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The Commodordion (linusakesson.net)
519 points by cowtools on Oct 21, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 65 comments



Check out his C64 demo "A Mind Is Born", where he fits a "procedurally-generating" song with visuals in barely 256(!!!) bytes.

https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/


It's been discussed on HN before too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26511266


On one hand I wish there was more, on the other I think it would have been too much? It's brilliant for sure. I love that these guys have been making this stuff since the ASCII scene (for those unaware lot of cool procedural bits like this used to get stuffed into warez greetz and plenty of smaller binaries before that such as coms and what not in the BBS scenes)


I wonder what the demoscene could do with modern CPUs and their AVX multisymmetric parallel whatchacallit and what not. As in, getting the most amount of stuff done with the least amount of instructions.

Does anybody know any examples?


Probably ‘.kkrieger’ would be a more-current inspiration, though it's almost twenty years old itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

My uneducated guess is that perhaps the thing of the day now is proper voxels (not Minecraft's “voxels”) and lots of shaders on top. But then again, this endeavour doesn't really differ from just making experimental game engines.


https://youtu.be/Imquk_3oFf4

I don't think it uses any fancy modern CPU features but this is probably the reigning champion of the 256 byte demo, and its write up[0]

[0] http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories


Well the fact that you are limited by the C64 itself makes you use every bit of creativity to pull off such a demo as A Mind is Born.

I think it is this limiting factor that is partly responsible for keeping the C64 scene alive. While it is limiting, there are also still infinite possibilities of creativity. I don't personally find say, the PC demo scene as interesting because it is not really limited in any way other than size competitions. But still there you get a lot more mileage out of every opcode than on the C64.


This is pretty impressive!

I play piano accordion (but not particularly well). I started watching the video first and was a little troubled that the bellows appeared to be home-made, crappy looking, and not nearly as effective as they could be. Aftermarket bellows are not hard to find and are not even that expensive if you get them from China. But then I saw that he made them out of _floppy disks_ and decided that was pure genius.

This also made me realize that a computer keyboard pretty closely resembles the right hand of a chromatic button accordion, so I assume that's how it's laid out.

Anyway, he certainly plays this cobbled-together instrument far better than I'll ever play my analog accordion. There are MIDI and other "digital" accordions out there but they are either extremely expensive or limiting in terms of what you can do with them, or both. This gives me hope that one day I could possibly build my own programmable digital accordion.


The layout on a chromatic button accordion is surprisingly similar to a keyboard.

This was quite straightforward to touch type with: https://twitter.com/ykarikos/status/1038145486618861573


> my analog accordion

Perhaps you were joking, and you made me smile, but there are no "analog" instruments (save perhaps analog synthesizers), because what could they be the analog of, or analogous to? They're the real thing, not an analog of something. You meant your acoustic accordion. It would be very confusing to call acoustic instruments analog, because even an electric accordion or electric guitar or digital synthesizer still uses analog electronics for amplification.


From wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_signal

> An analog signal or analogue signal (see spelling differences) is any continuous signal representing some other quantity, i.e., analogous to another quantity. For example, in an analog audio signal, the instantaneous signal voltage varies continuously with the pressure of the sound waves.

> In contrast, a digital signal represents the original time-varying quantity as a sampled sequence of quantized values which imposes some bandwidth and dynamic range constraints on the representation.

> Analog devices are a combination of both analog machine and analog media

So, in common scientific use, this is fine. You are speaking of accordion analog, not analog accordion.


I think you are confusing sound, or vibration propagating as an acoustic wave through a medium such as air, which is what acoustic instruments produce, with signal, or the representation or analog of sound by changing levels of voltages, what, say, a microphone would produce, which is also electrically analog, or analog electronics. An accordion produces sound as air flows past vibrating reeds, producing sound acoustically. Acoustic instruments have no signal if they have no electronics. Thus, there is no accordion analog nor analog accordion scientifically or otherwise unless you consider a digital synthesizer's accordion-sound mode an accordion analog. If so, the C64razy digital accordion in the article is also an analog of an acoustic accordion and an accordion analog.


I think you suffer from overpedantry and you are confusing electrical signal with just signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal

> In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon.[1] Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers.

> In nature, signals can be actions done by an organism to alert other organisms, ranging from the release of plant chemicals to warn nearby plants of a predator, to sounds or motions made by animals to alert other animals of food.

Sounds are also signals. And using "analog" with accordion is not strict technical term, it's layman's term for "not digital". According to your usage, Commodordion is not digital, because it emits sounds, not numbers.


> I think you suffer from overpedantry and you are confusing electrical signal with just signal.

Tu quoque, ad hominem, and equivocation. "Signal" has multiple distinct meanings. You are conflating homonyms in equivocation, as well as attacking me personally while arguing, "you too!" Not all signal, by the definition you're conflating, is sound (such as semaphore, gesture, facial expression and even pheromonal response), and by the same vague definition, not all sound is signal (such as Berkeley's tree falling), not unless it is communication.

Context and semantics matter here. If we define sound as signal and vice versa, then there is no literal distinction between acoustic sound and analog signal, creating ambiguity and confusion. In the context of audio and sound, and from your own citation:

> in an analog audio signal, the instantaneous voltage of the signal varies continuously with the sound pressure... The term analog signal usually refers to electrical signals

A sound is also a a long, wide body of water that connects two other bodies of water, but it would be absurd and equivocating identical words of different meanings to claim that acoustic sound is also a body of water.


Some years ago, I had a dream about meeting someone playing a button box accordion which had a qwerty keybaord in place of the usual buttons.


This is so much better in the video than what I thought it would be from just the pictures. Which of course makes sense since it's Akesson. He's one of the people behind the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators, after all.


