Boy Genius Report: Throwback Thursday: Apple IIgs http://goo.gl/fb/OuzRS

(By @BGR - Blog Feed - Massively, Entertainment)

Apple a day...Take a look at the design and progression of Apple computers from the Apple II to the current models. This video shows the computers I've kept for one reason or another morphing from one design to the next. It's a little over 30 years in a little over 2 minutes. Sadly, it doesn't include many iconic Apple products (Apple IIc, Apple IIgs, Quadra etc), only the machines I've personally owned or acquired over the years.

Changes: This release fixes problems in MED, AMF, Digital Symphony and Archimedes Tracker formats, adds Coconizer module support, fixes building of the Audacious plugin, and addresses portability issues in BeOS and Haiku. An experimental Android port is also available.

Release Tags: Minor feature enhancements, Minor bugfixes, Stable

Tags: multimedia, Sound/Audio, Players

Licenses: GPL

Continue reading Apple II Digital Music Synthesizer available now for 8-bit die-hards

Apple II Digital Music Synthesizer available now for 8-bit die-hards originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Changes: This release adds support for new module formats including Titanics Player, Novotrade, SKYT Packer, Hornet Packer, The Player 6.1a, Magnetic Fields Packer, and Polly Tracker. It adds support for StoneCracker S404 decompression, has fixes for the Audacious and Winamp plugins, and can be built using Visual Studio 2008.

Release Tags: Major feature enhancements, Stable

Tags: multimedia, Sound/Audio, Players

Licenses: GPL

Changes: This release fixes crashes and memory leaks caused by invalid or corrupted modules, and has better support for Real Tracker and MED4 files.

