Retro hardware? Vintage game machines? Old computers? New mobile devices? Whatever it is, we’ll make music and motion on it.

The Blip Festival, the legendary international festival of vintage music and visual tech, invades New York today (Thursday) through Sunday. There’s an unbelievable lineup, with fantastic musicians and live visualists playing every single night Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, from music from m-.-n to Bubblyfish and visuals from Paris Treantafales to Meneo (and many other friends). In fact, every single musician has their own live visuals, so your eyes and ears are guaranteed to be (over)stimulated at all times.

Saturday afternoon is a lineup of workshops, including making your own visual electronics with VBLANK and putting music on NES albums with NO CARRIER.

Sunday is the debut of Reformat the Planet, the documentary film.

2008 Blip Festival

And before the Friday night Blip festival starts, get your 32-bit / mobile gaming + music device / happy hour mixer on:

Mobile Music: 32-Bit Blip Drinkup/Meetup with CDM + Boing Boing [Facebook]

Friday 32-bit BB/CDM Meetup @ Bell House Bar

Blip has a strictly 8-bit and/or retro focus. The stated mission is to:

showcase emerging creative niches involving the use of legacy video game & home computer hardware as modern artistic instrumentation. Devices such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy and others are repurposed into the service of original, low-res, high-impact electronic music and visuals…

Now, I love retro tech, but being the subversive character I am, I have to say, cough, “low resolution”? “8-bit”?

And so, with Joel Johnson (Boing Boing / Offworld / Boing Boing Gadgets), we’re hosting a very informal meetup to celebrate all things mobile and 32-bit with the Boing Boing and CDM communities. If you’ve got one, bring your PSP, your Nintendo DS, and your GamePark (or even mobile phone / PDA), and prepare to share. I’m especially hopeful we’ll get some wireless action with multiples of the DS, Korg DS-10, and homebrew. We may be able to unlock your PSP for homebrew (contact us first – likewise, give us a holler if you’re good with a Pandora’s Battery and Magic Memory Stick). If you’ve found a way to hook your 8-bit Game Boy into your new DS DIY MIDI interface, all numbers of bits will be accommodated.  I’ll be bringing my PSP with the incredible PSPSEQ onboard – which sounds utterly beautiful and is really inspiring to use. I’ll have DS homebrew, too.

If you just want to meet me and Joel and folks and see what’s possible and nerd out and have a few drinks, that goes, too!

We’re meeting at the bar at the Bell House, which also happens to be where Blip is happening. So you can come, get some drinks and snacks, and get your mobile music/visual geek on. Bonus: it’s two-for-one happy hour, so bring a friend / significant other and we’ll make them feel at home!

Bell House Food & Drink Menu

RSVP on Facebook

When: Friday, December 5, 6-8p

Where: 149 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215 [Map | Directions]

See you there!

Again, very important rest of the planet, I’ll try to stream live if WiFi cooperates in the bar! Watch http://twitter.com/cdmblogs for updates.

Our friend Marc (“M-.-n”) writes to let us know version 1.0 of music tracker (think alternative sequencer / music making tool) LittleGPTracker is here, with quite a lot in the way of new features. As always, the banner feature of LGPT is its ability to run on the open, Linux-based GamePark mobile game console, making it an ideal choice for tracking on the go. But it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux desktop systems, too, with features enhanced in this release. The list from Marc:

• Sample library & import support


• Groove support for odd time signature


• Debian build & JACK support


• Allows creation of project from the program itself


• new Feedback parameters at the instrument level


• new Looper Sync looping mode for automatic looping on the current tempo


• Engine optimization


• New rendering system allowing to render directly from the application


• either the mixdown or the 8 separated tracks.


• External joystick control on all platforms

littlegptracker.com

Debian build, eh, with JACK? Have to try this on the Ubuntu Studio system I just installed. For your viewing enjoyment, here’s Patric C and M-.-n playing with 2 GP2x, each running LGPT.

Intially, after a while of finding out where the trouble was we nailed midi
for littlegptracker running on GP2x. Here’s a little vid for it.

Of course, another application would be also to use the 2x as sequencer to
drive sequences on any midi-aware VJ program. So you could for example write
an audio track using 6 channels and use the two remaining to have perfectly
sync’ed video

Description:

This is Little GP Tracker [LGPT] running on a Gamepark Holdings Gp2x handheld, outputting midi using a custom serial to midi interface designed & coded by FirestARTer, board & assembly by IDMCLASSICS.NET.

In this clip, LGPT is driving a Clavia Nord Micromodular [3 seperate mono patterns into a polyphonic patch] and has an Alesis HR-16 drum machine slaved via Midi Sync.

FiresARTer: http://www.firestarter-music.de
Little GP Tracker: http://www.10pm.org/nostromo/lgpt/
IDMCLASSICS.NET: http://idmclassics.net

If the lack of a stylus Mario Kart hurts, though, see also this:
Hacked MIDI Support for Nintendo DS: DSerial

See comments: the upcoming F200 will have stylus/touch input. Awesome.

Multi-touch mobile gaming, could you be next?