Update: June 22, 2009

Open Emu version 1.0.0b2 is now available, featuring a massively refactored architecture and several new emulator cores. Go get it!

Open Emu, an application I helped develop, is now available for download at SourceForge.net. Here’s my part of the story.

At the first Blip Festival in 2006, I generated some of the visuals with jit.atari2600, a plugin for Max/MSP/Jitter (my platform at the time) that encapsulated an open source Atari emulator. Jit.atari2600 was buggy so I quit using it in performance, but the idea of encapsulating an emulator and ‘bending’ it in software — as my friends noTendo and No Carrier do with hardware — stuck with me. Early last year, I began looking for an open source Nintendo emulator and learning Objective-C/Cocoa in order to try making an emulator plugin myself. I found Open Nestopia, an open source, Cocoa-based port of the fearsomely thorough and accurate Nestopia emulator by Martin Freij, and started work on the plugin during my residency at the Experimental Television Center. I contacted Open Nestopia’s developer Josh Weinberg who generously, patiently and kindly helped me get the app to build and get a sense of his code and what to do with it. Then I got really, really busy with other things and shelved the project until August when, with the help of Josh and Anton, I got the plugin to build and run in QC.

Anton joined the project — which in the meantime Josh had transformed into Open Emu, a framework for multiple emulators (NES, Atari, Sega, Gameboy) — and development really took off. Now, five months later, our first beta release of Open Emu is live on SourceForge and the Quartz Composer plugins are in private beta and soon will be public. I couldn’t have learned this much and brought the plugin this far this quickly without the overwhelmingly generous help of Josh and Anton especially, as well as all the other friends and developers who’ve patiently answered my noob questions these many months. Thank you Josh, Anton, Eric, Ben and everyone else.

Gamers! If you’d like to play your favorite old school games on Mac OS X, download the beta and give it a whirl. It’s still got some bugs so we’d very much appreciate your feedback.

Visualists and hackers! Stay tuned to the Open Emu site for our Quartz Composer plugins, coming soon.

**Oh, and if you’d like to see me use Open Emu in a show, come out to 8static in Philly next month.

p.s. We’re having a private beta on the plugins right now. If you’d like to try them, let me know. Note: you must have the Leopard Developer Tools (and thus Quartz Composer) installed for these to be useful.

demo reel from plasticpool on Vimeo.

The latest and greatest version of my demo reel, edited by the fantabulous Benton-C Bainbridge. Watch it in HD!

Music: “Compressoratorer” by Lucky Highstepper.

Paul Owens writes to say:

Hey everyone, I just wanted to spread the word that the feature length documentary [Reformat the Planet] that I directed is now streaming off of the mega hipster site Pitchfork Media…

http://pitchfork.tv/week/blip-festival-reformat-the-planet

the whole movie. for one week only!

If you haven’t yet seen it, or have been waiting for a copy that I never got around to sending, please check it out now. for those of you who aren’t familiar with the movie, a little history lesson: i’ve spent the last few years documenting (with pals Asif Siddiky and Paul Levering) the Chip Music scene, which is an underground music movement based around using old videogame hardware (gameboys, nintendo, atari, etc.) as musical instruments.

Eventually we realized we had captured enough footage to make it into one of those feature length documentary-type things. Taking a year to compile the footage, we eventually premiered the film at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin in March. It also recently played in Melbourne, Australia and will be seen in Seattle, New York, and Amsterdam in the coming months. But who cares about that? Just go watch it now.

Tomorrow morning bright and early i’ll be heading off to Owego, NY, for a 5 day residency at the Experimental Television Center. I’ll get back Sunday night, probably. Wish me luck and/or productivity.

Some of my high school students showed me this video. They don’t know what “viral video” signifies but they know what it is. Whether you can dance or not, part of this subculture or not, it’s joyful and infectious.

Can anyone point me to the original Soulja Boy video?

Update

Still haven’t found the original Soulja Boy video but here’s a great Eclectic Method remix:

CompressoratorerBREAKS video

Also, IS MY BIRTHDAY.

I’ve updated the visuals page to highlight some of my latest work. Suggestions for improvement would be welcomed. I used Jeroen Wijering’s excellent free FLV player, which I highly recommend for those who like to host your own video instead of using a commercial site like Blip.tv or Vimeo.

And to return to the previous post, well, should I use the living signs as my visualist name or stick with Dan Winckler? F2F feedback on the subject has been mostly positive with one important exception (Emily).

Update

My latest demo reel is up on my portfolio page. I decided not too use ‘the living signs’ — too mystical.

The video below is a brief excerpt of my 35 minute set with DJ Olive at {R}ake last week. Olive played a beautiful ambient set. I did live visuals on all four screens, mixing together new HD footage (@800×450) shot with my new HV20, mixed in a custom application built in Jitter with the v001 system. vade graciously recorded my set and I’ve posted the whole thing to the Internet Archive.

Alternate versions and downloads

• Download this excerpt as a Quicktime for iPhone and iPod Touch
• Watch a streaming version of the whole show
• And the whole 35 minute video will be available in 1080p HDV soon — VJ historians, take note.

One of my current projects is making a music video for Jonny from Eclectic Method. Here’s a little trial run/draft of the work in progress for his song Compressoratorer. Jonny liked it, as well as my suggestion of adding some fun with scanned images of his face — more forthcoming.

CompressoratorerBREAKS video

Last night’s show at The Tank was fun. It was a bit of a struggle with my patch at times (lots of those texture binding errors) but I beat it into submission such that things started to flow, especially with Touchboy, who played last — and who I hadn’t heard before — great stuff. Asif and (?) from 2Player Productions (makers of the Blip Festival documentary) were there shooting some footage and posted a great duet by Glomag and Receptors on YouTube.