Release Tags: Stable, Minor bugfixes

Tags: multimedia, Sound/Audio, Players

Licenses: GPL

<p>Filed under: <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/analysisopinion/" rel="tag">Analysis / Opinion</a>, <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/rumors/" rel="tag">Rumors</a>, <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/iphone/" rel="tag">iPhone</a>, <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/ipod-touch/" rel="tag">iPod touch</a></p><img align="right" hspace="8" vspace="8" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.tuaw.com/media/2009/12/holmes-cjr-1260888832.jpg" alt="" />Last week, a <a href="http://twitter.com/eldarmurtazin/status/6526522906">brief tweet</a> from Mobile Review's editor-in-chief, Eldar Murtazin sparked a <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/10/rumor-foxconn-receives-new-iphone-build-order/">rumor</a> that Taiwan-based manufacturer Foxconn had received orders to build the next-generation iPhone. This week <a href="http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2009_12/pr1501.htm?from=RSS_PRESS&uid=20091215-818e">Toshiba has announced</a> their 64GB NAND flash chip -- the largest capacity in the industry. Is this what Foxconn will be stuffing into future iPhones?<br /> <br /> Apple has doubled the capacity of the top-of-the-line model in previous updates. You'll remember that <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2009/06/19/ifixit-publishes-iphone-3g-s-teardown/">the curent iPhone contains </a>either a single 16GB or 32GB Toshiba NAND module. We're not in charge of production at Foxconn, but it seems that six months is enough time to produce a pile of these. This is speculation, of course, but speculation is fun.<br /> <br /> Note that Apple uses a pair of NAND packages in the 32GB or 64GB iPod touch. Can you say 128GB iPod touch? We don't know who would need that much storage space, but Apple sells a <a href="http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipod/family/ipod_classic?mco=MTM3NDk1MTQ">160GB hard drive-based iPod</a>, so what do we know? Apple <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/tag/nand/">chews up a substantial slice</a> of the worldwide NAND market, so any tweaks to capacity or manufacturing are definitely noteworthy in Cupertino.<br /> <br /> Last month the Korean Times <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2009/11/30/chip-makers-apple-manipulating-flash-memory-prices/">accused</a> Apple of manipulating flash memory prices. It's been <a href="http://news.cnet.com/apple/?keyword=flash+memory">estimated</a> that Apple consumes 25% of the world's flash memory.<p><a href="http://www.tuaw.com">TUAW</a><a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/15/rumor-toshibas-64gb-nand-flash-chip-for-iphone/">Rumor: Toshiba's 64GB NAND flash chip for iPhone</a> originally appeared on <a href="http://www.tuaw.com">The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)</a> on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our <a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/">terms for use of feeds</a>.<br /></p><h6></h6><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/15/toshiba-announces-64gb-nand-packages-apple-winks-gives-a-nudge/">Read</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/15/rumor-toshibas-64gb-nand-flash-chip-for-iphone/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry">Permalink</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tuaw.com/forward/19281688/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email">Email this</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/15/rumor-toshibas-64gb-nand-flash-chip-for-iphone/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry">Comments</a><br clear="both" /> <br clear="both" /> <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:4923d6d8cf9ff1a003e5e7bddec66827:lVhf%2BVLXKuVgWBdTka9Uf9pQi%2Bp4DZFH25nZTq2zvVc2pWwDzqwh%2BhieuQEpCSD0fOZwlVyOocZe"><img border="0" title="Add to digg" alt="Add to digg" src="http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif" /></a> <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:962fb0db83975c980d56cd32f1e656f6:qgAXzjTTJ2lIJ%2FiKJPNjtxSJANgIx%2FDqOpU%2FVH4Mwnff%2FWjRFS2aO1VMSCSSzVJPwFPmGR6d%2FFvn"><img border="0" title="Add to del.icio.us" alt="Add to del.icio.us" src="http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/delicious.gif" /></a> <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:8cbcc79611c3b8c7bf6ca437f81ad43e:xbl8GtUoMMhYTw7rYEgFr9khXEGIULbAO2U7%2BSg5HasqyOzmb7KzBfW7W64LwrPdlll6sqvertI2"><img border="0" title="Add to Google" alt="Add to Google" src="http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png" /></a> <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:34a3b5d5da880c57d41996c7d1f81713:uqy9VLI7Wl1bjYS1Zg5GtOnsjPcieJGrfdeNKozKyx6XNpiRkhVHQXR1Pdrgthnj5ykofW8DJNTj3w%3D%3D"><img border="0" title="Add to StumbleUpon" alt="Add to StumbleUpon" src="http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/stumbleit.gif" /></a> <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:c392c60a1b9eb0bc6d253a756d7c0dd2:m5utPlZDFoNYXnW9zHoQuEsWcO2MojulF75W6hdl1ZbJGJFqmywoh5HdNmCcft3UnPzP6i%2B3FnFukg%3D%3D"><img border="0" title="Add to Facebook" alt="Add to Facebook" src="http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/facebook.gif" /></a> <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:1ac89e79f42a86138101ba87ceb2eef8:ukW%2BlVoDV3a%2BoHR6rBeFQN%2FiiGsMaCxgZyVDdFumym%2B6SSJmWN2h46%2B9M8%2FYF%2FVTSLhsVLAB0FJK"><img border="0" title="Add to Reddit" alt="Add to Reddit" src="http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png" /></a> <a href="http://www.pheedcontent.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:5f51961ef3d4283affa0207a365ac980:k2wfZx2SMW1iAPwZ9IKFp4DQnuZWO6%2Bkp4a2GS40ZA1qIfy3Xx3efewbZmsMk00JX8DWgeIQn%2B04VQ%3D%3D"><img border="0" title="Add to Technorati" alt="Add to Technorati" src="http://images.pheedo.com/images/mm/technorati.png" /></a> <br clear="both" /> <a href="http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=4510f6abc94c6615143bdec74c9c6093&p=1"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ads.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=4510f6abc94c6615143bdec74c9c6093&p=1" /></a> <img alt="" height="0" width="0" border="0" src="http://a.rfihub.com/eus.gif?eui=2226" /><br clear="all" /> <img src="http://ads.pheedo.com/img.phdo?kw=" align="absmiddle" /> <a href="http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=4510f6abc94c6615143bdec74c9c6093&p=64&kw=iPhone">iPhone</a> - <a href="http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=4510f6abc94c6615143bdec74c9c6093&p=64&kw=Toshiba">Toshiba</a> - <a href="http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=4510f6abc94c6615143bdec74c9c6093&p=64&kw=IpodTouch">IpodTouch</a> - <a href="http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=4510f6abc94c6615143bdec74c9c6093&p=64&kw=Apple">Apple</a> - <a href="http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=4510f6abc94c6615143bdec74c9c6093&p=64&kw=Unofficial+Apple+Weblog">Unofficial Apple Weblog</a>

Changes: This release contains portability improvements, fixes for many memory leaks and access violations, a rewritten player core, a new build system, support for Galaxy Music System modules, and support for xz and LZH compressors.

