nerve (Junkie XL was one part of the duo) and his remixes  & productions with KONG, which I also fan of. 

I guess when you get older your music taste changes a little. So there will no "Fan Of Junkie XL", his "little less conversation" remix of Elvis Presley is simple and still another great track ( with his alias JXL ).

I was just about to publish this post when I remembered I bought once a mega single-CD 
of Junkie XL, when Junkie XL was a Dutch band, with the rapper "Rude Boy" from Urban Dance Squad. It featured "Billy Club", "No Remorse" and 2 remixes of tracks of the album "Saturday Teenage Kick". It was so called "Big Beat" music, like The Prodigy made.
I liked it but not enough to buy the full album. I wish I did, cause 2 tracks "Def Beat" and 
"No Remorse" featured in the OST of racegames I still like to listen to.

Fan of The Blues Brothers ???

I have told already some things about the movies "The Blues Brothers" and "Blues Brothers 2000" when I post about "Sollicitere" of Janse Bagge Bend. 
If you read it you know what the movies are all about and the good music in it. When I found out The Blues Brothers were a real band I bought their album "Briefcase full of blues". 


It wasn't what I expected after seeing the movie, I am still not a big fan of Rhythm & Blues. So it was a bit of a waste of money. I better had bought the soundtrack of the movie. Looking at the wiki page of the soundtrack, lots of good stuff was left behind. They had better decide to publish 2 versions, the standard and the extended version with 2 CDs. 

I still liked the music of the first movie and the crazy story so when "Blues Brothers 2000" came out, I got to the cinema to watch it.
Like I said in an earlier post, better watch the songs from the movie and forget all about the story. After that, I was still a fan of The Blues Brothers, the 1st movie but not the band ( the picture, you see above, was hanging many years on my wall).

The 1st movie was such a great success, so they (Titus) made not 1 but 2 Blues Brothers video games. 
It was simple platformers with good music of the movie, remade for FM soundcards, like the early Soundblasters.
When I search for pictures or even videos, I found a nice website where you can play them in your browsers!

Check them out, here and there.  

Of course, there was also a Blues Brother 2000 game, this time only for Ninento 64 game console, you can try it here and there. On my computer, it was to slow to play. Better download an N64 emulator (like Project 64) and try your luck at some from the archive (like Rom Hustler) on the net.

I quit this post with some nice YouTube links with Blues Brothers (& Friends) music.
Hope they won't be banned soon. 
 

The ECH Files Part 5 : The Journeys 1, 2 and 3

When I played on ElyssiaMC and I wasnt building, I was travelling a lot.. 

To find ice, to find the town back, to travel by boat and see where I landed or simple a random teleport just for fun to see how many biomes there were or what kind of buildings other players had build.

 

In a lot of pictures you see me holding a kind of weapon.

That for a good reason, at night there are a lot of zombies and skelets, and everywhere is PvP, so any player you meet can be hostile and try to kill you to get your gear. 
I only met a player once and I ran away before he saw me. 

Well, I died a couple of times and cause I was traveling I had no clue where to look for my gear. The server only used random spanpoints and not manually added coordinate. Result: ever time I died, I had to make my own (standard) stuff and get enough food.

Some pictures are showing info about the biomes, coordinates, type of computer, Java version, chat lines etc. These were not attended. Because of the PvP players and other enemies I had not much time to take those pictures, I could be attacked any second.

Lately I found the pictures of my Journeys on ElyssiaMC back and I had the idea of creating a sort of exhibition of zooitroep, the famous photographer. I found a nice program Photo! 3D on a website with a not working download link. It could create different 3D galleries, so I manage to download it from a obscure website (and started after that, my Anti Malware programs). I had a lot of fun with it, but I had too many pictures to show for 1 gallery.
Instead of 1 3D gallery, there are 3 now. 


 The amounts of pictures urgs me to use: Pyramids, Castle and Neon Maze.
Form these 3 is Castle the worst, showing lots to the same pictures, had to be edited a lot.

