Something Unreal

Here’s my MIDI software synth Bawami doing its best to even keep responding while trying to play TheSuperMarioBros2‘s black MIDI “Arecibo“. The left view shows how it’s processing every MIDI message. Not shown: About 5 minutes of Bawami loading the 12MB MIDI file hideously inefficiently (tempo changes make it even worse).

[Watch in HD]

This problem of my player stopping responding when maxed out is something I need to (re-)fix. I fixed this a long time ago (probably before releasing Bawami), but broke it again afterwards somehow, also a long time ago now… As always, the most recent version of Bawami can be download here (also check the most recently tagged posts to see recent changes).

TheSuperMarioBros2 have made a lot of great black MIDIs that are often fun to stress-test MIDI players with. You can see lots playing at their channel (they also provide download links for the MIDI files). However, Bawami’s loading of MIDIs is inefficient, so I’d recommend not trying to torture it with black MIDIs too much. I also suggest unticking “Loop” so that, if it stops responding during playback, it’ll eventually start responding again at the end.

This explains a lot (maybe).

[Watch in HD]

I was playing around with Windows 98 drivers and found a combination of settings that printed the slowest, loudest, darkest black line I’ve ever seen this dot matrix printer print. And then a second one on top of the first one, just in case it wasn’t dark enough already.

I’d guess that that’s about a week’s worth of wear in 30 seconds.

[Watch in HD]

And now, I’m enjoying random fainter black parts in my prints because that part of the ribbon’s worn much more than the rest, lol.

(Printer is an Epson LQ-300+II)

Somebody requested this on my “Clock Overclock” video from my other channel, so here it is (better late than never, right? orz).

[Watch in HD]

I thought the “randomly running away” part was weird, and the freezing confirmed my suspicion.

[Watch in HD]

You sometimes have to talk to the maid with the sign 2 or 3 times to trigger the running away. The first time I tried, it happened on the first try. While recording, I needed to try 3 times (I cut the first try out of this video). Still way too easy, though.

When I have a source of money again, I think I’ll get my Vita modded so that I can capture the video directly. That way, I won’t want to have to point a camcorder at my Vita as if I’m featuring on Retsupurae.

I made this to quickly explain to a friend what “cutoff” and “resonance” of a low-pass filter mean. The top view is a spectrogram of the sound (loud sounds are dark, high-frequency sounds appear near the top). Thought I might as well upload it here in case anyone can benefit from it.

Putting sound through a low-pass filter and modifying the filter’s cutoff and resonance has these basic effects.

[Watch in HD]

The sound is a simple MIDI played on the Roland SC-88Pro synthesizer (which only has a low-pass filter, rather than high-pass, band-pass or comb).

Blue is actually violet, but oh well. This is using the Epson Windows graphic-mode driver and OpenOffice Writer – nothing made by me, this time. I had to boost the saturation by a stupid amount in editing to make the colours on the paper be visible to the camcorder, for some reason.

[Watch in HD]

I was messing around while editing a past video and thought that it sounded cool when slowed down, so I decided to record it in higher quality and show how secondary colours are mixed from cyan/magenta/yellow at the same time.

I intend to record another (normal-speed) video of it printing images, using dithering to make other shades of colours.

The printer’s an Epson LQ-300+II. I recorded it with a Quad-Capture sound interface at 192KHz using two NT1-A mics, and slowed it down to 48KHz (25% speed).

Printing in text mode on one long roll of paper. I finally got this Epson LQ-300+II working in text-only mode on Windows 7, so I had to try this. If it’s hard to see, please watch in HD.

[Watch in HD]

Most art is from Christopher Johnson’s ASCII Art Collection. The last was converted by a program of mine, originally drawn by Tongu (Pixiv member ID: 258901).

I had to open this printer to fix it for someone recently, and was impressed with its speed, so I recorded this quick and dirty video. I guess I should re-record it (making it print multiple pages), but I’m lazy. Maybe some day.

[Watch in HD]

The printer is an HP scanner/printer combination (Photosmart C4780). I’m impressed by the fact that it can still run with its scanner board disconnected.

I noticed a GIF was playing in-sync with a MIDI that was playing on Bawami, and then this happened. I had no intention of the video turning into this.

[Watch at YouTube]

Neither the GIF nor the MIDI were made by me.