There's this insane Super Mario World hack called Kaizo Super Mario World that's like Syoban Action in that it's a fiendishly difficult take on the conventional Mario paradigm. There's a lot of videos of it on YouTube, which are very entertaining. Then there's another take entirely, by a guy who hacked Snes9x to record all the times you reload a save state and play them all on top of one another. The whole thing takes on a quantum-mechanics "multiple-world" kind of thing where there are many copies of Mario doing slightly different things. Very cool.
But while he was testing out this wonderful hacked Snes9x he ran into some problems, resulting in this gem:
Reminds me aesthetically of another very cool (intentionally glitchy) creation, Crystal Castles.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
More Super Mario World
Sunday, March 9, 2008
New Hope for Pretty MIDIs
Well, back in the mid-90s FM synthesis for MIDI playback on most soundcards was pretty standard. When we got our first Pentium with Windows 95, Microsoft thoughtfully included some nice bonus media to show off their new OS. This included the classic canyon.mid, as well as a nice version of In the Hall of the Mountain King, Fur Elise and some others. Anyway, this era of FM-synthesis GM was great, and when really shitty wavetable synthesis started to become dominant, I think everybody agrees that it was bad. So that makes me happy to announce that I've found a nice easy way to get something that sounds like the same ol' FM synth stuff, even if it probably isn't. That's right, foobar2000 version 0.9 now has a very nice MIDI decoder complete with synthesizer, and it sounds very nice. You can get the plugin here; it's foo_midi, of course.
And here's a nice MIDI I made for one of our old one hour MIDI compos we used to have. I was never good at MIDI sequencers.
SONAR KILLS DREAMS
In other news, reddit showed me this very interesting page about a man with a great idea: making infrared goggles that block out all light in the visible spectrum so that your eyes start to see what little infrared they can pick up. It sounds so cool walking around on a sunny day seeing things trees glowing pinkish white while the sky is black. Maybe I'll try making these pretty soon.
Note: there may be concern that this will damage your eyes; but I don't think UV leaks through the filters, as shown by the light spectra graphs he has up. It's possible that lots and lots of infrared radiation is getting through to your wide-open pupils, however, and I think that might be a concern.
