Kaleidoscopes Part 2 : Philips Designer MSX-2

WHE I BOUGH my frst MSX comuter VG 8235 I GOT home office 1 and msx dos and a msx dcursus on disk. at home officw 1 contns a very nice screen 8 drawng program MSX Designer of A koene. LATER i got desgner plus on my nms 8245 and downloade later via my modem the latest videographics for 8280. nw i dont wantto go deeper into the differences between these prorams, they had at least 2 things in common all made by a koene and all run on screen 8. but mx desiner had one feature the other 2 programs did not havem a kaleidiscpoe i like it cause its absolutely random and afterxx visuls it shows he name of the maker. it works in series of circles, triangles or other stuf, however the choosen colors wll hurt your eyes and the multiplying after creatin a visualis not a s fast as i wiss. i like it anyway and used it in the short videoclip 2 felix with a speed up  of 200 or 500 procent

Video was made but mostly drawings with ugly colors. Edit needed badly!

Kaleidoscopes Part 1 : Psychedelia MSX-1

Between my collection of MSX games there was a program called PSYCH, yeah MSX tapes doesnt allow more than 5 charcaters. 
If you start it, you saw the full name called PSYCHEDELIA. It was one of the first visulaizers on any computer, it was made for commodore 6510, ported tozx spectrum and in the end also to msx. with your jkoystick and lots of keys ou could change the patterns, colors speed and a couple of other things. bUT you could create and sae your own set of settings, it didnt respond to any music, like todays visualizers and you could not create your own patterns or texts. so within 15 minutes youhave seen it all and reset your msx to play a real game. and because its a port it doesnt use allMSX 1 colours, only 6 of them, which is a reaL mistake. BUT hey easy money... the software PSYCHEDELIA was when it came out very overprized, and what i like the most in it, is the very high speed of the visuals. the creator made other visulizers the interat to controllers and music, check the website, he improved in many ways his PSYCHEDELIA.
When I started this post I was convinced I had to make a video about the MSX version of PSYCHEDELIA, but after seen YT videos of the Spectrum I saw no differences with the MSX version and therefor no reason to create and upload.

I found the manual of the C64 version, I guess the port to Spectrum and MSX uses the same keys. Maybe it will help to figure out what you can do with the MSX version.

However nobody else tried the same thing on MSX-1 in any way, which is a bit of disapointment for me, considering the amount of MSX-1 software that has been made. 

Link to yt spectrum version needed.

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.