Xplora 1 CD-Rom - Peter Gabriel

Let's begin with saying "There is no Xplora 2". You can stop reading here! 

Now I will continue for those who want something about "Xplora 1". 

Peter Gabriel is one of these artists who knows how to use new technologies.
So when the CD-Rom games starting to become very populair, he not only release a CD called "Us" and also a CD-Rom with a musical multimedia experience, with video clips from his singles of the CD "Us", some musical games, puzzles, photo's, sounds and other interesting info.

With the CD-Rom came a beautiful book with more stuff to read,  more pictures, photos like on another magazine ever.

I kept the book somewhere (in other words: I don't know where I put it) and the CD-Rom 

cause I liked the idea of a musical adventure, where you can just watch or explore.

When I bought it, my PC was not capable of running it (too slow) and when I got a faster PC, it won't run it, cause it used an too old version of Video for Windows. Yes, this CD-Rom was made when Windows 3.1 was all around and Windows 95 not yet to be released.

Now recently on my virtual Windows XP, it works a bit, except for the videos.

Lucky for me, others like it too and posted some videos of "Xplora 1".

It was also released for Apple Mac computers and Philips CD-I. Understandable, but CD-I was a very very bad system.

Of the whole CD-Rom, I like the video-clips of the songs of the album "Us" the most.

"Kissing That Frog", "Steam" and "Digging In The Dirt"is very fascinating to watch.

Yeah, I know "Steam" is just another "Sledgehammer", but almost as good.

I will leave you with a short video review and sort of play through by a proud owner of de CD-Rom.

And some videos of my fav songs of "Us" or "Xplora 1"

My Music Memories : Hit Me With Your Rhyme-stick - Ian Dury and the Blockheads

When I was at primary school, Ian Dury was for a short time very popular. 

His first hit "Sex and Drugs and Rock n Roll" was sung by everybody in the translation "Koek and drop and Milky-Way". 



But his 2nd hit with the "Rythme-stick" was even better, and I still like it. 


It's funky, funny and everyone likes to shout HIT ME ! with Ian. 
If some white guys trying to be funky, then this is should be the result. 
The blockheads play like crazy and with the stoïcijns Ian at the front talk-singing 
his crazy lyrics, it's magic. 


Because of these Ian Dury hits, I bought much later the MSX version of Deus Ex Machina, but that's another story 
I already posted. 

After 2 hits I never heard anything from Ian Dury...
Years and years later I bought some kind of greatest hits album of Ian Dury, a bad buy.

All songs even those the other ones with the Blockheads, were just songs you listen to in an empty bar, easy to forget and not worthy to listen to it twice ( well maybe not: Reasons To Be Cheerful part 3 )

Examples: 
- Wake up and make love to me
- Sueperman's Big Sister
- Billericay Dickie
- I Wanna Be Straight
- What A Waste




 
These are just more avant-garde then funky, just not catchy enough. 
No surprise, these titles were no hits in the Netherlands. 
He did want he wanted to do, no concessions in lyrics or music. And no more hits.

But every time I hear "Hit Me" I just smile, turn up the volume and shout "HIT ME !!!" 

Sorry, here are a couple remixes that can compete with the original (sorry Paul Hardcastle).

Some Basics 4 MSX Basic ( part 5 )

Some Basics 4 MSX Basic ( part 5 )

Problem: 
Sometimes you cant start the next program automaticly, for example the Wordstore+ Basic replayer. Why ? Cause the replayer removes the entire Basic program that started the replayer.

Example:

10 PRINT Play the WS+ sample"
20 BLOAD "sample.ws",R
30 A=USR(0)
40 END

It wil not work. After the BLOAD the whole Basic program is gone.

Solution: 
An easy methode is, let the user press a key to start the next part of the program.
 Example:  

10 ' Some Basics 4 MSX Basic 5
20 SCREEN 0
30 PRINT "Press ENTER to run this program again"
40 PRINT:PRINT "run"
50 LOCATE 0,CSRLIN-2
60 END 

The trick is in line 50. The CSRLIN has the value of the current Y coordinate on the text-screen. We extract 2 from the current Y coordinate, so the cursor will be on the first character of the word "run" and we end the program. 

