Incredible Shrinking Sphere

xo · Post by xo » 27/08/2005 - 11:59

I just went to Binary Zone and found the amazing Incredible Shrinking Sphere. But what, no remixes?

Kenz · Post by **Kenz** » 27/08/2005 - 12:19

Yeah, it's a great track - quite Shadowfire-esque.

Could I ask where you found it on the BZ site?

Hope someone picks this up for a remix.

xo · Post by xo » 27/08/2005 - 12:24

I can remember as a child I was really a fan of this game. I can't remember much of the gameplay so maybe it was the music.

I found it here: http://www.binaryzone.org/cdrom2.php the page claims that its playing it. I didn't have the plugin though. But it made me look for it. Actually I was looking for it some time ago but somehow I never got to it. Today I choose the game name for a gmail account and decided to search for the music.

I did a complete search of my media/audio/0 (scene/retro stuff) folder for "incredible" and only a couple of hits came up, including the sid and some song from Rymix (a pretty good amiga musician), and "incredible crash test dummies". Dunno what that is.

This is really overlooked, its a classic in my mind.

Kenz · Post by **Kenz** » 27/08/2005 - 13:18

Aha! Well spotted.

I've actually been removing the SidPlug tracks when I update the pages as SidPlug was very buggy in IE - but isn't there a new (and more stable) plugin for Firefox? If so then can anyone point me to a link?

I'm a big fan of Tony Lees' music - there's a great interview with him in Commodore Zone - I really must get round to making html versions of those mags one day ... Mort has actually scanned them all though. Perhaps I should bring a few CZone scan CDs along to BitLite!

xo · Post by xo » 27/08/2005 - 13:45

I don't know about SID plug but I'd be wary of using music on a homepage. It is incredibly annoying if you get to a page, and you have the volume up high, already listening to music and then the sharp SID sounds pump out on top of that. Not a good experience. However a solution could be to use a flash player with a mute button and/or volume slider, preferably muted per default. Then you can stream mp3 to the user via some mp3 file you can point to. I'm making a simple player for someone else and flash is almost ubiquitous, although I have mixed fealings about it. It takes a couple of minutes to make a stripped down flash player.

xo · Post by xo » 27/08/2005 - 16:41

Here you go Kenz.

http://bent-rasmussen.info/stream/

Here's what's needed to put in on a page

- download stream.zip
- unpack stream.zip
- copy stream.swf to the html page folder
- copy stream.js to the html page folder

<html>
<head>
<script src="stream.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<script>Stream("incredible_shrinking_sphere.mp3",false)</script>
</body>
</html>

change false to true and the player will start automatically. Pretty simple.

Kenz · Post by **Kenz** » 27/08/2005 - 18:32

Hey, that's really neat! A good way to have an (optional) mp3 playing on your web page. Maybe I should change the SIDplug links to that lil' player linked to a REAL SID mp3 recording of C64 choons.

xo · Post by xo » 27/08/2005 - 20:07

The advantage of flash is that its ubiquitous. The purist solution would require native media support from the browser but that's shaky. I need to add another parameter for initial volume and then perhaps width, height and background color.