Back from Denmark with Ron Boots and Families

We just got back from a great week on holiday together with Ron Boots and both our families. We rented a house in Borkhavn in Denmark for a week and we all enjoyed ourselves very much. We had a lot of luck with the weather over there. A lot of sunshine and no rain. We even got sunburn when we visited the Legoland park. Next to the little trips we took over there and the nice dinners and lunches, we also made a lot of new music. In the picture you can see the temporary studio we created in the living room, were we played a lot together. Ron is playing the Korg Kronos and I was playing the Clavia Nord Wave. We recorded everything on my notebook even though Ron brought his notebook too. I had a listen back to the music and I think the outcome is really interesting and very different from what we played on 'Refuge en Verre' last time.

Here is another nice picture of Ron and me that we took on one of the trips. The nature around Borkhavn is really great and you can even encounter a lot of wildlife. We had a really close encounter by the way with 6 deers that crossed the road when we were driving about 100 Km/h. We had to break very hard not to hit them. Quite a scary experience I can tell you. From now on we are going to take these 'animal crossing' warning signs seriously ;) Back home now I'm going to see if I can open all the Cakewalk projects on my studio PC and I guess Ron and me will be starting by selecting some tracks from the stuff we played for release consideration. We really have a lot, so we can be selective. I'll visit Ron next week to listen to it all and then we will decide what will happen with it. But my feeling is that we have enough good stuff for a CD release. But of course it is a collaboration project, so it is not only up to me. I'll let you know when we made a decision on this matter. Now back to my normal life :)

E-Day 2012 Aftermath

Some days just fly by like they happened in a blink of an eye. E-Day 2012 was one of those days. I planned to do so much, but eventually I spend the whole day talking to a lot of people and even missed the first two concerts because of that. The only downside was that I mostly talked to people that already have all my music, so I only sold 2 CD's during the whole day, but well the talks were nice and at least I could tell those people that there is new music on the way. I told them that the collaboration CD with Remy is planned for October (if we make it) so that next time I'll have something new on my stall at E-live. And I also told them that I was going to leave for Denmark the next day on a holiday together with Ron Boots and both our families and some synthesizers, so something new might come out of that as well.Thanks to Remy Stroomer by the way for the picture :) I'll update you soon on the weekend with Ron Boots.

Mobile Studio for upcoming Collaboration ......

As some of you might already know, I'm currently working on a collaboration album together with Remy Stroomer. Progress on that project is going well and we hope to release that album later this year. I'll update you on that when there is more certainty. There is another collaboration coming up though. You might remember that in 2010 I released a collaboration album together with Ron Boots called 'Refuge en Verre'. The album was the result of a long weekend in a rented house together with both our families in the Belgian Ardennes. Well we are going to repeat that soon. In the picture is the stuff that I will be bringing along, so a notebook with Cakewalk Sonar installed, a Clavia Nord Wave and the Roland SH-101 and I heard Ron will bring his Korg Kronos. So we'll have a nice set to work with. We are going to improvise there just like last time and if it works out, who knows :) I'll keep you posted. I'm really looking forward to this holiday and also to playing together with Ron Boots again :) More information on 'Refuge en Verre' can be found here: http://www.synth.nl/Refuge

Synth.nl stall at E-day 2012

Coming Saturday there is the yearly E-day festival that my record label Groove Unlimited organizes every year. I will be present there with a stall, where you can buy all my CDs. There are also a lot of other artists present with their own stalls. Groove Unlimited has a big stall where you can buy all kinds of Electronic Music on CD. There are also 3 very nice concerts so all in all a very enjoyable day for Electronic Music fans. The event is held at Theater 'de Enck' in Oirschot in The Netherlands (near Eindhoven). You can find more information on this festival on http://www.e-live.nl/ I hope to see you there!

3D Demo Reel 2011

This is an overview of the 3D Animation work I did in the last year. I tried to make a little compilation that shows a good average of what I can do. All animations were made in Cinema 4D. The music I put under it is the track 'Apollo 9' from my 2011 Apollo album. More information about Apollo here: http://www.synth.nl/Apollo. More information about my graphics work here: http://www.osenbruggen.nl

Final Expansion 3 for Commodore VIC-20

I did another nice retro computer DIY project recently. I bought a Final Expansion 3 DIY kit from the Retro Donald Webshop. If you remember the VIC-20 from the good old days you will know that it only had 3,5 Kbytes of RAM and you had to wait for ages to load games from a tape drive. This expansion gives your VIC-20 a lot of new features. I will tell about them later, but first the process of building the cartridge. You will have to build it yourself since it is only available as a kit. You can only choose to buy it with or without an enclosure and I chose the version without.