If the user press ENTER, it will start then same program again.
Of course instead of "run" you can use "BLOAD"sample.ws",R".

It's not very fancy, but I used this trick  a couple of times, 
cause I didn't had a better solution.

TnC Internet Adventures: Red Zora (Magix & Ultra Red)

For some posts about Kaleidoscope software programs I had bought in the past, I was browsing in my special CD case full of Multi-media CD-/DVD-Roms.

Before I even found those Kaleidoscope CD-Roms, I re-discovered an enhanced Audio-CD
labeled Ultra Red Red Zora published by Magix. That was very interesting, because it was not only a maxi CD-single (4 tracks), but had also a multimedia part by Magix with demo's and the PlayR remix-program to create your own version of Red Zora.

I never liked the song Red Zora, but the Berlin Jones Remix (track 3) was not too bad. 
The single version reminds me a little too much of the remixes of disco-classics Daddy Cool and Ma Baker of Boney M.

Anyway, I tried to get the PlayR to work on my Windows 10 PC, but Windows 10 didn't let me install it. Too old. When I tried again with a VMware version of Windows XP Professional it installed, but cause my soundcard doesnt support the DirectSound of DirectX6 (yes that is old) the program crashed and never started up again after that incident.

What I saw was to turntables where you could add en remove samples of Red Zora in realtime, so while the music played you can play with the samples. Nice Idea, I saw it earlier in DJ Station, maybe from the same programmer.

There was also a possibility to create your own video-clip, with some visuals and short vids of a moving creapy version of a Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) clone.
I wondered if Magix wanted to create a "Red Zora" horror-movie, glad I could not find it at YT. And I am not planning to create a video myself with these vids, too scary.

I was wondering if I should find all tracks on YT and to my suprise "Red Zora" was not an original song, made with Magix Music Maker ( or any other Magix clone), but a remix of the theme from the TV-series "Die rote Zora und ihre Bande ". The TV-serie was made for children in 1979, but the story was much older, made in 1941 by Kurt Held. After the TV-serie they made a movie called "Die rote Zora" and they used the remix of Ultra Red as the new theme for the movie.Sorry, most info is in Germany language.

From the original music from the TV-serie I found an instrumental version (basic stuff for the remix of Ultra Red), a French version "Zora la rousse" and a German version "Die rote Zota". I liked the French version, cause I dont like any kids choirs...

I tried to find better remixes than in this maxi CD-single, but if you dont like the original,
you will find noty much, so I like only this remix of Tom Borijn, cause he used almost nothing of the original Zora song...

MSX Google: week 17, 2018

After all current my internet adventures I found enough websites to create an other MSX Google week. 

This time I searched for MSX TV and MSX monitor images, to be used in a long video I still want to make of the Moonblaster mix "Between Good and Evil Gabba Heads"  I created already a short video-clip ( "2 Felix" ), but I wanted to use the Kaleidoscope animations from the Philips Designer program also in the long mix and using images of all kinds 
of MSX computers (with monitor or tv) to display those animations, just like in the video clip, only with other images.

 
The results were poor, lots of images of MSX computers, but 99% without any TV or monitor. So I must re-think the whole idea for the video for the long mix.

But all is not lost. I found some websites that had some interesting MSX content. There is also non-interesting MSX content. I don't care much about the history of MSX, 
why it's a failure and why not, where the name MSX came from, etc. etc. 

You can believe msx.org, Wikipedia or any other website. I believe they all have facts and opinions, so I believe all stories are true.

For me, MSX stands for playing very old but good games, programming in powerful Basic
and listening to amazing music from games or made especially for MSX on the MSX by lots of composers.

Enough bullshit, here are some interesting MSX content I found: 

The Nightfall Crew website shows how computer hardware looks like inside and gives lots 
of information about what must be repaired and how it's done .Together with lot of images, it's nice to browse. Not many MSX stuff, but some obscure Philips computers and a Arabic computer, all with interesting technical details. 

