GOTO80 - Bortabra
BORTABRA is 5 tracks in 55 minutes, mostly based on C-64 improvisation in ambient/electronica style. Well-balanced between chaos AND cute, ideal for chromatic enjoyment in sofas and meadows.

GOTO80 & Entter - _2_4×4
6 tracks and one machinima glitch video! Funk, acid, electro, ambient, buggy dub, house and noise - but somehow it’s all techno!?

He’s also on three newly released compilations, Level Up on DWD, Sudd mixtape vol. 2 (8-bit edition) and Holy 8bit Night on the newly started Japanese indie label VORC Records.
The compilation CD from VORC records costs 2500 Yen, about $23. (But you can preview the trcks online) It’s still unknown to me whether VORC records are associated with my favourite chiptune news central, vorc.org.

I’ve listened to the tracks, and I can attest that they are good sid indeed! So grab’em while they’re hot.

August 31, 2007, Ignatz posted a manifesto called “Chip music is Dead” on the LSDj mailing list. The message and the intense discussions following it can be observed here. After a while, someone got the idea to make a compilation with just that theme, “chip music is dead”. And because of some confusion or something, there are now not one, but two compilations on the theme.

The first one is was compiled by Ignatz and released on his own netlabel, Gainlad. It contains tracks from several of the oldies from the LSDj wave of chip music. In fact the album appears to be dominated by Gameboy music made with LSDj. Most of the tracks that are not made with LSDj seems to be made either with another chip, or pigggytracker. And as always, Bud Melvin’s track is an LSDj track accompanied by his banjo.

The other release marks the start of the new netlabel chiptorrent. As the name suggests, the idea is to distribute chip music with the bittorrent protocol. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, the torrent is not seeded, so I can’t give any form of review of i right now, but judging from the people on the compilation I think it will be good. Notably, the name flashbob appears twice, making him the only artist participting on both compilations. Also notable, the cover of the chiptorrent compilation says “Music is dead”, which is a possible pun on Ignatz’ manifesto.

The 20 tracks on the two compilations shows what I always knew: The chip scene is alive and kicking!

After much secrecy, the Pushpin Gameboy MIDI synth has finally been release to the public as open source. The software lets you tweak just about every parameter the Gameboy sound chip has to offer. The source code instructions how to build are available on Google Code: http://pushpin.googlecode.com/.
There’s also a mailing list for those interested in the tech talk.

The wave of Gameboy music has not ended. It has merely begun!

This is a far out creation by Joey Mariano, aka Animal Style. It is a breakout box for his Gameboy color, which allows him to control each button of the GBC with any foot switch of his choice. The foot switches can even be used to do button combos, for use with nanoloop. And needless to say, the box also features a prosounded output, for optimum audio output quality.

Edit: Fixed the name…

This guy, Kipkay, found an old Star Trek Laser Phaser toy 1976. The design is cool, but the light in it is a tad too wee. So he replaced the original lamp with a laser diode from a PlayStation 3 Blu-Ray laser pickup. The result: A great looking laser beam.

And he even had the courtesy of telling the world how to do it, for under $100!

Instruction Video

I stumbled upon the JXD 301 MP4 player. (MP4 is not a typo for MP3. MP4 is a video format, and accordingly, this is a video player.) The JXD 301 plays all common audio and video formats, and has a high contrast LTPS display and a builtin speaker which is amazingly clear for a unit of this small size. It also has two headphones jack as opposed to the regular one. It’s still unknown to me whether they can be controlled separately from software though. (Which would make it even more interesting, having 4 sound channels in total)

But what makes it interesting to me is that it ships with emulators for a large number of oldschool consoles. (NES, SNES, Sega Mega Drive, Gameboy Classic, Gameboy Advance and Neo Geo) It sports a powerful Blackfin CPU clocked at 600 MHz and has an upgradeable firmware.  At a price of $126.50 this could be a serious rival to the GP2x, if it can attract a devoted community of homebrew developers and users.

If you’re interested in buying it, you can do so from MP4Nation.com who have also made a demonstration video, that you can watch here.