Something Unreal

Yeah… A rushed attempt by me of Chen Nyan Poi on the piano (well, keyboard). I had to have it done by a certain day for somone, and I guess I had been too lazy with practising, but being fail has never stopped other things of mine from being uploaded.

[Watch in HD]

“Chen Nyan Poi” is a remix by IOSYS of the theme of Chen (stage 2 boss in Touhou 07: Perfect Cherry Blossom). Anyway, not much more to say here, except that I actually recorded this over 3 weeks ago and had forgotten to upload it until now. orz

On a graphics tablet~.

[Watch in HD]

I was recently introduced to the rhythm-based game “osu!”. Since it’s a clone of a game from the Nintendo DS which takes advantage of the touch-sensitive screen, I decided to try to emulate that playing style.

I know that this beatmap is really not hard compared to most, but my “Yes!” was due to the fact that this was the first time I’d got a 100% accuracy rating.

The wires coming out of the pen are soldered to the battery terminals inside, and have a D-size battery (which you can see on my desk) connected on the other end. I did that because the internal battery compartment of the pen had a connection so bad that the tablet was simply unusable when using it.

I don’t think I have the input/song sync set correctly since there is quite a noticable delay between pressing the pen and the game detecting that (you can see, and even sometimes hear the tapping at times, in the video). I set the offset to the same as what I set StepMania’s to, and, since both games use DirectSound, I thought that that would make the offset perfect here too, but clearly that’s not the case.

We were hit by a large amount of snow early this February in 2009 and I was eager to catch some shots with my HD camera to go along with a song which I’d recently got addicted to.

[Watch in HD]

The song used is a cut-down version of “FREEZING ON YOU” by “IOSYS” (I had to cut it down from 4m40s since I didn’t record enough different video to last that long without the finished video ending up uninteresting). It’s a remix of Cirno’s theme from Touhou Project, and with Cirno being an ice fairy and associated with the number 9, this was too perfect an opportunity for me to miss.

Lights flashing to the notes in StepMania files. They’re controlled by a program which I made which reads SM files and plays through the notes (it’s the same program which controlled the servos in my previous video where the servos pressed the arrow keys for StepMania).

Some people who saw my previous video may know that I (accidentally) killed the microcontroller on the same day that I made the video. My brother’s kindly letting me use his in the meantime. I ordered a new one two weeks ago today, and it still hasn’t arrived. Aaaah, SSC-taaan! >_<

Technical rubbish:
The main microcontroller is an SSC-32.
The bulbs are each 2-Watt 21-LED 12-Volt bulbs, producing the same amount of light as a 25-Watt halogen bulb.

I intend to make a guide on how to make this, some time.

EDIT: Oh, YouTube’s messed up the sync again.

My latest project, and this is a mere prototype. A computer plays StepMania CVS 4, controlling servos to press the arrow keys according to step sequences in StepMania files. Lots more info and quite a bit of showing off in the video.

It plays “Overdrive” (for the sake of avoiding typing a really long title which I can’t translate) by IOSYS, and even gets a toasty on “Piano Variation for Remilia Scarlet”.

EDIT: Wow, this video’s quality really disappeared somewhere along the line.

For the technically-minded, I’m using an SSC-32 (microcontroller), and 4 Hextronik 5gr (HXT500) micro servos. The program was made with Visual Basic.

I know it’s not much compared to most of the Touhou stepfiles out there, but for me, this is an achievement. xD

Recorded with my DCR-TRV270E camcorder, and Audacity on the computer recording live audio.
Video screen-in-screen effect applied with Premiere. Notice that the original camera view at the start has the monitor image quite small, and I zoom into it with Premiere. That’s why the main image becomes a bit pixellated, but the keyboard view stays good quality (because I didn’t zoom into that view – I wanted it to remain small).

The song and stepfiles are in the Touhou StepMania pack 01, which you can download here. (255.24 MB!!)

This took the longest to transcribe, by far, of all my bleeper music compositions – about 5 hours.

The song is a remix, by IOSYS, of 2 themes from Touhou 08 “Imperishable Night”, and it’s called 「蓬莱の玉、どこまでも美しく」. Its title has been translated to “The Hourai Jewel, Ever Beautiful”.

The song was made by IOSYS in 2 parts, A and B.
- Part A: 「竹取飛翔」 “Flight of the Bamboo Cutter” (Kaguya Houraisan’s theme).
- Part B: 「Voyage 1970」 (Eirin and Kaguya’s Last Spell theme)

The chorus of Part A repeats to finish the song. So it’s like A-B-A.
Part B gave me so much hassle. The tune really is beautiful, but the beauty is complex. x_x

For those who don’t know – this is a program I made, for creating music with the internal ‘system speaker’ inside PCs. Then I made this music using it. It’s playing along with the original song on my main computer speakers.

I tried to liven things up visually this time with my 4-light sequencer. =D

Sorry about my large period of inactiveness for the past week! >_<

Here’s an updated version of my remix of Unlocked Girl by IOSYS! I called it “6 Voice Style”, since now, instead of just the 1 electronic voice, there are now 6 voices used, including a backing harmonizing voice (Miku Hatsune)! The other 5 voices are made using RealSinger on Virtual Singer, part of Melody Assistant. There’s also now a much cooler-sounding Distortion Guitar used during choruses.

Here’s the YouTube video, this time featuring my attempt at a full translation of all the lyrics, and 10% of your RDA of randomness near the end. Of course, this is in mono and at low quality. This time, I think I avoided typos and forgetting things in the credits. ><

The actual YouTube page is here - there’ll be comments there. ;P Of course, I don’t mind if you leave comments here at my blog either! ;)You can download the high-quality stereo MP3 of this “6 Voice Style” [6.48 MB] (or if that link doesn’t work, you can try this link, although it will be much slower, sorry). I’m also putting up the original MIDI for download [64 KB] which I made for this remix, which is at the heart of this MP3. Please note that the MIDI is not complete. Sorry about that. But it’s certainly better than nothing (well, probably). It does contain all parts of the song, by which I mean that just by copy-and-pasting things you can complete the song. But I didn’t do that to the MIDI – just to the final MP3′s audio. That’s why the MP3′s complete and the MIDI isn’t – I’m lazy. ;P

I finally completed this! I’ve been working on it since the 25th of December, and finally last night it was completed. I hope you like it. And I know there are several typos. >_<

Original YouTube page

I’d prefer it if you commented at that page, rather than here. That way, all comments will be in one place (even the comments left by people who didn’t find the video on this blog). There’s more info there too – just check the description! :D

Oh, and the high-quality stereo MP3 can be downloaded… right… here. (5.47 MB, 5 mins 10 secs) (Sorry about the slow download speed.)