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Author Topic: Taito's Qix and the Nick Chip Exos Demo (Read 2598 times)

Offline gflorez

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Taito's Qix and the Nick Chip Exos Demo
« on: 2015.June.18. 17:11:12 »
Playing with MAME and old arcade games I've found a game from year 1981 named Qix that reminds me very much of the Nick chip demonstration program that came inside the ET1/1 Technical Information.

Inside the Wiki page of the game they say it has been ported to several consoles and microcomputers, but at the launching-time of the Enterprise64 only a port for the Atari 5200 had been done.

Here you have a video of the game-play.

Offline gflorez

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Re: Taito's Qix and the Nick Chip Exos Demo
« Reply #1 on: 2015.June.30. 12:14:16 »
Now this is a story of a relative deception, but has something in common with the same Nick chip demonstration(I've been searching for it but don't find it on the demo partition).

In Zozo's web page there is a collection of magazines related to the story of the Enterprise. I always have been interested in Midi interfacing but don't know how to play a note... Some time ago I find a really good written article about Midi and the Enterprise on a Dutch magazine.

The writers, Jos and Rene, described the way they have achieved the needed 31250 bps by interrupts and promised a complete application on the second part on the following issue of the Magazine. A pity we don't have it....

Recently I've contacted with the authors. One of them explained me a little about that days. They where at that time immersed on a multidisciplinary art movement named "Stichting Synthese Studio" in Maastritcht, Holland.

Since then Rene, the artist, has evolved to something like religion, mixing Orientalism with computer graphics(and music) and the Books of Carlos Castaneda...

At the other side Jos,  the programmer, is still working with computers in a professional way.

No one of them remember that magazine article and almost all the documentation has been lost....


But they still hold animations made with an Enterpise synchronised with a synthesizer by Midi. They soon switched to Amiga computers so the early videos are mixed.... You can see in this video some footage of an Enterprise drawing bars in the screen in a more complicated way but similar to the  Nick chip demonstration.

Rene says:

"Did you notice that the bouncing bars are triggered by the midi signals
and that they are synchronized with some of the synthesizer sounds ?

Actually a midi keyboard is used to start trigger tracks that control
some of the synthesizer sequences parallel to the enterprise graphics.
This is where the enterprise midi in interface does its work. "

What astonished me is that all is achieved in real time synchonishing graphics and the external synthesizer...