December 21st, 2022

2022 Retrospective

Ah, the days when I would regularly post something new on here… perhaps I should get back into that, eh. For now though, this Year 2022 Retrospective will have to do.

As I mentioned in the previous post, we released a new Doppelplusungut album earlier in January. We’re not doing a new one this winter, as I want to spend time on some other projects that have been stacking up since a long time. Also participated in DiHalt’s beeper compo. Only came in 4th this time, even tough I’m actually pretty happy with my work.

Over the course of the next couple of months, I finally made some progress on Bintracker again. The core application is now pretty much feature complete. I also started to tackle Windows builds, but didn’t manage to get them working before the gardening season. I’m planning to start up work on that again in the coming months.

Not much artistic work got done from mid spring to the end of autumn, as driving our homestead was taking up pretty much all my free time. I’m fine with that, since it’s such an exiting process that involves learning many new tricks and techniques. Still, I wish the days had 48 hours, so I could do other things as well.

In June, I co-organized the famous C64 Lounge at Reilfest in Halle (Germany). I love doing the Lounge there, but I think this was my last time. Sadly, the Reilfest event has grown beyond any healthy proportions, making it an extremely exhausting experience.

In July, I helped organize Chipwrecked in Denmark, the largest outdoor Chiptune festival in the world (albeit slightly down-scaled from previous years due to Covid concerns). That was a blast. So good to meet old friends again after the pandemic years, make some new ones, and listen to an excellent and diverse selection of music on the big system. As expected with such a massive line-up, there were a number of acts that I didn’t know before who really blew me off my feet. My personal highlight was probably the turbo blasting set by synchronously headbanging metalhead duo Doktor Ziegel from Malmö. Also loved Eggstempo’s glitchy Chip Hop set, a rare sight these days.

During the next months, I participated in Rabenauge’s Transactor demo for the Commodore PET, which took 1st place in the Oldschool compo at Deadline. Not entirely happy with the end result, as the music in the demo isn’t playing as intended, which I learned only after it was released. Nevertheless, it was a fun experience, and there’s always a chance to do things right the next time.

The past few weeks I’ve been indulging in a ZX Spectrum beeper coding spree. I published four new beeper engines, and discarded another half a dozen designs in the process. After 7 years, I finally managed to beat my own record for smallest beeper engine with nanobeep3. Pindsvin and Pulsatilla are two engines combing Squeeker synthesis with PFM (pin pulse) and Pulse Interleaving, respectively. Finally, there’s tftone, a Tritone port that eliminates row transition noise, and runs at approximately 4 times the speed of the original Tritone.

So, overall it’s been an eventful and busy year. Hope to continue the good run next year. Until then, happy end-of-the-year festivities everyone. Stay safe, and see you all back in 2023.