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Incredible Shrinking Sphere

Posted: 27/08/2005 - 11:59
by xo
I just went to Binary Zone and found the amazing Incredible Shrinking Sphere. But what, no remixes?

Posted: 27/08/2005 - 12:19
by Kenz
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.

Posted: 27/08/2005 - 12:24
by xo
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.

Posted: 27/08/2005 - 13:18
by Kenz
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! :)

Posted: 27/08/2005 - 13:45
by xo
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.

Posted: 27/08/2005 - 16:41
by xo
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.

Posted: 27/08/2005 - 18:32
by Kenz
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. :)

Posted: 27/08/2005 - 20:07
by xo
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.