Release Tags: Major, Stable

Tags: multimedia, Sound/Audio, Players

Licenses: GPL

The New York-based artist, famed for his work based on hacked Nintendo games is curating an exhibition at London's Lisson Gallery. Gamesblog met up with him to discuss his career, and the attractions of games as an artistic medium.

Here's a question that has bothered cultural commentators – and gamers - for the last thirty years. Can videogames be art? Of course, most of us blithely wave the matter away; 'they're just games,' we humph, before turning back to our controllers.

But of course – the most profound new entertainment medium of the century can't be so easily dismissed – and as videogames deal in the same areas of aesthetics and representation as other audio visual media, it's impossible to say that games don't have artistic aims and merits. Hegel, one of the few modern philosophers to grapple extensively with the meaning of art, certainly would have seen videogames as an expression of the subjective spirit - and the worlds we see in games are certainly subjective. Miyamoto's Mushroom Kingdom is in no way an objective rendering of human life.

But there have been famous detractors. Critic Jack Knoll once insisted in a Newsweek article that games, "can't transmit the emotional complexity that is the root of art." And film reviewer Roger Ebert prompted a flame war, when he declared that videogames could never be considered art, later explaining, "I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art."

In reply, MIT professor and keen gamer Henry Jenkins has argued that games are, in fact, the artform of the digital age, and wrote an important piece entitled Games, The Lively Art explaining his position. Horror writer and sometime game designer Clive Barker also countered the Ebert position in a keynote at a Hollywood games convention. But regardless of high profile exponents, surely now it is difficult to look at games like Okami, Katamari Damacy or Shadow of the Colossus and not appreciate art in motion.

The fact that a growing number of artists are turning to videogames as a form of expression also hints at the fact that these things are not just daft little diversions with no inherent aesthetic value. The likes of Riley Harmon, Alison Mealey and Wafaa Bilal have all used videogame graphics, interfaces and/or tropes in their work, trading not only on the visual imagery and accepted conventions of games, but also their inherent meanings.

One of the most widely recognised proponents of this emerging practice is New York-based artist Cory Arcangel, who is currently curating a fascinating exhibition at London's Lisson Gallery. While studying music at the Oberlin Conservatory in the late-Nineties he joined an experimental programming collective named BIEGE where he started hacking and altering games consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System. From here he went on to create one of the most famed works of hack art – Super Mario Clouds (see above), a version of the legendary platformer in which all the graphics except the clouds have been removed.

"At the time I was thinking about the technical concerns, about getting in and hacking it myself – that was paramount," explains Cory as we wander around the Lisson exhibition, taking in his own latest works, as well as those of artists like Stephen Willats and Daniel Buren. "I was using that game because it was cheap and it was the most recognisable. Why I picked the clouds and erased everything else? I have no concrete thoughts on that – I just knew to do it…"

It's a weird thing to watch – some will see it as a situationist prank or a piece of digital Dadaism; gamers can get quite irate about it, with one YouTube comment stating, "Nice try Cory, but there are Propgrammers (sic) out there that actually program, not just erase what others have done. You're a joke". In some ways, though, it works simply as a deconstruction of videogame design - it makes you think about these background objects which usually pass by almost imperceptibly: what do they add to the experience? How important are they to the success of the games? Or maybe it's just a really relaxing, hypnotic animation. (His hack entitled F1 Racer achieves a similar effect by removing the cars from a racing simulation)

In an office upstairs from the exhibition floor, Cory says he was interested in video artist Bruce Nauman at the time, particularly his meditation works, but stops short of calling it an influence. Looking back, he reckons what he was actually trying to do was create a meme, a cultural artifact that could be spread virally around the web. As Cory explains, "It was 2002, when the internet was just starting to blow up and you got these things emailed to you… I knew I wanted to participate in that, and at the time I was working with the Contagious Media Group which was an R&D; group sponsored by Eyebeam. We were studying memes and viral marketing strategies, and through that I knew how to structure an idea that would then spread itself.

