It’s been silent here. Next to tripping to Tokyo to speak at Adobe MAX in Januari and doing some small jobs, I’m doing a very, very cool Flash 10 Project utilizing the upcoming Papervision for Flash 10. For some optimization parts I’ve been looking into using Alchemy as an easy way to write optimized bytecode. As opposed to what some people took from my previous post on Alchemy, I don’t hate Alchemy. My point there was that if Alchemy can perform that well, so should ActionScript be able to, with the standard compiler.

Now, that being said, all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. With no time to spare during the morning, daytime and evening, I took the laptop with me to bed last night, and decided to do something I didn’t do before, port something with Adobe Alchemy. I decided upon a long time thing on my wish list; SID Playback in Flash. What is SID ? Well, SID stands for Sound Interface Device, referring to the MOS6581 and it’s a programmable audiochip as used in the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. I grew up with the Commodore 64, and the audio it produces is still something I hold dearly. You are quite likely to have heard a SID chip before, if you listen to the radio, as it is quite a possible you’ve heard one of these baby’s scream. Good recent examples are :

Bastian – You’ve got my love. (the beat in this song comes from Jeroen Tel’s Rubicon).

Nelly Furtado – Do It (controversy all around, Timbaland blatantly stole Glenn Rune Gallefoss’s version of Acid Jazzed Evening).

De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig – Hollereer (Produced by Bastian, C64 lover himself).

My interest was more playing back the old C64 tunes from games and demos. Keep in mind, an average SID file is about 2kilobyte to 10kilobyte; a perfect Small Web Format for all your music during preloading needs . Now, this is something I have been working on before in Flash 9, using the FC64 project, the amazing Flash C64 emulation effort by Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall. Last year, I even made a start with porting FC64 to Flash 10, but that needed to be dropped in favor of actual client work. SID Playback is something different from playing back .mod .xm or .mid files, as the SID chip doesn’t do much on it’s own. Essentially, a .SID file is an executable meant to be ran on the 6510, the Commodore 64′s CPU. So to playback the file, you not only need to emulate the SID chip, but also the 6510 and the needed registers / memory.

Software emulation of the SID chip has been around for a while, and all modern platforms have a way of playback SID files. Winamp plugins, command line utilities for conversion, it’s all there. As is there opensource code to do this. There’s libraries for most major languages. So, after a bit of research, I decided upon the Linux version of TinySid. This library is small enough and well optimized. It looked simple to port, so I went at it. All in all, 4 hours later, I had this baby up and running! (And an unhappy girlfriend who isn’t into the nerd thing, nor is she into listening to chiptunes whilst trying to sleep). Considering my very rusty C and a little hack around I had to do for the audio output, Alchemy shows off it’s feathers here. Many kudo’s to the Alchemy and Flash Player team for this effort. Just now I spent half an hour building a tiny interface using Keith Peter’s Minimal Components, and collected some songs; and here it is.

TinySidFlash (open link, requires Flash 10).

My favorites : Politik and Science (A C64 version of Coldplay’s the Scientist), Morphing and Turbo. Yes, I love Dane’s tunes!

There’s no code yet, as this is still very rough and unfinished work. I’m pretty sure that when I get time again, I’ll have a go at LibSidPlay instead, since the overall emulation in that library is a lot better.

You always have projects lying around that are to be finished…but probably never have the time for…

Today Exey Panteleev posted some creative use of Papervision3D and the Shaders in 2.0. Accompanying to his post he asked if it would be possible to run water simulation with Papervision3D….

Actually, yes…
Water Ball Experiment 1 Water Ball 2(cpu burner alert!)

As one of those things I never finished and probably don’t have time to finish within the next month or so, I have two examples of Papervision3D running interactive water on top of a sphere.

Disclaimer : these things are hacked together experiments from a couple of months ago…as a result performance isn’t to good. I’m sure that given some time they can run smooth, without burning your cpu to the ground. Hope you enjoy anyway

Ok, so I wanted to post this one earlier; an extremely realistic looking 3D interactive portrait of a girl….it’s kind of weird looking and a bit spooky, don’t look at her too long It’s impressive though.

So, what is this ? Well, a bit of simple research (read, firebug) led me too motionportrait.com. Unfortunately, that’s in japanese. That site has the same girl on it, as well as links to several other implementations of the technology…including this hilarious one : hige-chen (love that tune). But also, to the still very cool Rec-You campaign. I’m betting we’ll see a couple of more implementations of this in the near future.

Another thing that caught my attention today was a mail from the creator of the isometric engine ffilmation. Very nice work indeed! The name is derived from the old-skool filmation engine, used to create various gaming titles for the old 8-bit platforms. Looking forward to see progress on it. Related : also, make sure you check out the Alternativa3D engine which was previously isometric only also, but now “full 3D”..impressive stuff.

A bit late, but I didn’t see any MXNA post on this; the first beta for Gnash is out. From the release post : “Gnash is a GPL’d SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes.“.

Gnash already made the news last year, but this time they’ve got a beta…

Honestly, I’m not really impressed. One of the goals for this release seems to be to make youtube work on it. I don’t think this means that good to the Flash community. Even if Gnash grows up (and eventually supports SWF9 / AS3), I don’t really like the idea of “another” player. In my opinion, if it becomes a broader supported version of the player, it will just cause rips in the ubiquity and cross-platform nature of Flash….something which is undeniably one of the biggest strenghts of the platform.

What Gnash might provide is a deeper insight of the workings of the Flash Player, which might eventually enable us to optimize our code for it more and more. It might also inspire Adobe to make the Flash Player available on more os’es ? Let’s hope so. Maybe someone will port it to the Iphone

Over the last months I spent alot of my time developing with and on Papervision3D. Most notably alot of the new features of Papervision3D 2.0 have been part of daily work and development. Now I have yet to see someone uncover all of the posibilities with the current alpha, next to people as mr.doob and zeropointnine (and many more, yes).

It’s incredibly inspiring to me to see that the goals and purposes I personally had intended with the Papervision3D 2.0 source code is being picked up this well. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still alot to do…but in essence it seems to work for people ! I guess seeing your work being put to use by others in ways you wouldn’t or would’ve expected is a big part of the pay-off in OpenSource development. It’s both educational and inspirational to see how people are using the architecture.

(As a side note…in the FITC Amsterdam video on Lee Brimelow’s blog I’m noted as aformentioned zeropointnine…which is wrong….obviously, I’m that other three word number like dude….UnitZeroOne…Lee….)

Anyway, I stumbled upon note.x when I got my traffic report. It’s all in Japanese but I’m really astounded by the quality of code and work. It’s a very nice blog indeed, go and check it out.

Some other very good resources on pv3d 2.0 include : pv3d.org, papervision2.com, actionscript architect and of course fellow team member Andy Zupko.