Ah, trackers. This cool video brings back memories of the program I learned how to write electronic music on: Impulse Tracker. Nights after my web design job I’d sit for hours in front of my Pentium IV in DOS learning hexadecimal so I could add notes one by one and then toss on note effects. It was primitive compared to what we have today, but it taught me a lot about DSP and composition and without it I wouldn’t be where I am today (my most recent album is Coaster, which was done with FL Studio. Mercifully my early attempts at music done with IT have vanished into the ether ;-) ).

Trackers are sample based, and back in the day when hard drives were smaller one had to think about file size carefully when dealing with multimedia stuff. The easiest route to go was to just use sounds already on your hard drive in the Windows system folder. The artist, SomethingUnreal, expanded on the idea and made a track from Windows XP and Windows 98.

The artist uses ModPlug Tracker:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimed…
That will install itself as a program, which you can start running from the Start menu, as you would with most other programs. ;)

A while ago, I made a VERY brief (sorry) guide for getting started with ModPlug Tracker, and at least getting SOME sound out of it.
It’s at my site, here:

http://robbi-985.homeip.net:8000/info…

(Since that’s a text file, it might be easier to read if you download it (right-click, Save Link or Target As) and view it in a text editor like Notepad.)

Matthew Gallant over at The Quixotic Engineer has posted an interesting look at the evolution of the A & B buttons on game controllers. Me, I’ve got a Dreamcast so my world is backwards whenever I play on someone’s Nintendo system–it takes a second to get up to speed. Sony abandoned the whole letter thing and went with a circle, cross, triangle, and square, which one of the commenters pointed out:

# Jonathan Says:
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:06 am

Regarding the PlayStation controller, I read the following today :

circle = one stroke
cross = two strokes
triangle = three strokes
square = four strokes

Which then seems to align it with Nintendo’s layout.

Neat.

true_flicker_candle-sm.pngHere’s a great example of why it’s good to get a second pair of eyes to look at something that you’re designing. Did they really have to put that little candle graphic right after the “i” there?