Strawberry Strings
A tribute to Marco Passarani's works and a study on C64 programming
It's hard for me start to composing tunes after some years, but I'm lucky because Marco released new album, when I listen his works I am amazed at how beautiful complexity of simplicity is.
It is a sort of music video that runs on a Commodore 64 and shows random pictures synchronizing with music.
There's not a true random generator in this world, but mixing up some pseudo random generators and the loading times of the floppy drive gives me the feeling of a sufficient advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic.
The images are randomly cropped from Marco's album cover art The Wildlife of the Quieter Ones and converted with convertron3000 slightly modified to have different densities of ordered dither algorithm. Resulting images has been Tiny Crunched and put on a floppy.
This is the palette I used to try to look like one of my C64Cs
Every time program starts it shuffle the 64 images sequence randomly.
The random numbers was get by mixing (with exclusive or) three numbers:
- The noise wave from the SID oscillator number 3
- The raster time position
- The system timer A
SEED=8E - Real hardware - Budget video grabber (MS210x)
I got this problem with video glitches and artifacts so I perceive this low quality of composite grab as pure art. In other hand I am very disappointed that it runs at 25fps ruining the color mix effect at the end screen.
Every time an image is loaded we wait for a drum beat, a sound or a choosen command to show it. After that we load the next image of the sequence or the next scene.
Thank you Cadaver for the Ninja Tracker
I found I can fit a little more images on a floppy but the shuffle algorithm was easier to code with 64 elements :)
Thank you Krill for the Loader
Shuffle algorithm was "somewhat intriguing" because the odd pics loads at $2000 and the even at $6000 so can only shuffle odds with odds and even with evens.
Same shuffle sequence where used also for composing animation of the first image showed.
The main video was recorded on Vice 3.5 with a modded palette (mat64-lemon.vpl).
The name "lemon" comes from the fact that Elder0010 cleaned so well the commodore I got the palette so that smelled like a lemon.
SEED=00 - Vice 3.5 - custom palette
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