I wanted to add Minecraft remixed (or inspired) music, after all it were Minecraft pictures.
On Newgrounds.com I found plenty. Some not very dull, some good. After some hours I had found 6 good ones. Then I released all these were already used by someone else in their YouTube vids.

At the same time I was busy with the Pub Boogie songs on Fireworks 2 and 3, Dutch Moonblaster musicdisks of MCD club and besides the Pub Boogie songs it had a couple of spacey ballads. Perfect for these exhibitions. I faded out the tracks when they are looped and the result were 3 vids, just long enough not to be bored.

If you want to see the whole exhibition of each vid, 
check the download links below:

ECHs Journey Exhibition 1 (Pyramids): Mediafire / Pcloud
ECHs Journey Exhibition 2 (Castle): Mediafire / Pcloud
ECHs Journey Exhibition 3 (Neon Maze): Mediafire / Pcloud

The manual is in the .exe itself, running smoothly even under Windows 10 !!!

PS: In the first picture you see the only time I travelled not alone.

The ECH Files Part 4 : The Speedway

The Speedway stayed unfinished, cause I could not figure out how the combination of trick wire, redstone and redstone lantarns should work. The speedway was build as a big 8, cause you cant go high or low without jumping in Minecraft. And I used ice as road so you could race with just ordinairy boats. 

 

Because the redstone experiment failed, I placed many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many sign boards, so you could see where you should go. 

However the ice was very slippery, as you can see in the video. 

I had to speed up the vid (it took more than 5 minutes to get to the finish line), to save the vid from boring. I hope you like the music, its the Benny Hill Show theme. 

To create such a big 8 from iceblocks I had to do a lot of digging and mining, my son helped a lot to save me from giving up. To get enough iceblocks had I travelled a lot, without any success. Then I found a small lake that got frozen at 1 side. I borrowed a special pick-axe  

from my son, made some buckets of iron and made a very simple Ice generator by filling holes in the ground with water from the lake, let it be frozen and dig it softly to get the ice block. I had to do this many times, so I made my own spawnpoint there. 

Besides me my son and another friend of his tried to race the track, still too slippery to be funny. I didnt know if there were bouncing blocks available on the server, if there were any I would use them and re-arrange the speedway into a bumper-car floor. 

That would be big fun with friends. I forgot to mention, because of the redstone failure, there is no round counter or a real finish line. So its easy to cheat and be the winner.

The ECH Files Part 3 : The Island

When my first house was finished I wasn't very happy with it, it looked like a prison.
So I went on an adventure and got to the seashore, just a 2-minute walk from the town.
My son was already busy creating some kind of harbor with lights and I was staring at the sea. Closeby I saw a small island, so I got there swimming Minecraft style and saw there were a bunch of small islands.
Well, I started to connect those small islands to 1 big island.

A lot of sand was needed so my son helped too with digging and reclaiming.  When it was
finally finished, but it was soo big, I didn't know what to do with it. I always wanted to build a big castle in Minecraft so I started with only stones where the desert made of. That means lots of orange and deep red.  My son helped with providing enough stones and I created my castle without any drawing.

It has a private room for me with some food, tools, and weapons for emergency and you can look from any tower or through the windows if somebody was coming my way from the sea. To survive I made also a small garden with stuff to eat, some trees for wood and some fishing rods and boats. I had no animals I didn't know how to get them to the island by boat. 

Watch the video if you want to see it with your own eyes. I had some space left so I created a fishing pond, but I never caught any fish there...

The music is a bit Caribbean style, it was recorded on cassette and converted to mp3, however, the aging did serious harming to the sound. I couldn't find the original game
CD-Rom (Kaleidoscope I think), if I find it again I will fix the sound and re-upload.

