The Virtual Light Machine

Regular readers of TNOTB will have heard about the Virtual Light Company, formed by myself and two like-minded guys a few years ago to develop the lightsynth idea, which for me began back in 1984 with the Psychedelia lightsynth on the 8-bit machines. Some of you may even have seen the results of VLC's developments at raves and at the gigs we've done at Glastonbury, and at concerts by Primal Scream, The Orb, The Shamen and even Prince. We developed an audio-reactive light synthesiser which ran on our own Transputer-based hardware and used it to do large-scale video projections. Many of you have, over the years, modified your neural functions with the substances of your choice, slapped on an album and sat there, waggling your joysticks or caressing your rodents, staring into your monitors and soaking up the cathode rays while Psychedelia, or Colourspace, or Trip-A-Tron did its funky Thang...

Well, for all you people, VLC and the Yak have been busy on your behalf. In the halls of Atari, testers have been seen in the corridors with glazed expressions and an armful of CDs. The llatest and greatest episode in the long-running lightsynth saga is about to be unleashed. The Virtual Light Machine is no longer virtual. It is reality and it'll be infiltrating unsuspecting homes all over the world any day now...

This all began back when I first got a prototype Jaguar to code demos for. At the time the development of the Transputer lightsynth was in progress; suddenly I found myself with this stunning little bit of kit which could produce effects I'd never dreamed of (well, I probably had dreamed of them, but not while in a llegal state of mind). Wouldn't it be neat, I thought, if I could use that stuff to make a really great lightsynth...

Mosey down the timeline a bit, and it becomes apparent that Atari are going to produce a CDROM peripheral for the Jaguar; the Yakly neurons fire a bit more, a VLC meeting is convened at the cottage in Wales (with Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World scant metres away outside)...

(By the way, all business meetings should be as much fun as VLC business meetings. They usually seem to involve a fair amount of going down the pub and consuming quantities of rather nice beer, playing videogames and messing with lightsynths, and talking about stuff that we're all really interested in anyway, and having Ian put transputers in your PC).

As a result, Yak and Dave Lightsynth from VLC go to California, and politely suggest that it would be rather funky if, whenever audio CDs were played on the Jaguar, instead of some lame simulation of the LEDs on a stereo system, the screen were to go crazy in a psychedelic maelstrom of particles and feedback effects... Atari agreed that that would, indeed, be rather cool; and the JagVLM project was born.

Now it's done - in fact I just got my little CD-toilet (yes, it looks just like a little bog that sits on top of your Jaguar, and no, it's not full of crap!) and I now use it to play all my CDs... after all why just listen to a CD when you can use your Jaguar to see what the music llooks llike?

Some information about the Jag VLM

Realtime FFT coded by the very excellent Dr. Ian Bennet of VLC (who is by far a superior mathemagician than the Yak)

Graphics coding by a llarge shaggy beastie with big horns

User interface and integration with the rest of the CD stuff by the estimable Dave Staugas (a proper coders' coder)

Nothing New Under The Sun

Back when I started my lightsynth experiments I hadn't heard of anyone else doing such work, and thought that I was pretty much on my own in the field (and it's never good to be alone in a field, I usually prefur that there are a few beasties in there with me). However, over the years I have discovered that there have been others treading the same ground... I came across a good book some years ago written by the computer graphics pioneer John Whitney (who amongst other things invented the 'slit-scan' cinematography technique which yielded the splendid psychedelic sequence at the end of '2001 - A Space Odyssey) in which he presented his ideas for a visual synthesiser for the accompaniment of music. Recently, though, I have discovered that an audioreactive light synthesiser was actually manufactured and sold in the mid-Seventies by none other than... Atari! Through the Net I have come into contact with someone who actually posesses one of these rare beasts, and he's promised to lend it to me to have a llook at soon. I'll be very intrigued to compare Atari's first lightsynth against their second one! I'll upload a report on it when it happens...

Anyway, enough of this; I hope that you all enjoy the llatest and greatest instalment of the Light Synthesiser sequence!

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