let's play intendo

[kensuguro]

My friend never got it right.. he always said let's play intendo. And I was like, it's Nintendo, with an N. Anyway, I was building a max patch for performing on an NES (with a midi adapter cartridge) and decided I should try writing a piece to see what it's like.

And darn it's hard.. it's 2 square with variable pulse width, 1 traingle, and 1 noise channel. So, there can only be 3 voices at any given time.. which makes 4 voice chords hard to execute. And since the timbre palette is so limited, it's hard to create spectral variation..

[braincell]

It's cute like anime... or lolicon!

[hubird]

[garyb]

forget that i said that orchestras were your forte'. you're good at intendo cheese too....

[hubird]

Less (more restrictions) is More (less but good choices).

[ChrisWerner]

Reminds me on the good old times when the first computer games had music. Could be a funny jump and run game. Thank you for the memories.

[Joat]

And done with real, midified NES. Ybercool.
If you feel like doing this kind of music easier (or just use the sounds for some other kind of music) there is some good VST instruments for the job as well. For NES emulation, check this out:

http://www.tweakbench.com/peach

There is also a pretty good SID emulator VST out htere, called QuadraSid, but it's not free. Costs almost nothing, tho.

Old video game sounds can really add a strange dimension to any song.

[kensuguro]

great minds think alike? This one's done with vsti, just to get a "feel" as I prepare the max patches to control the real NES. This one's done with 8bitmagic from CMYK.

I'm only helping with the performance patch, but a friend of mine is going to perform for a chip tune event called BLIP. I'm a stranger to the scene, but BLIP is supposed to be the biggest event of its kind, so I'm kinda excited to see how my max patch turns out.