The ECH Files Part 2 : ECHClans Territory Town

You should see the video of the town first. The music was taken from TrackMania United Desert, very suitable in a video about a town in the desert. But as you can see in the end, also close to the sea, which made the location even more special. 
The town seemed to be unfinished and it is. After 1 friend was building some walls, others made structures that got in the way of these walls. And when that friend stopped playing nobody (including me) had the courage to continue. 
So you find some (un)finished houses, 2 mines, a monsterspawner, big towers to improve your falling skills, a farm, some special horses, chickens,  pigs, cows, sheeps, a temple and a minecart track to a some harbour. There was room for more members, but nobody travelled that far. Only an other player wanted to annoy us by claiming land close to the town. Lucky he had not much status, so he could claim very little. 
You also find a small nightclub in 1 of the corners of the town. 
My house was called ZT prison ( ZT is the short alias for mine Minecraft alias zooitroep), beneathyou find the temple and the minecart racetrack to the harbour. 
Beware of the monsterspawner, if you are not fast enough, you will be killed. 
And be carefull when looking below from high towers ( there are lifts), you get easily lost all your stuff if you hit the ground tne wrong way.

The ECHs Files Part 1 : Introduction

An Introduction:

During the last part of 2016 and the first part of 2017 my son (jeffrey123454) and I (zooitroep) played for the last time ever, the game Minecraft. We did not know at that time, but after June 2017 we both stopped. My son stopped earlier than me, cause he lost interest when his companion from school got banned forever from the server we were playing Minecraft on and other friends didn't want to join anymore.

The Minecraft server was called Elyssia MC and had fresh ideas about roleplaying.

Every player could choose 2 skills, like Miner, Explorer,  Farmer, etc. 

Those skills got upgraded by doing lost of things. Also, you could trade a lot, build your town, by claiming land and rent it. There was also PvP, but only outside your town. And all chests were locked for all other players unless you gave them 1 by 1 permission. 

I was not playing on that server from the start of ECHClan Territory (the name of the town), 

it was much later after his schoolmate got banned when using mods to get more loot when mining. My son got banned too but got access back later. By that time the town was almost finished, when I started building my first home, fixing the road to the entrance to the town (a lot of holes to fill ) and build more walls. 

Most of the buildings and other constructions were made by online friends of my son, 

with a little help of course. 

Lately, I asked my son how it all started. He said, we ( he and another friend) were looking for a place with much space, they fund in the desert a big tree and my son wanted to have a treehouse in Minecraft. And so it all began. 

I played on the server mostly with my son only, he helped mine with preparing and building of my structures like the underground minecart track, the icy speedway, the island and the underground temple. See the other videos in this playlist. He was the major and could claim enough land to build big structures. 

So when I was finished building, he played other games and didnt care about ECHClan Territory anymore. I tried to maintance it for a while by paying the rent and change little things on my structures. 

I made a couple of videos about the ECHClan Territory and I will create a shorter post about each of them to give you some backgrounds.

My Music Memories: Een kopje Koffie of VOF De Kunst

Another Dutch song, which is basically another cover with new lyrics. However, the lyrics fit the song and it could have been a hit outside The Netherlands. The original song was called "Verde e Amarelo" of Roberto en Erasmo Carlos from Brasil. The English translation will be "One Cup Of Coffee". Yes, it's a Dutch song about our national drink, coffee ;-)

Lucky for me I didn't translate more lines of text, somebody else did and created also a funny video featuring Kathryn Janeway of Star Trek Voyager series, who drinks a lot of coffee during the clip.


I had to admit, when I was working in the office they had a special coffee maker, which created perfect expresso. And I was a real addict, I drank some 6 mugs of expresso during the working day. If you count a mug as 3 times a normal expresso, you know I had no problem to stay awake. I had to, cause I got up at 6, to be on time at 8 at the office, mostly working until 17 or a bit later, be at home always after 6.



VOF De Kunst made more sing-a-long songs like "Suzanne" their greatest hit (also a cover), "Oude Liefde Roest Niet", they tried their luck in English songs as The Art Company and later they were successful with songs about Sinterklaas and other children songs.

Now I get very thirsty. I guess it's time for "Een kopje koffie".

My music memories: Sollicitere of Janse Bagge Bend (vs The Blues Brothers)

When the song was played everywhere on the Dutch radio stations, I had left school and was currently unemployed.I had many jobs via employment agencies, but all last for a couple of weeks or months. So I got an alimony from our town and had to apply for jobs.
I really liked the lyrics, cause I also had to write many cover letters (by hand) every week to prove I was searching for suitable jobs. Enough about me.

