Kasio Kristmas from Jim McKenzie on Vimeo.

Feeling a warm, holiday glow – or is that just nostalgia for simpler times, times when less digital information was needed to capture sound? Bits were real bits; sampling rates were low enough you could count to the top of them. Kids walked uphill through the snow both ways to buy a new Casio keyboard, and they didn’t yet believe Nintendo’s R.O.B. was a gimmick. They had none of your Grand Theft Audio nonsense: they hummed along to annoying tunes and watched sprites dance across the screen like a derezzed Sugar Plum Fairy.

These should put you even more in the mood, then.

8-bit Jesus is a work-in-progress by Doctor Octoroc, applying the style of an NES game to each Christmas favorite – think “Super Jingle Bros.” Unfortunately, the good Doctor’s server has been overwhelmed by holiday cheer, or his server admin has been drinking too much Egg Nog. Anyone got an alternative link? Found at:

8-bit Jesus, the NES themed chiptune holiday album [boing boing Offworld]

8-bit collective, the all-powerful assemblage of chip artists, has their own holiday creation: a virtual musical advent calendar, in which each day is a new tune. Best title yet: “Joy is all up in this B*****.”

8-bit Advent Calendar [8bitcollective]

Fans of 8-bit or newcomers wondering what the fuss is about, Weekend America did a story on the Blip Festival that just concluded here in New York:

Blip Festival Radio Story

Lastly, Bohus Blahut at Retro Thing points to the album Kasio Kristmas, as seen in the video at top. It’s not free, but it does feature freaky-looking fellows dressed as coneheaded aliens. Bohus’ copy is ready for them to add to their press clippings:

With more than a touch of Devo (and that’s a good thing), vintage electronics, and oodles of out and out weirdness, these AA battery powered tunes re-electrify the holiday classics.

Enjoy!

And just to round this out, I’m running this photo by Scott Beale of laughingsquid, because I didn’t photograph my bottle, and because it seems somehow appropriate, and will likely inspire someone’s own 8-bit (or 64-bit) album.

8-bit audiovisual party Blip Fest started last night here in New York, so it’s only natural we celebrate game systems used for music through the weekend in its honor. (Reminder: come meet up with me and Boing Boing’s Joel Johnson tonight, 6-8p, if you’re going to Blip. Facebook event / CDM post)

Sega Master Bitcrunch

The promising new – and music-savvy, I might add – Boing Boing Offworld gaming blog points to a Sega Master System II that’s been turned into a bitcrush/digital overdrive effect.

It sounds absolutely terrible. You know – in a good way.

Bender / chip artist Sebastian Tomczak created this digital monstrosity. I’d actually like to hear some percussive material through it. It’s a beautiful thing, though – now, Sebastian, you just need to make the game controllers control parameters.

Sebastian has been seen round these parts before making drum machines with the Arduino, Processing apps for mobile phones, and controllers out of water bowls. (Sebastian, I would have missed this if not for Offworld – believe it or not, readers, I actually don’t know everything you do as you do it.)

8-bit Multi-Effects

Sebastian isn’t the only one using vintage hardware as effects. Animalstyle, aka Joey Mariano, who played CDM’s (not-all-chiptune) HOPE hacker con performance in July and is playing Blip now, has his own rig. 8-bit fuzz pedal + Game Boy foot controller + 8-bit sounds + guitar = chippy goodness.

Blip Films

Meanwhile, if you’re curious what’s going down at Blip, CDM’s friends at music documentarian 2 Player Productions are sharing clips of their “dailies” with us as they’re posted. Check in later in the weekend for more, but in the meantime, here’s a quick clip of Greenleaf from the “Night Before Blip” open mic night on Wednesday:

Arduinoboy mGB from trash80 on Vimeo.

Lovers of the sound of the original Nintendo Game Boy, the Minimoog of game systems with its distinctive, rich 8-bit sound, this may be the best solution for integrating it with other music gear.

Our friend trash80, aka Timothy, has completed a project with open-source code for the affordable, easily-programmable Arduino electronics platform. To make it work, he’s built his own custom cartridge, adding standard MIDI communication with other devices. An 1/8” minijack plugs into your Game Boy cart, but you get standard MIDI DIN on the other end for connecting to keyboards, computers, and the like. With all the code available, you should not only be able to build your own MIDI Game Boy, but apply some of trash80’s techniques to other MIDI hardware projects, as well.

Full documentation:

Flickr set

Code, project detail, and docs at Google Code

That’s the full Arduinoboy shield below:

Updated: As Smithers notes in comments, this is similar to the Pushpin project. Pushpin is actually quite a lot more compact, using only a MIDI cable. The downside: Pushpin requires a Game Boy Color, while this project works with the other Game Boy models. Also, the Arduino aspect may make this project a bit more accessible. Worth looking at both, of course.

The appeal of newer music apps for phones, current-generation mobile game systems, and PDAs is portability first. But for the Game Boy music scene, it’s as much about a distinctive sound, and acquiring Game Boys as a kind of unique synthesizer. Our friend and mobile game musician Peter Swimm points us to the new documentary Reformat the Planet. It’s available for a week free on pitchfork.tv, with screenings to follow. It’s a pretty nice survey of the New York corner of the scene, at least. I’m personally getting increasingly interested in tools like PSPSEQ, which have a distinctive sound all their own — think string modeling rather than vintage game glitches — but that puts this in additional perspective.

Reformat the Planet [available this week only, pitchfork.tv]

Cinematographer Asid Siddiky writes:

Homebrewed game music has an uneasy relationship with the mainstream game industry. Running or developing DIY music software isn’t possible on the Nintendo DS without special hardware – hardware that’s also favored by pirates. Nintendo is now suing the makers and sellers of that hardware, because they (correctly) point out it’s being used to pirate — but that could impact the homebrew music software scene, as well. And against that debate, we have a major leak of the Korg DS-10 cartridge, the one cartridge that is official and runs like a normal DS game. The twist: the "pirate" DS-10 music mix sounds fantastic, and should be a terrific argument to go buy a legitimate copy, right now. In fact, this should be a golden age for game music, provided the interests of developers large and small can be balanced. And, ahem, provided we all go buy that DS-10 cartridge so it isn’t the last legit game synth we ever see.

Nintendo Goes After Flash Loaders

For lovers of 8-bit music and mobile music, Nintendo DS flash cart loader hardware is all about the ability to run homebrew music software – seriously. Despite the snarky comments you might see on tech blogs, there really is an audience for whom running and/or developing home-built software, not piracy, is the primary reason to buy these gadgets. An entire music scene uses portable game systems exclusively, dating back ten years ago to the emergence of Nanoloop (and later LSDJ) on the original, 8-bit Game Boy. And it’s not just about piracy: because of the stringent requirements for developing for a game console, there’s simply no other way to write or run oddball music apps on the DS.

The appetite is certainly there. Running homebrew software on the DS is arguably more challenging than on any other mobile device, but paradoxically the DS has become the richest mobile platform for unusual, home-built music software. The DS is blessed with trackers, step sequencers, hacked hardware MIDI support, wireless communication with computers and other game systems, cellular automata synths, stylus scratching, and many other tools. All of this is possible because of the ready availability of flash loaders. The hardware tricks the DS into running homebrewed software by exploiting backwards compatibility features integrated with the device.