Yes, there is still 1 Dutch MSX shop !!!
Not much to buy, a couple of Dutch MSX books, a UMJA controller for using an USB mouse (even wireless) on your MSX computer and a SE-ONE MP3 player with FM radio. An UMJA may come handy, cause 2nd hand MSX mouses are hard to get. 
But a MP3 player ? Why do you want that ? We all know you better play MP3 files on much newer devices. Why prove that MSX computers are capable of playing MP3 files? 
Hellow, it's 2018. Nobody cares. 
Everybody listens to music on smartphones, tablets and laptops. 

Better go on with the next site.

I never heard of Wilbert Berendsen, till I found this page.
He was the programmer of the WBASS MSX assemblers !
Finally, I know where the WB stands for. 
Not. I was never interested in assembler programming, too tough to handle for me. 

Well, that was all the MSX stuff he ever made, but his CV is very impressive.
Now he is an organ player, composer and still a computer nerd, interesting combination.




And now I break a tradition, a non-MSX link in the MSX Google week. While the MSX world is still waiting for the MSX-3 computer, I present to you: the MSX-5 Monitor !!!

Well, that's all Folks !!

Some Basics 4 MSX Basic ( part 4 )

Hellow again.
This example is a bit longer than earlier posts. 

I wanted to make a good example of what you can do with characters in SCREEN 1,
but colours would make the example too long.

Problem:How to get bold characters in SCREEN 1

Solution: VPOKE only the charcters you want to speed up your code
 

Example:
100 ' SB4B-04 apr/may 2018 TnC
110 SCREEN 1:WIDTH32:KEY OFF
120 PRINT "SCREEN 1: Bold Characters":PRINT: PRINT
130 '---
140 T$="ABCDEF":PRINT T$:PRINT:GOSUB 220
150 T$="123456":PRINT T$: PRINT: GOSUB 220
160 T$="abcdef":PRINT T$:PRINT:GOSUB 220
170 '---
180 PRINT:PRINT "Press any key when ready"
190 IF INKEY$="" THEN 190
200 SCREEN 0:KEY ON:END
210 '---
220 FOR T=1 TO LEN(T$)
230 A=(ASC(MID$(T$,T,1)))*8
240 FOR V=A TO (A+8)
250 VPOKE V,VPEEK(V) 0R VPEEK(V)/2
260 NEXT:NEXT
270 RETURN 

I wanted to make a good example of what you can do with characters in SCREEN 1,
but colours would make the example too long.


The clever VPOKE in line 250 does the whole trick, but you need to know the ASCII table. Then you know which characters must be bold.

For example: 

ASCII 65 = "A", 90 = "Z"

ASCII 97 = "a", 122 = "z"

ASCII 32 = space
ASCII 48 = "0", 57 = "9"


Please remember: Never use special msx chars to vpoke if you publish it online. 
Better use standard ascii characters like # or $ or ?




And after a CLS or SCREEN command, the bold characters will be normal again.

"Deep State" Theme Music - Dan Berridge (Fox TV series)

Sometimes you see a trailer on TV and you think, not too bad, another James Bond clone, whose family is being kidnapped and he had to kill someone for the last time. 
But after seeing episode 4 (Reunion, I missed the first 3) you know its more than just an old secret agent trying to stay alive and rescue his family. 

It's also about powerful people in any secret service, who have the power to change anything if they want if they get enough money to do so and let others take the blame or say its for the best of their country. 

For the intro, Dan Berridge made a really haunted version of the intro of "Once In A Lifetime" by the Simple Minds. I recorded by hand the intro with Dutch subtitles from the Fox TV, cause that intro shows really what the series is all about. Not another Rambo action series (like all official trailers of Fox networks), but this intro let you think about what happened behind the news of today. Is the news not manipulated by any secret action of any security agents?

And why did Fox TV choose the "Once In A Lifetime" song for Deep State?
I made me wonder why Swedemason took the song, speeches of president Trump and mixed them together.. 
Want more Deep State conspiracy theories, here it is.
If you just want to know more about this TV serie, check out the offical website.
Very stylish, just like the intro I recorded.