The Jasse Bagge Bend is a real live band, you can see it clearly in the official video-clip
of "Sollicitere" and I know it's just a cover of "Gimme Some Lovin" of the
The Spencer Davis Group, but I like this version much more. Why? Cause they changed the organ with a trumpet, sax, and trombone and made the song more Rhythm & Blues.

When I found out the real title of the original song I started to remember a musical comedy called "The Blues Brothers". 

If you don't remember it, it's a totally over the top movie with lots of car chasing/crashing, explosions, a stupid story about "The Blues Brothers Band" raising money for a community center and lots of great music and famous artists, for example James Brown as a reverend and Ray Charles as owner of music store.



But "The Blues Brothers" were not only comedians, they were also a great Rhytmn & Blues bands who played many concerts. 

One of the songs they played was, "Gimme Some Lovin", I could not find the whole song from the movie, so watch the clip with only the beginning of the song, showing the humor in the movie. 

If you like it, watch 
the whole movie. 


If you don't like the story, like it for the jokes. 

If you don't like the jokes, 
like it because of its music.

 If you don't like the music...
Well you better stop reading now.

When a movie is a great success, there will be a sequel sooner or later. In this case, 
it took 18 years, when "Blues Brothers 2000" came out. Don't watch that, just listen 
to the soundtrack and forget the movie. For your own good, trust me.


Last note about the Janse Bagge Bend, they made more 
very good songs, like "Awt en Versjlete", "D'n Hoofinzenjeur", "Prins Dzjah d'n 1ste" and more covers with new lyrics 
like "Proemevlaai" 
Sometimes funny lyrics, sometimes to think about.

 Maybe I will post more about "The Blues Brothers" movie,
At the moment I dont know what I had to say more about
the movie and his music.


Wait !
Special for you I translated the lyrics of "Sollicitere" into English.

 Sollicitere - Janse Bagge Bend
(Gimme Some Lovin'- The Spencer Davis Group)
 S. Winwood/E. Masthoff

Hey!
The perspectives for the future, which are zero comma zero,
Although after a lot of sweating you have a university bull.
If you are a teacher, bank clerk, or psychologist,
In the following years you are probably unemployed.

You must apply, apply!
They say you go ahead
Apply

Have you already written?
Seventy-five Letters!
Have you already written?
Seventy-five Letters!
Have you already written?
Then write them again!

Hey!
You start the day sleeping up to an hour or one,
You look in the newspaper if there are still jobs.
That is still nothing, so you sleep the rest of the day.
You feel quite lousy, you get the nerves on your stomach, cause

You must apply, apply!
Go ahead, you must write once again
Apply

Have you already written?
Seventy-five Letters!
Have you already written?
Seventy-five Letters!
Have you already written?
Then write them again!

On Monday you have to be at the social service again,
For the x time, fill in the form again.
You do illegal work, occasionly
But look out, the controller is watching you.

You must apply, apply!

Have you already written?
Seventy-five Letters!
Have you already written?
Seventy-five Letters!
Have you already written?
Then write them again!

Hey!
In the evening when it gets dark, you start to live
You look in it around if there is something going on.
You go to Punk band concert, perhaps going to a shabby shed
Maybe you'll go to the Janse Bagge Bend
With you need to apply, apply

Have you already written? Seventy-five Letters!
Have you already written? Seventy-six Letters!
Have you already written? Seventy-seven Letters!
Have you already written? Eighty Seventy letters!
Have you already written? Seventy-nine Letters!
Have you already written? Then you write again.