"I knew that the clouds would be simple enough for people to latch on to, and I knew that in order to make art that dealt with technology, you had to, in a way, have the art not directly be about specific technologies. I mean, we think everyone played Nintendo, but really, hardly anybody played Nintendo. Now looking back on it all – it's about… what do these pixelated clouds represent? It represents the whole progression of humans, communication and technology. But I couldn't write that down. And it became a meme slowly. I put it up and it took years for people to see it, but it worked…"

In the same year he produced I Shot Andy Warhol, a hacked version of the NES light gun shooter Hogan's Alley in which the gangsters were replaced by blocky representations of Andy Warhol, while innocent bystanders were replaced by the pope, Flavor Flav, and Colonel Sanders. I ask what it's about. "It's not really about technology," he explains. "It's a meme again, well not a real meme… but the meme idea as it relates to the history of conceptual art…"

His attention drifts to the laptop on which, bizarrely, we're scanning a website named Cute Overload which has just featured Cory's work Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, a video of cats walking across piano keyboards which has been edited so that they play Arnold Schoenberg's piece of the same name. It got 50,000 hits over a couple of days and he's extremely proud of another successful infiltration of web culture. "What I do on the internet, it's like if I can figure that out I've figured everything else out. The internet represents all culture at this point, and how you put your work on the internet could be a reflection of how you feel about all contexts, all creative expression"

When he was a kid, Cory's family first owned a Commodore 64, but he was too young to take notice. Later, they got an Apple IIGS and, through games like Bard's Tale and Sim City 2000, he was hooked. "I hit pretty hard on it," he says. "I was a bit of a computer nerd. I wasn't an internet nerd – I didn't get into that until college. It was a little scary back then – the modems… I lived in the suburbs and that information was not available, I didn't even know the technology existed except in that Matthew Broderick movie!"

Arcangel doesn't work entirely with videogames. He's been making video art since he was a teenager and also has several music projects on the go, including the rather amusing Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum, a version of the album played entirely on, yes, the glockenspiel. He actually studied classical guitar at the Oberlin Conservatory and tells me he only took programming as a minor subject because he knew it would make him more employable – "classical guitar and knowledge about the second Viennese school of composition was not going to get me a job…"

In the background there has been a long-running interest in desktop art applications, from MacPaint to Paintshop, and two of the works Arcangel has on show at the Lisson - incredibly vibrant explosions of colour - have been created using the gradient tool in Adobe's application. "It's the printing you're reacting to," he says. "It's the technology – just to be able to make these would have been impossible a couple of years ago. It's really high-end LightJet printing. In ten years time they'll be tacky because the printers will be even better, but that's fun!"

Right now, though, he's moving back to games with a typically eccentric project, which has only been shown in beta form at a gallery in Holland. "It's this little computer chip," he explains. "I've been working with this engineer, and you just solder it on to a videogame controller and it's like a Tivo – you can play a game and it'll record it and playback that same game over and over in a loop."

His plan is to finish the prototype chip, get at least 100 of them manufactured, then play a series of games – badly, he points out pointedly – presenting the results in a cinematic setting. Interestingly, he's focusing on first-generation 3D games, from the PSone, Saturn and N64, and it's mostly going to be sports titles, the likes of PGA Tour and Madden. "I wanted early 3D games, that was a really important part because the representation of the human form is at a really awkward point – there's something really funny about it. It's technology as style. I don't know how people will react to it. It's a little bit slapstick…"

I don't put the "videogames as art" quandary to Cory – it all seems a bit irrelevant here. Whatever you think of his work, he and his contemporaries are pushing game culture into the remit of the art establishment. But the important thing is the sense of fun behind it all. This isn't the pretentious conceptual quagmire of the Young British Artists and their acolytes. "They're all experiments," Cory says dismissively at one point. "I'm not trying to grind home a point. It's just bumbling round in the dark. It's an enjoyable process."

Later this month the FACT gallery in Liverpool is running a free exhibition entitled Space Invaders: Art in the Computer Game Environment, which will house works by the likes of Mark Essen, Yuichiro Katsumoto and Cao Fei who all explore the impact of games on our society. Alongside the art will be playable demos of commercial games such as Grand Theft Auto. The message is, both the art and the source material are legitimate. Or it could be that FACT knows people will come if they can play free games. It doesn't matter. Art wins either way.

Lisson Presents 7 is running at the Lisson Gallery in London until January 16. As well as Cory's works, there are pieces by Stephen Willats, Daniel Buren and Ceal Floyer. Go see it.