How about some surreality to cap off a wonderfully weird night?

29 November 2007

In the words of my namesake, I'll explain later.

First up, one of my fellow retrocomputing afficionados named Toni Westbrook has undertaken an amazing project: Shredz64. Chances are, you've heard of the game Guitar Hero, in which you use a controller shaped very much like an electric guitar to 'play' rock music as a character in a video game. I've never played it, but it looks like it might be neat. Anyway, Westbrook is designing an interface for the Commodore-64 called the PSX64 that will let you hook a Guitar Hero controller up. He's also developing a game that works very much like the Guitar Hero games (albeit with vastly simplified graphics) in which you'll have to hit the proper button on the controller at the right time to hit a scrolling image that roughly corresponds to a musical note on a vertical staff. Westbrook's planning on using .SID or .MOD files for the actual music that the player will hear during the course of the game, and an analysis component that will map notes in the song to scrolling objects?

Make sense? Good. I just re-read that, and I can't figure out what in the hell I just wrote.

In other news, a guy named Ben Lewry worked his old laptop computer into the body of an electric guitar. The LCD panel is directly behind the strings, and the computer continuously runs a visualisation program against the sound produced, the output of which is shown on the display. v2.0 of the TVGuitar includes motion sensors, which add direction and velocity to the frequency analysis feature of the visualiser. Watch the posted videos on the page, it'll make more sense.