Atari Video Music | Hacker News Reader

Atari Video Music

en.wikipedia.org

100 pointsrbanffy26 comments

While visualizers have fallen out of favor, live video jockeying is gaining popularity. Some DJs work closely with VJs before shows to produce curated visual experiences which augment the music. Lots of raymarching, geometry manipulation, and progressions reminiscent of the demoscene. It's quite an experience live. Here are a few examples:

https://www.yewtu.be/watch?v=XYk5wku59TY https://www.yewtu.be/watch?v=LsmMU-5XVa0 https://www.yewtu.be/watch?v=6jS3nAf7ZRg

"According to Atari design engineer, Al Alcorn, when Atari was on tour promoting the device, a Sears representative asked what the developers were smoking when they invented it. With that, a technician stepped forward holding up a lit joint."

The demo video’s length is 4:20

[1] for those not familiar with that symbology.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_(cannabis_culture)

This reminds me of the early Winamp 5 days, circa 2005-2008.

Music visualizers seem to be a forgotten art today.

long live MilkDrop!

More of a Geiss person myself

Forgotten just like screensavers. It’s sad and I hate it.

I have a screensaver running that cycles thru a decade of family pictures and some cool wikipedia featured photos.

I do agree that screensavers aren't as pervasive as in the 2000s, but its not dead like winamp visualizers , or are they ?

I have XScreensaver on all devices. It’s the first thing I install.

Not only are they not dead, the need for them as a screen protection feature is back because OLED screens can suffer burn-in.

My Apple TV box has a screensaver called Aerial that downloads new videos daily. Some of them are incredible.

On the contrary, they have merely evolved. Artists these days are putting out "visualizers" that are somewhere between the media player visualizers of old and fully-fleged music videos (with karaoke-style screens mixed in in the case of the "lyric video" style of visualizer)

Most people listening to digital music do it through streaming, so the local media player isn't getting much attention anymore. For artists, it's cheaper to put something out that has a minimal, looping, branded animation than a full music video, especially now that video editing is so commonplace these days. There are also software options that will generate these videos with just a few clicks (which, unsurprisingly, resemble their media player ancestors)

Along with this, though, a lot of artists are also livestreaming "concerts" from their rooms on platforms like YouTube, Discord, and reddit. The landscape is changing, but in some interesting ways

For me, I still rock my CDs and Soulseek collection from time to time on Windows Media Player which still supports the visualizers from the early 2000s. They are even still served on Microsoft.com

They’re not totally dead. Winamp and milkdrop run in the browser

https://www.jukelab.com/s/dkhpmnq

And I use milkdrop for live visuals at the club

Does anyone else remember Jeff Minter's virtual light machine (VLM) and other early experimental digital interactive light shows?

Didn't have an Atari Jaguar CD myself, but I did have a friend with one, and have fond memories playing with the Virtual Light Machine. Never knew anyone with a Nuon so never got to play with the VLM-2 though.

Was always comparatively disappointed with subsequent music visualisation like MilkDrop and Geiss on Winamp to be honest - they always seemed to be just doing their own thing without as much reference to the music, and of course without the interactivity you were just watching rather than playing (or consuming rather than creating).

Arguably Psychedelia by Jeff Minter [1] has a claim to be the first software music visualiser. The algorithm is pretty straightforward [2] and I recently 'ported' it to Javascript for fun.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelia_(light_synthesizer... [2] https://github.com/mwenge/psychedelia [3] https://mwenge.github.io/psychedelia.large/

Jeff Minter always seemed to epitomize that living synthesis of seeming to be psychedelically high while also ruthlessly focused, and made some amazingly fun things along the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter

I wonder if there are any hardware projects to build this yourself, or better: if there are any emulators you can use to emultate this Atari machine.

This thing proabably doesn't have a CPU so there is nothing to emulate. You're talking circuit-level simulation here. For that same reason the original Pong and Monaco GP games aren't in MAME.

I believe circuit simulation is in MAME now. There problem here, if I understand it correctly, is that there is a special purpose ASIC in the video music whose innards are hidden. Would need to be reverse engineered.

The pixel music 3000 may be of interest.

https://makezine.com/projects/pixelmusic-3000/

The 70s were the age of 8 bit tech glory. I wish I could go back then and experience (again) all the new things that became ubiquitous, the glorious age of video game saloons, the use of that technology in movies and tv at the beginning. I was just the right age to experience star wars, video games, early home computers and it's when I started programming in atari basic and then hand assembled 6502 assembler. I even had that basic programming atari video game cartridge.

Those were the days!

-Old man

It visually renders the sound-beats properly. That's important. To synesthese like that. So many visualizers don't.

Have you seen the intro for ENTER THE VOID? A fine example. https://youtu.be/dL0lNGXoP8E?si=h878U0DOdaCRPXgM

This is the best visualizer.

https://vimeo.com/313049496

Not much of a song but the beats are right on.

The video is 4:20 long. Lol.

It's peak New Age tech.

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