112 MSX Basic Games presents: SNACKBAR.GAM (65)

First SNACKBAR.GAM was just a simple game to translate, before I started to play it frequently. 
Then I saw the shortcomings of the game, no manual, no highscore and it was impossible to get the (hidden) highscore of 99950, cause each round give you maximum of 50 points, most of the time less. 
Well, not impossible but who wanna play more than 2000 rounds the same game ? I don't so when I add the highscore I change the amount of points you get. Now you only have to play around 400 rounds. 
Okay, I am not sure anyone will play this game that long. But it's very amusing game. Just another memory game, but the setting (a snackbar with a customer ordering and a waitress delivering) is very unique. Also another old listing from the Dutch magazine MCM and I still want to play it. 

The listing itself was very uncomplicated so when I had to change the layouts for the new highscores, it wasn't that hard to do. Writing the manual was not so easy if you use SCREEN 1, cause you can't make long sentences. 
 I also made the manual completly cursorkeys/joystick compatible, the listing of mr. H. Mak had a very clear way of making choices with a joystick, just checking the up and down direction.

Mediafire / Pcloud if you still wanna beat the highscore... 

And if you miss some games in your 112 MSX Basic Games collection, you can download
them from this list

112 MSX Basic Games presents: BULLS.GAM (66)

Another action game and 100% Basic.
That's "Catching Bulls". It's a simple game, just put fences around the bull so it cannot move and you win !   
Yes ! Okay, next post ! 



Oh, I think I forgot to mention the bull is randomly dangerous, if it hits you, you start over again. And there are 2 difficulties easy (1) and hard (2). My record was 20 seconds on (1). 


You might complain about the sprite detection, when you get hit by the bull.  


It's your own fault, you have to be carefull and plan where you put those fences . 

There is no title screen, just a short manual and a playscreen. Another SCREEN 1 game, I just like the originality and playability of it. 
Better than any pacman remake in MSX-BASIC.  Agreed? Then you may proceed to the download links : 
Mediafire / Pcloud. 

Dont read this, play it now ! 

I just made the manual, made a good name, but did not know how to improve this game. It's good, basta.

Impossible Objects ( the MSX part)

First, the MSX disk was called Optical Illusions, changing the name to Impossible Objects was a logical step, cause all the collected demos were mostly Impossible Objects instead lots of different genres of Optical Illusions.   

Also, most of the Impossible Objects were not real Escher's, more inspired by. 

The disk is for MSX-2 and higher and most impressive demo is ESCHERS (option 5), which is completely written in MSX-Basic without loading any pictures showing a lot of beautiful Impossible Objects.

When I tested the disk for the last time, before uploading it to Mediafire and Pcloud,  I noticed that to pictures was damaged after crunching it ( without picture crunching I would be able to show maybe 8 pictures a disk ). The crunching was done a long time ago by myself with the first (and worst) program I could find, COMPRESS. 

I search all my disks for the original pictures, no luck. Then I tried to save the damaged pictures in regular BLOAD,S format, my VideoGraphics kept complaining about the file format. So I made a screenshot in my BlueMSX emulator of the damaged pictures and tried to fix the missing GFX in the pictures with good-old Microsoft Paint. One picture was so badly damaged I had to improvise. 

After that I converted the repaired screenshots in the online MSX conversor to MSX SCREEN 8, then I had to compress these and put the new versions on disk. Yes, you see very clearly the differences between the undamaged and the repaired pictures (also in size). 

I could try harder to repair it with other MSX drawing program, but for me, it's wasting time. 

Warning, when choosing option 1-4, it's better to reset your MSX computer after you watched it. Most of the time the ML-code for the crunchers prevents other crunchers 

to start up.

 

I included the MSX crunchers  I used, COMPRESS.BAS and PICRUNCH.BAS.

As described above, stay away from COMPRESS.

I learned something the hard way NEVER COPY FILES IN MSX-BASIC. Always use 

MSX-DOS instead. I got a lot of corrupted pictures are copying to another disk with the COPY command in MSX-BASIC.

Have fun with the disk.

MEDIAFIRE / PCLOUD,

Optical Illusions & Impossible Objects ( non MSX part)

Recently we bought 2 books about Optical Illusions, very cheap. It explains a lot about different kind of optical illusions. 

I did not know there were so many. 
Even long time ago, at the Romans they made already some optical illusions, famous painters used it and later on in childrenbooks and newspapers. 