Intro to Pocket Operators

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFD9_8H7lPA

Cool stuff


I remember Linus videos with the pocket operators, somehow didn't internalize that he worked for teenage engineering, and in retrospect it feels like the most plainly obvious thing in the world. Of course he does.


Very neat!

I haven't done a proper writeup yet and there's no retro-computing involved, but perhaps folks will be also be interested in a demo of my homemade accordion. (MIDI controller, technically; sound generation is on a laptop.)

https://youtu.be/4ZueoLaISdw


I am delighted to live in the era where such hackery occurs and is also so easily shared.


Related: I made https://www.keyboardaccordion.com to be able to play the accordion layout (chromatic and diatonic) with a computer keyboard. (Desktop only, of course.)


This is a fantastic idea! I had no trouble playing scales along the row.

Is the source code available? As a C#/D player, I find the relationships between the rows unfriendly, and miss the bottom two buttons of the row. Plus I'd love to have real accordion sound samples, and maybe MIDI output...

(ooo, plus I guess if you only wanted two rows of right hand notes, then you could have two rows of bass buttons, just like a real box only with a lot more chords available...)


Yep, the source is on GitHub! Yeah, I didn’t set up any but the standard Hohner tunings, but any would be easy to implement.


Geez, was the "open source" link there all along and I just missed it? Thank you!!


I see Akesson, I click through. Absolutely amazing. Curious why he chose a Datasette emulator instead of cartridges, though.


It's a lot easier to dump out a pre-recorded audio stream (or even generate it with a simple modem) than it is to interface with the C64's expansion connector.


The simplest PCB designs for C64 cartridges requires fewer components than the datasette emulator pictured, or you can buy a ready-made more advanced one with a 64K eeprom for ~$20.


This feels like the kind of project where "it made me laugh the most" is as good a reason as anything else. I sure laughed when I got to that part.


Certainly the whole thing is awesomely bizarre, so not criticizing the choice. It just seemed to make things more impractical since it adds the requirement of the "play" button and pressing keys on both machines and waiting for the load on startup instead of just turning them on.

But then again practicality isn't a high priority for this thing.


I'm guessing he's using a variant of his own Qwertuoso program for the playing, and it's tiny, less than 4k. Even with the horribly slow default C64 tape loader, that would be about a minute.

Linus is one of the demoscene's experts on fastloading too, so he may not use the default loader!


This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen – and I have kids.


Took the words out of my typing hands! (Yeah, and I have kids too!)


That's completely geeky and absolutely entertaining. Can't believe the amount of work that went into that bit of ingenuity.


Very cool! It's funny, over the years I've seen high-tech digital Roland accordions used in very trad venues where I wouldn't expect them.

But TBH when I saw the thread I was expecting something a little more like Keith Cary's Commodium (a mandolin made from a metal bedpan)...

https://www.fretboardjournal.com/features/odd-jobs-the-fanta...


Yooo, his performance is immaculate, had me dancing to the entertainer like it was 1913. Yeee!


Only respect for this mad guy. Not only did he build it he also played it in public.


This guy is both an inspiration and makes me question the value of my own existence. Always love watching and reading his work.

Now I want to figure out how to build a guitarch-linux.


This is amazing.

It heralds the coming of the Spectrophone and the Amiguitar.


If this were to be fake, it would be the cruelest video on the internet, IMHO.

This is such an amazing display of talents, it requires and analysis video of its own to go over the geekery, the music, the time and effort, the creativity, the whys and hows. I was speechless and awed throughout the video and reading about the project. I feel so lucky to have seen this!

Happiness.


Yeah, I usually rarely bother with watching videos of projects, much preferring to read about them, but watched this to the end.


This is the best accordion I've seen in my life! Such a cool and geeky project. Just what we need more of.


Bravo. Bravo, sir. I flat-out giggled with glee during that amazing video!


This made my day. Absolutely magnificent! My hat's off to you sir.


I'm so happy to see this at the top of the list on a Friday afternoon. Totally made my day, as well as a few others who are too busy right now trying to close out the week to f5 on HN.


Not knowing in advance who Akesson is, I was prepared for this to another bad attempt at music-adjacent technology. Then I watched and listened to his performance...wonderful!


Amazing musicianship.


This is the best thing ever! Wow! Great work!


Amazing - bravo!! Is Weird Al Yankovic on HN? Because he REALLY should see this.


this would have fit in perfectly in the white and nerdy music video


Amazing indeed! Linus always comes up with mindblowing stuff. A true genius!


Linus is the fuckin man, I love this guy. His demos inspire me to no end.


That is so dumb. I love it!


And the bellows is made of floppy disks. This is a masterpiece.


Amazing. I though I was a nerd.


This is completely insane.


The SID chip is so sick!


This is truly bananas and wonderful. As an "old" that had a Vic-20 and a commie 64, this just warms the heart.


A pure geek porn


Incredible


lol


What a sad project but amazing implementation and vision. Awesome!


Your use of the term 'sad' seems to not match that of many of us.

I was not informed about its history, so I checked, and discovered that it means "satiated" - so the current use of 'sad' comes from the idea of the discomfort that being burdened by too much nourishment brings.

You must mean that the project is very "satiating". Good: surely it can fill us with a most fulfilling nourishment. But I would have used the most unambiguous term.


Toward the end, the article states "unfortunately I won't be playing this instrument very often, and I most definitely won't practice for hours to improve my left-hand technique. This rather undermines the potential for the Commodordion as a viable musical instrument."

I believe there is a certain element of sadness in that. However it's hopeful that he will continue experimenting with the lessons learned, so I wouldn't describe it as sad.


No, he managed to combine three traditionally uncool things, namely 8 bit computing, accordions and ragtime music, resulting in an underflow of uncoolness which is extremely cool.


I like all those things though...




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