15 ms·
The Commodordion
- arbitrage 4y agoAmazing musicianship.
- vidarh 4y agoI see Akesson, I click through. Absolutely amazing. Curious why he chose a Datasette emulator instead of cartridges, though.
- cbm-vic-20 4y agoIt's a lot easier to dump out a pre-recorded audio stream (or even generate it with a simple modem) than it is to interface with the C64's expansion connector.
- vidarh 4y agoThe simplest PCB designs for C64 cartridges requires fewer components than the datasette emulator pictured, or you can buy a ready-made more advanced one with a 64K eeprom for ~$20.
- egypturnash 4y agoThis feels like the kind of project where "it made me laugh the most" is as good a reason as anything else. I sure laughed when I got to that part.
- vidarh 4y agoCertainly the whole thing is awesomely bizarre, so not criticizing the choice. It just seemed to make things more impractical since it adds the requirement of the "play" button and pressing keys on both machines and waiting for the load on startup instead of just turning them on. But then again practicality isn't a high priority for this thing.
- vintermann 4y agoI'm guessing he's using a variant of his own Qwertuoso program for the playing, and it's tiny, less than 4k. Even with the horribly slow default C64 tape loader, that would be about a minute. Linus is one of the demoscene's experts on fastloading too, so he may not use the default loader!
- johnklos 4y agoThat is so dumb. I love it!
- westmeal 4y agoLinus is the fuckin man, I love this guy. His demos inspire me to no end.
- bergenty 4y agoWhat a sad project but amazing implementation and vision. Awesome!
- mdp2021 4y agoYour use of the term 'sad' seems to not match that of many of us. I was not informed about its history, so I checked, and discovered that it means "satiated" - so the current use of 'sad' comes from the idea of the discomfort that being burdened by too much nourishment brings. You must mean that the project is very "satiating". Good: surely it can fill us with a most fulfilling nourishment. But I would have used the most unambiguous term.
- dwringer 4y agoToward the end, the article states "unfortunately I won't be playing this instrument very often, and I most definitely won't practice for hours to improve my left-hand technique. This rather undermines the potential for the Commodordion as a viable musical instrument." I believe there is a certain element of sadness in that. However it's hopeful that he will continue experimenting with the lessons learned, so I wouldn't describe it as sad.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zogomoox 4y agoNo, he managed to combine three traditionally uncool things, namely 8 bit computing, accordions and ragtime music, resulting in an underflow of uncoolness which is extremely cool.
- vintermann 4y agoI like all those things though...
- Grothendank 4y agoYooo, his performance is immaculate, had me dancing to the entertainer like it was 1913. Yeee!
- RocketOne 4y agoThat's completely geeky and absolutely entertaining. Can't believe the amount of work that went into that bit of ingenuity.
- Optimal_Persona 4y agoVery cool! It's funny, over the years I've seen high-tech digital Roland accordions used in very trad venues where I wouldn't expect them. But TBH when I saw the thread I was expecting something a little more like Keith Cary's Commodium (a mandolin made from a metal bedpan)... https://www.fretboardjournal.com/features/odd-jobs-the-fantastical-world-of-keith-cary/ https://www.fretboardjournal.com/features/odd-jobs-the-fanta...
- felipelalli 4y agolol
- torh 4y agoThis is the best accordion I've seen in my life! Such a cool and geeky project. Just what we need more of.
- adhoc32 4y agoOnly respect for this mad guy. Not only did he build it he also played it in public.
- joemi 4y agoThis is so much better in the video than what I thought it would be from just the pictures. Which of course makes sense since it's Akesson. He's one of the people behind the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators, after all.
- raphar 4y agoIntro to Pocket Operators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFD9_8H7lPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFD9_8H7lPA Cool stuff
- gimmeThaBeet 4y agoI remember Linus videos with the pocket operators, somehow didn't internalize that he worked for teenage engineering, and in retrospect it feels like the most plainly obvious thing in the world. Of course he does.
- MaintenanceMode 4y agoThis is truly bananas and wonderful. As an "old" that had a Vic-20 and a commie 64, this just warms the heart.
- kstrauser 4y agoBravo. Bravo, sir. I flat-out giggled with glee during that amazing video!
- tommek4077 4y agoThis is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen – and I have kids.
- l0c0b0x 4y agoTook the words out of my typing hands! (Yeah, and I have kids too!)
- fancyPantsZero 4y agoThis made my day. Absolutely magnificent! My hat's off to you sir.
- danrochman 4y agoAmazing - bravo!! Is Weird Al Yankovic on HN? Because he REALLY should see this.
- amanj41 4y agothis would have fit in perfectly in the white and nerdy music video
- scrozier 4y agoNot knowing in advance who Akesson is, I was prepared for this to another bad attempt at music-adjacent technology. Then I watched and listened to his performance...wonderful!
- Wuzado 4y agoCheck out his C64 demo "A Mind Is Born", where he fits a "procedurally-generating" song with visuals in barely 256(!!!) bytes. https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/
- spydum 4y agoOn one hand I wish there was more, on the other I think it would have been too much? It's brilliant for sure. I love that these guys have been making this stuff since the ASCII scene (for those unaware lot of cool procedural bits like this used to get stuffed into warez greetz and plenty of smaller binaries before that such as coms and what not in the BBS scenes)
- Razengan 4y agoI wonder what the demoscene could do with modern CPUs and their AVX multisymmetric parallel whatchacallit and what not. As in, getting the most amount of stuff done with the least amount of instructions. Does anybody know any examples?