The books shows you can create almost with everything some kind of illusion. 

It made me wonder if I could find some optical illusions on my MSX disks. I found 2 slideshows with impossible objects. 
In the Netherlands we call every impossible objects 
an Escher, the famous Dutch artist who created some optical illusions just by hand. Some slideshows were not enough to fill the disk so I converted some pictures imspired by Escher, I called them Modern Eschers. While I was searching for Modern Eschers I stumbled into some Russian English blogs about impossible objects everywhere and also some videos of animated Eschers. These videos are very impressive and made me wonder what would happened if Escher had a computer to work on. 
Enjoy the videos, the blogs and the MSX disk 
I compiled, called Impossible Objects Disk.

Check out that other post.

- Blogs about Impossible Objects
- A lot of Animated Eschers on Vimeo


There is more than only YouTube, so I tried to find interesting videos on Vimeo.
And I found enough good stuff.
Check out vimeo.com, you might the interface.

PSG Tracker videos

I was searching for Eschers on in my collection MSX disks and MCCM CD-Roms, 

when I found a disk called PSGTRCKR. As a regular user of FAC Soundtracker, Moonblaster and PRO Tracker I was of course very curious what a PSG Tracker would look like and what the possibilies were. I have not many music-editors for PSG that are more than a 3-tones organ.

PSG Tracker started with a nice logo in SCREEN 5, but after loading, the editor showed only 40 columns!!! Why create a MSX -2 logo and use only 40 columns of a MSX-1? 

But more trouble to come. There was only an incomplete manual inside the editor, 

no separate manual as txtfile and only 1 demo song . A converted Impact song. 

Well, the layout look a bit like Moonblaster and just like Moonblaster is PSG Tracker capable to convert a FAC Soundtracker music-files. Not the drumtrack (OH NO !!) and only 3 channels of the regular 6. I didnt test the conversion with every FAC Soundtracker version, but the editor had some nice features ( remember last input, easy delete), worked very fast and then I discovered the SELECT button I could change some more settings. 

I did expertments with PSG drums, which was not so easy to create. If you have only 3 channels sound, the PSG drums will collide with one of them.  

After I puzzled how the editor worked I converted my first song of Ernst Schuller ofUnicorn Corporation, "Shizo-Frequency". Its more a loop than a song, but I liked it so much 

I converted the original FM-Basic listing into a FAC Soundtracker musicfile and now into PSG Tracker. Choosing the right 3 channels was not so difficult, the PSG drums took a lot of time, cause I did not know how to copy part of tracks and I tried to make the song less boring by experimenting with different drum-riffs. 

When I finishing it I liked the result so much I recorded it and send it to YouTube. 

After convertIng my first FAC Soundtracker song I wanted to do more, 1 song of all the great MSX groups that used FAC Soundtracker, 1x Impact, 1x Unicorn Corporation, 1x FAC. 

-Sorry if I missed other MSX groups -

So I was looking for a nice song of the FAC, some kind of ballad. I found "Basic Principles" but editing the drumtrack in almost 80 tracks was no fun. Also the song swapped channels, so after converting 3 channels some part had only a bassline in PSG Tracker. 

I edited the song, so every channel was in use during the whole song and I noticed that the editor had no feature to create different PSG voices, every voice sounded the same if the same octave was used. Pity, I was going to like the program. 

I finished the song put it to YouTube. 

Then what? I had put so many hours in Basic Principles I had no strength left to convert another one. Maybe a song of TwinSoft ? There was another important feature missing in PSG Tracker, a MSX Basic replayer. Now you cannot use PSG Tracker songs in your own Basic programs,  like other music editors can.
I put a question in the MSX.org forum, but if seemed the original maker lost all sources 

and documentation. I don't think I get a proper answer from anyone.

If you want to try it, here is the zip with 2 disks, 1 program disk and 1 music disk. 

You have to switch disks, cause PSG TRACKER only works with 1 drive.

MEDIAFIRE PCLOUD  ( beware dont save on your programdisk it's copyprotected).