Yar's REVENGE (OF DOOM!!!!)

Ok, so now I have a favorite system to bend: Atari! I used to have a soft spot for Gameboy, but the simplicity and pure glitch-ability (yes, i made that word up) of the system makes it freaking PERFECT!

To give you an example, me and my friend, poke, over at http://intraocularypoke.blogspot.com/ made a BEAUTIFUL video showcasing all the work I did in my 4 glitches of the classic Atari game, Yar's Revenge! I hope you enjoy the wonderful video he made, visit his site for more of his work! I hope we can have more collabs in the very near future :)

Video:

Again, here is Mr. Poke's official website: http://intraocularypoke.blogspot.com/

And, here are the ROMS, for those who would like to experience them for themselves. These roms were all hand bent with love, and I really do hope you enjoy them: http://www.mediafire.com/?7doygg40e8y1i3q

And, if you need an emulator to play the roms, I HIGHLY recommend the awesome, multiplatform emulator known as Stella

Finally, take a look at the awesome cover poke also made me!

Lossy File Formats RULE!

The JPG format, for lossy picture file compression, was made to save space... But lets see how SPACE SAVING we can go, while retaining the idea of the original image!

For my source image, I chose the (somewhat ugly) album cover of "In The Court Of The Crimson King", by King Crimson, in a decent 300 by 300 resolution. Below each picture, I will give the file size of the image. In this experiment, I stopped when the resulting file was wholly unrecognizable. As stated earlier, everything is done in the JPG file format.

Original image, 36.1 Kilobytes. Schizoid Man sure is a handsome chap, ain't he?

8.4 KB. Still quite recognizable, despite the fact that the file size is nearly a fourth of its original size.

3.1 KB. Almost one twelfth of the original file size, and it is starting to look blocky. Zoom in to see the interesting patterns within each compression block.

1.7 KB. Individual solid colored blocks are now clearly visible, and colors are being obviously rounded together. Overall image still recognizable though, even at such a small file size.

1.5 KB. Compression rate is slowing down, I decide to begin compressing by resolution to increase reduction per step. Each of the following steps, I reduce the resolution of the image, then return it to original size, while also continuing normal jpg compression.

1.2 KB. Barely even recognizable any longer. However, size reduction is significant. Compression 'blocks' are barely even recognizable as a whole any longer, being replaced by large ugly patches of solid color.

File has now reached the landmark of 1 kilobyte. To give you an idea of how small that is, the wikipedia article for Michael Jackson is nearly 3000 times the size of this single image, not including the pictures/media included on the page.

However, the results are less than decent. I contest that only the most seasoned of King Crimson fans would be able to recognize the image above without any suggestion. At this high a compression level, squinting your eyes and looking at the image from far away is one of the only things that could possibly help your recognition of the subject. 

Despite all this, lets go one level lower, just for the heck of it.

0.9 Kilobytes. Uhh, yeah... I think we are done here.

Side note: Perhaps this experiment could be replicated with other lossy formats, for example, the lossy audio format, mp3?

Gridbug: Patterns In Bitwise Operations

Bitwise operations can often make very beautiful patterns, given the regular rules that dictate how the operation in question works. So, I thought performing these operations on a bmp file that has a regular pattern might produce some interesting results. Click the following images to see the resulting patterns in full-resolution, 1000x1000 pixel glory (you might wanna zoom in to see those fine details!) :)

Source Grid

Gridbug 00000001

Gridbug 00000010

Gridbug 00000011

Gridbug 00000100

Gridbug 00000101

I really liked the results of this short experiment, and I think I may continue this Gridbug project later, with a variety of different grids, picture formats, operations, etc. Hey, I like the sound of that: "Project Gridbug"! Who knows :)

EDIT: Grr, looks like Blogger has a thing for turning my shiny uploaded bmp images into crappy lossy jpgs! That sucks! I will try uploading them elsewhere, so you can actually SEE the patterns.

EDIT2: Ok, here are the bmp versions, which should be much better (same order as before, including source):

http://i.min.us/ijokCm.bmp%Source
http://i.min.us/ijoi4k.bmp%First Bug
http://i.min.us/ijs7qC.bmp%Second Bug
http://i.min.us/ijoi4g.bmp%Third Bug
http://i.min.us/ijswBY.bmp%Fourth Bug
http://i.min.us/ijs5i4.bmp%Fifth Bug

10 Pet Sounds

Source

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

Hand edited in jpg format (lossy), converted to png format (lossless) afterward

Sifl And Olly Glitched VIDEO

So, now we are databending VIDEOS!? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS!?!?!?! 0_0

Anyways, this is an old (pre mtv) clip of a show that I love a lot, Sifl and Olly, hand edited to smithereens, in .mov format. Enjoy :)

Visualization Through BMP, Part 2

I am really happy with the results of this session, some of these patterns are just amazing!

The pictures you are about to see have been enlarged to show detail, so you don't have to zoom in like you did last time. Your welcome :)

I started with this simple .bmp file of a blank canvas:

Not too interesting, eh? You probably can't even see it, given how the site itself is already white :s

Anyways, I then began to experiment. I replaced the content of this blank file with whatever other information I fancied, and the resulting image files show the large variety of different images that can be created with this method.

For my first experiment, I generated a VERY low frequency saw wave (2 hertz):

I then generated a low frequency (though not quite as low!) square wave, non-interpolated:

The waveforms were looking very beautiful, but I wanted to see what other possibilities there were. I visualized a flac file, the King Crimson song "Moonchild":

The space at the bottom is, from what I can tell, the place where the file stops, leaving a bit left before it can loop around. Not quite sure though, to be honest!

I then chose a wav file of the world famous beat, the Amen Break (the bmp for this file seemed to be broken, so I had to re-upload it as a png):

And, finally, I visualized my first non-audio example: The first chapter of the classic novel, Moby Dick:

I hope you enjoyed these experiments, let me know what you think in the comments!

Visualization Of Various Waveforms

I thought it might be interesting to see how I could visualize some fundamental waveforms at various frequencies through data-bending. Here are my first two results:

about 120 hertz square wave

>1000 hertz sine wave

Try opening them in your image software of choice and zooming in, the patterns they make are quite beautiful. More coming soon!

Highlights from Tetris ROM bend

SNES: Bad for bending

Yeah, SNES doesn't work very well, probably because of how much more complex it is than the gameboy. However...

NES works particularly well! Now if only I could find a decent emulator for it on linux!