- throwawayben 4y agohttps://youtu.be/Imquk_3oFf4 https://youtu.be/Imquk_3oFf4 I don't think it uses any fancy modern CPU features but this is probably the reigning champion of the 256 byte demo, and its write up[0] [0] http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories
- pwrrr 4y agoWell the fact that you are limited by the C64 itself makes you use every bit of creativity to pull off such a demo as A Mind is Born. I think it is this limiting factor that is partly responsible for keeping the C64 scene alive. While it is limiting, there are also still infinite possibilities of creativity. I don't personally find say, the PC demo scene as interesting because it is not really limited in any way other than size competitions. But still there you get a lot more mileage out of every opcode than on the C64.
- aasasd 4y ago
- raphar 4y agoAmazing. I though I was a nerd.
- Eupraxias 4y agoI'm so happy to see this at the top of the list on a Friday afternoon. Totally made my day, as well as a few others who are too busy right now trying to close out the week to f5 on HN.
- pwrrr 4y agoAmazing indeed! Linus always comes up with mindblowing stuff. A true genius!
- jrd259 4y agoI am delighted to live in the era where such hackery occurs and is also so easily shared.
- rkagerer 4y agoAnd the bellows is made of floppy disks. This is a masterpiece.
- sixstringtheory 4y agoThis guy is both an inspiration and makes me question the value of my own existence. Always love watching and reading his work. Now I want to figure out how to build a guitarch-linux.
- bityard 4y agoThis is pretty impressive! I play piano accordion (but not particularly well). I started watching the video first and was a little troubled that the bellows appeared to be home-made, crappy looking, and not nearly as effective as they could be. Aftermarket bellows are not hard to find and are not even that expensive if you get them from China. But then I saw that he made them out of _floppy disks_ and decided that was pure genius. This also made me realize that a computer keyboard pretty closely resembles the right hand of a chromatic button accordion, so I assume that's how it's laid out. Anyway, he certainly plays this cobbled-together instrument far better than I'll ever play my analog accordion. There are MIDI and other "digital" accordions out there but they are either extremely expensive or limiting in terms of what you can do with them, or both. This gives me hope that one day I could possibly build my own programmable digital accordion.
- dhosek 4y agoSome years ago, I had a dream about meeting someone playing a button box accordion which had a qwerty keybaord in place of the usual buttons.
- Maursault 4y ago> my analog accordion Perhaps you were joking, and you made me smile, but there are no "analog" instruments (save perhaps analog synthesizers), because what could they be the analog of, or analogous to? They're the real thing, not an analog of something. You meant your acoustic accordion. It would be very confusing to call acoustic instruments analog, because even an electric accordion or electric guitar or digital synthesizer still uses analog electronics for amplification.
- yetihehe 4y agoFrom wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_signal > An analog signal or analogue signal (see spelling differences) is any continuous signal representing some other quantity, i.e., analogous to another quantity. For example, in an analog audio signal, the instantaneous signal voltage varies continuously with the pressure of the sound waves. > In contrast, a digital signal represents the original time-varying quantity as a sampled sequence of quantized values which imposes some bandwidth and dynamic range constraints on the representation. > Analog devices are a combination of both analog machine and analog media So, in common scientific use, this is fine. You are speaking of accordion analog, not analog accordion.
- jrochkind1 4y agoThis is completely insane.
- Caitlynmeeks 4y agoThis is the best thing ever! Wow! Great work!
- quadcore 4y agoIncredible
- otikik 4y agoThis is amazing. It heralds the coming of the Spectrophone and the Amiguitar.
- skybrian 4y agoVery neat! I haven't done a proper writeup yet and there's no retro-computing involved, but perhaps folks will be also be interested in a demo of my homemade accordion. (MIDI controller, technically; sound generation is on a laptop.) https://youtu.be/4ZueoLaISdw https://youtu.be/4ZueoLaISdw
- l0c0b0x 4y agoIf this were to be fake, it would be the cruelest video on the internet, IMHO. This is such an amazing display of talents, it requires and analysis video of its own to go over the geekery, the music, the time and effort, the creativity, the whys and hows. I was speechless and awed throughout the video and reading about the project. I feel so lucky to have seen this! Happiness.
- vidarh 4y agoYeah, I usually rarely bother with watching videos of projects, much preferring to read about them, but watched this to the end.
- floppydiskette 4y agoRelated: I made https://www.keyboardaccordion.com https://www.keyboardaccordion.com to be able to play the accordion layout (chromatic and diatonic) with a computer keyboard. (Desktop only, of course.)
- colomon 4y agoThis is a fantastic idea! I had no trouble playing scales along the row. Is the source code available? As a C#/D player, I find the relationships between the rows unfriendly, and miss the bottom two buttons of the row. Plus I'd love to have real accordion sound samples, and maybe MIDI output... (ooo, plus I guess if you only wanted two rows of right hand notes, then you could have two rows of bass buttons, just like a real box only with a lot more chords available...)
- floppydiskette 4y agoYep, the source is on GitHub! Yeah, I didn’t set up any but the standard Hohner tunings, but any would be easy to implement.
- colomon 4y agoGeez, was the "open source" link there all along and I just missed it? Thank you!!
- kennyloginz 4y agoThe SID chip is so sick!
- sintezcs 4y agoA pure geek porn