Long time, no post. Rather than follow my initial instinct to just type two-thousand words of utter nonsense, I'll instead write a little list of what Mr. Laemeur has been up to since the last post in May. I'm sure there will be omissions, but my memory only ever runs at about 44% recall on a good day, so I'll give what I can.

June was consumed with the writing and drawing of BRAVE ULYSSES, chapter 2 for competition in July's Zuda invitational. The comic placed 7th. Woo-hoo.

July was spent dealing with my psychotic mother's deterioration, incarceration, hospitalization, and subsequent release. Some music was recorded during this time as well.

August I went to P-town (that's Portland for we west-coasters, not Philadelphia) for a few days, then came back to the wilds of north Idaho to begin work. Yes. Like, a regular job. I know, I know... I didn't think it would ever happen either. What can I say? Opportunity knocked, and I wanted some new shoes.

September I acquired an Atari 800XL home computer, a Roland TR-55 drum machine, a Sony SL-HFR90 Betamax VCR, and some vinyl records. Copious quantities of time have been invested in playing with these items, particularly the Atari and the Roland; I'll go into those a bit more:

The Roland Rhythm 55 (model TR-55) was that company's mid-range transistorized drum machine from 1972 (the TR-33 being the base model, and the TR-77 being the pimpmatic). It's a fully-analog, non-programmable, six-voice machine with ten pre-set rhythm sequences. Each sequence has up to ten user-selectable variations, for a total of somewhere around 100 unique, repeatable patters. The six drum voices are: bass, snare, hi-hat, ride cymbal, low conga, and high conga. A 'balance' knob controls in a simple fashion the levels of the various drum sounds; swept fully to the left, only the bass and snare are heard, while when swept fully right, only the hi-hat, ride, and congas are heard. There is a tempo control knob and a switch which, when tripped, doubles the tempo.

I was quick to learn that a deft touch on the controls of the TR-55 can increase its rhythmic potential quite significantly. By doubling/halving tempo and triggering variations during playback, you can cook up a whole variety of new beats, in new time signatures, on-the-fly. And running the box through an overdrive circuit makes everything sound lo-lo-loverly. As I write this, I'm shaming myself for not having committed any of my experiments to disk yet. The reason for this, though, is that I got ambitious.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was get inside the machine and see if I could rig up some external triggers for the drum circuits, bypassing the sequencer entirely. I spent hours and hours poking and prodding the boards of the unit until after a few days I did manage to locate traces that, when shorted, would trigger individual drum voice playback. Some of you handy hackers out there might chuckle at the fact that it took me days of experimentatin' to figure these things out, but in my defense, I have almost no prior experience with circuit design of a complexity greater than that of... a joystick. So... *blows raspberry*

With trigger locations located, the Roland was put away and has been since that time. The external trigger project awaits planning, component procurement, and additional work with its intended triggering device: the Atari 800XL.

No, I did not buy the Atari just to trigger the Roland. In fact, I placed the winning bid on eBay for the Atari a couple of days prior to my purchase of the TR-55.

The Atari was a long-postponed purchase. I'd been wanting one for years, but I was completely broke for, well, years (confession: my first Zuda commission, back in April, was the first time I'd received a pay check in 42 months -- proving that I am a seriously committed deadbeat). Also, space has been at a real premium for me the last little while, and I didn't want to get an old 8-bit if I couldn't also get a CRT display to go with it. A 13" CRT may not seem like it takes up that much space, but when I say space has been at a premium, I'm understating significantly.

Anyway, all that rubbish aside, I got my hands on a not-entirely-functional Atari computer. First order of business was to get the important keys on the keyboard back to a working state. This was achieved, in preposterously poor fashion, by taping aluminum foil over the corroded/broken traces on the keyboard membrane. This method of repair, for those of you who may be in a similar situation, is utter shit, and I find myself having to go back and fix it every few weeks. When I feel like spending a lot of money, I'll buy a $20 conductive-paint-pen and redraw the traces with something that (hopefully) won't come un-stuck as often.

Once I could actually BREAK a BASIC program's execution, the reading and tinkering (and quite a bit of unproductive-but-unavoidable game-playing) commenced; this activity continues to the present.

In October a few good days were spent hacking the guts of a Sony Watchman FD-510 portable television. The Watchman is an AC/DC-powered TV with a 4.5" monochrome picture tube. I had an idea, following the purchase of an SIO2PC cable from Atarimax, of turning the Watchman (which I picked up from work for a few bucks) into a very small PC by stuffing a nanoITX motherboard and a 3.5" floppy drive into its case. This super-small PC (using the Watchman's display as a mono monitor) would then be used as a portable file-server for my Atari. Okay, the project seems a little elaborate just for serving files to a 25-year-old computer, but I've wanted to stick one of those nanoITX boards in an unlikely place (!) for some time, and the Watchman seemed like a killer candidate. Also, the tuning indicator slot being repurposed as a 3.5" disk slot was just too cool to pass up.

Anyway, the guts-hacking bit: the Watchman only has an RF-input from the factory, but in the little bit of reading-up on TVs that I'd done in September, I learned that TV tuners are just demodulating a composite video signal, and if the composite output of the tuner can be located, you can feed any old composite signal down that line and add a composite input to any TV. I had to look up datasheets for some of the ICs on the Watchman's mainboard to find it, but I did find the composite line, and was able to wire-in an input. Sadly, I killed the composite output of one of my PC's video cards in the process, which I kicked myself thoroughly for.

I figured the Watchman didn't need its built-in speaker anymore, so I ripped that out. Also, I yanked the humongous transformer out of it since I'll just be running the thing on DC power from now on. The tuning dial apparatus was pulled out and discarded, and with a little internal case modification I got the main PCB to sit a few inches lower in the case, freeing up even more internal space. As it is right now, the Watchman is a fully-functional, monochrome, composite monitor. Now, when I have monies to waste, I can drop a little nanoITX board in there and complete its transformation into a very small, slightly-useful computer. The file-server idea, though, I pretty much discarded when I picked up a working Atari 1050 disk drive for cheap on eBay.

The other big 'get' of the month was a brand-new (old stock) Atari Touch Tablet (model CX77) and AtariArtist cartridge, with which I have been joyously doodling for the past several weeks. Also, it makes a great general-purpose input for some of the hellacious-noise programs I've been cooking up. There are some dead pixels (for lack of a better term) on the tablet, though, and I'm considering picking up another one in the hopes that it'll track better. Little in this world is more irritating that having a computer paint program jump the cursor across the screen in the middle of a critical stroke.

I completed one illustration in October: A Girl and Her Robot.

That sort-of brings us up to November, I guess, where work on the Atari continues (DLI wave-shaping routines and nine playfield colors per line in Antic mode F!). I'm trying to get back on the wagon as far as drawing and comics goes, but I don't have any immediate plans in that area. It is unfortunate that as soon as I began making money again, I began falling into the routine of entertainment-through-material-acquisition which I indulged in all through my early twenties. With my late twenties drawing quickly to a close, I hope I can find the resolve to put my material acquisitions to better use that I did in the past -- and actually get some fucking art done. (-respond-)