A couple years ago I bought a broken down old Tron arcade machine off eBay. I spent a good portion of the summer tearing it apart and fully restoring it. In the process, I added a few special touches of my own.
At some point I’ll share all the details of how much work went into this endeavor (and why this is the most unique and special arcade machine int he world), but for the moment let me just show off a few picture galleries that tell most of the story:
I’m currently in the process of reverse-engineering the original software and re-writing it as a native .NET/XNA application. I can tell you that I know my way around the light cycles routine… I wrote the program!
It’s been more than a year since I posted the original JoCo medley. I was a little surprised by the response I got the first time around. The people really love their Coulton.
Here are the very special tracks that made the cut this time around:
Shop Vac (Intro), Space Doggity, Opening Band (Paul and Storm), Blue Sunny Day, You Ruined Everything, First of May, Big Bad World One, I’m Your Moon, When You Go, I Feel Fantastic, Shop Vac (Reprise)
I must admit I knew nothing of Paul and Storm‘s music before my first JoCo show last year, but I became a loyal fan before they finished their opening number. Perhaps the next medley will be just Paul and Storm favorites. They have more than enough great songs to choose from.
As per usual, here are some files (right-click and choose “save as”):
I’ve got tickets to both San Fransisco shows this month, which will be my sixth and seventh times seeing Mr Coulton perform live. If you have the opportunity to see a P&S/JoCo show, please don’t pass it up. It’s impossible to not have a good time.
Here’s a MIDI file that I made while working out the arrangement. This isn’t quite the same as the performance in the video, but the data might be useful to someone.
My Cintiq 12WX arrived this evening. Here’s a couple sketches I made while trying to get a feel for it. The tree was drawn in Photoshop, and the moon was done in Corel Painter, which I need a lot more practice with. It’s a bit frustrating.
I’m very happy with the tablet so far. It’s a lot of fun to use.
Ethan decided he wanted to make some beautiful paintings to send to his grandparents as Christmas gifts. We thought it would be fun to share a video of the artist at work. I imagine the video of Ethan creating his masterpiece will eventually help us deflect scrutiny from 60 minutes.
I made a cover of Still Alive about a year ago and put it on YouTube. It’s gotten over 150,000 views, which isn’t too shabby, I think. Here’s the original description:
So, here’s a little cover arrangement I made of “Still Alive”, the ending credits song from the excellent video game Portal.
The song was written by my personal hero, Jonathan Coulton. Explore his music. It’s wonderful.
I performed all nine tracks (on the keyboard), and I kept pretty close to the original arrangement.
The encoding on this movie is a much, much higher quality than the YouTube version.
