LASERS! && Freemont Street LED array (was Re: Cray J932SE (was Re: Straight 8 up on Ebay just now))

[ethan at 757.org]

> I knew it! Piano, bass, violin, and guitar, here. I play them all badly
> but guitar a little less badly. I've been an amateur for about 10 years
> and I've been taking guitar lessons for about three years, now.
> Sax, eh? Cool. I've never tried a reed-based instrument.

Very cool! I'm a.d.d. a bit with hobbies. On the synth side I recently 
picked up a Roland MT-32, so that was an achievement unlocked. Hope to 
find an Oberheim Matrix 6 at some point.

> You have all the cool sound gear you need if you have an ST and a machine
> with a GUS! Well.... maybe an Amiga with Octamed or Protracker, but Scream
> Tracker and Impulse Tracker also rocks fairly hard with a GUS, so never
> mind. :-)

I started computeres on Atari 800XL, then next computer was family's Tandy 
1000SX. At some point ended up with a Sound Blaster 1.0 in that (Still 
have the SB.) I don't remember if there was ever a tracker on that, but I 
remember Scream Tracker on the 386 (same sound card IIRC.) Spent a lot of 
time messing with Scream Tracker and Renaissance Composer 669.

> As you can tell, I like trackers. I wrote a few MOD/IT/S3M files "back in
> the day".

If you haven't looked, look on the hornet mod archive to see if any are on 
there? There was recently a video from popular artist deadmau5 where he 
was driving around interviewing some DJ and he asked the guy if he used to 
mess with ScreamTracker and all that -- I was pretty shocked.

> Ah... I finally found some mention of it. Check this out:
> "The light and sound spectacular runs on a master show controller and
> three sub-systems. The controller runs Stage Manager 3000 software on an
> Amiga computer originally installed when the show began in 1995. Murphy
> said the master controller sends commands to the video-display controller,
> light console and digitally automated audio system. The audio system, a
> recently upgraded LCS Matrix 3 system, distributes 550,000W of sound
> through 220 remote amplifiers located throughout the outdoor mall."
> From:
> http://www.signweb.com/content/night-lights

Interesting! Never seen the show, we tried to go to it once while at 
Defcon but messed up on the time. So they're still running it on an Amiga? 
That's awesome!

Some of the amusement parks had ride simulators that used Amiga + Laser 
disk. It's interesting where the Amiga found it's niche.


> Whoa, very neat. When I was in college I used to run shows out of an old
> machine shop in an industrial part of town. It started as just a practice
> place. However, I knew a bunch of artists. They weren't just other college
> kids but artists who are pretty well known in the area and responsible for
> large public works etc... They all had daughters, you see... Anyhow, they
> talked me into letting them setup some art "openings" at this same little
> dinky venue I had going. One of them was an electrical engineering student
> who would come up from Texas Tech and cover the place with LED matrices
> that he had built. It was really impressive tech for the 1990s. He could
> do things like color cycling, and display static frames, but not
> animation. It always brought in lots of folks (200-800 per show usually)
> who were impressed by our tiny art shows with the "Light Room" display.
> People gave canned food or $$$ to get in and we raised a bit of food and
> money for charity that way, too.

Very cool! I always think about trying to do some sort of music venue with 
a focus on live music + video recording / live streaming, or arcades + old 
computers. Here in Northern VA everything is crazy expensive tho, so 
coming across commercial space for pennies is difficult (at this moment.)


--
Ethan O'Toole