On the website on the shop there is a very clear manual that actually shows with pictures which components go where. Most of the stuff is pretty straight forward except for the SD cart holder that is SMD mounted. I used some flux to solder this one. In the picture you can see the finished PCB, but what you don't see is that there are some components soldered under the ICs as well. On some spots I found it quite challenging to get everything in place without putting to much force on the components. But in the end it worked out fine.

So time to put it in the VIC-20. You might have noticed the DIN plug coming from it. This is actually a serial connector that plugs into the VIC-20's serial port. The cartridge emulates a disk drive over this connector. You can load files from the SD cartridge. It is standard FAT16 formatted so you can just copy files on it from your PC. The first thing you need to load is the firmware for the expansion itself. At first I could not get it to work. I could load software I put on the SD cart, but the firmware didn't want to program. It turned out I forgot to set the dip switches right.. duhhhhh... It actually took me quite some time before I found this out. After the cartridges Eprom is programmed you can use the reset switches to reset the VIC-20 into a nice menu system. And from this
menu you can do some very nice things.

The first menu item is the most exciting one. It says RAM manager and you can add additional RAM to your VIC-20. As stated before the standard RAM amount is just 3,5 Kbyte, but you can go up to 512 Kbyte!! But there is more. You get another 512 Kbytes where you can put programs in you use often that you can then load from the menu directly. You also get a battery backupped real time clock. With the 'Basic Wedge' option you even get additional Jiffy DOS commands. If you want to learn more about this expansion you can read all about it on this URL: http://t-winkler.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:fe3:main

The New Commodore 64 III

As you might have noticed by now, I like retro computers as well next to synthesizers. I have quite a collection of old stuff in the place now where my studio used to be. When I needed a new work station there I could not resist the new machine that is made by a company called Commodore USA. It is a reincarnation of the old 64 (brodkasten) style enclosure, but it is not what it seems at first sight. There is actually a brand new modern PC in this enclosure. I got the smallest one available and that is an Intel Atom. There is also version with a Core i7 inside.

Here you can see it from a different angle and you can clearly see the SD, CF and USB slots on the side and the VGA, Ethernet and PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports on the back. On the other side is also a slimline DVD drive and it has more USB on the back as well. They keyboard is fortunately a lot better than the one on the old C64 by the way. It is not a cheap PC, but I really love the look and feel of it. Commodore USA is also working a linux variant they call Commodore OS Vision that I have running on it. It is a mix of Ubuntu and Mint with bits and pieces of their own with a nice retro feel to it. It is not completely done yet, but the beta is available from their website even if you don't have a Commodore machine. So check it out :) You can find more information on http://www.commodoreusa.net

AtmoSphere CDs back in stock !

A while ago I reported that there were only 3 AtmoSphere CDs left. Those ones were sold quite quickly as well. My record label Groove Unlimited was so kind to do a reprint of AtmoSphere, because there were more people interested. So I have good news. There are another 300 copies of the physical CD available. You can buy them directly from Groove Unlimited. AtmoSphere was my second solo album and was originally released in 2008. You can find more information about the album and the sales links on http://www.synth.nl/AtmoSphere. You can also listen to some clips there. It is also available as mp3 download from Itunes, Amazon and CDBaby by the way if you prefer that format.

Eventide H8000 Back from USA

My H8000 was broken a while ago and I have tried to repair it myself, but didn't really succeed. Eventually I decided to sent it to Eventide in the USA to let them have a look and they found that the socket for the main processor was loose. This seems to be a common problem, so they desoldered the socket from the PCB and soldered the SMD mounted main processor directly on the PCB. Besides that they also repaired the big dial knob on the front panel. Last week I got it back and I started playing around with it. Man what a machine this is. I wouldn't want to miss it again. I bought an Eventide H4000DSP in the mean to fill in the gap. It has a couple of the same presets. Now that the H8000 is back I'm going to sell the H4000DSP again.

Apple IIe Enhanced + IDE + TCP/IP!

Last week I did a major change on my Apple IIe computer. It actually got a new mother board from the US that I found on E-bay. It is an so called 'enhanced' version. It was sold back then as an upgrade kit that contained some ROMs and a new CPU. They are hard to find now a days and you need the exact type. The ROMs of this motherboard for example didn't fit in my own old motherboard. You need this upgrade for a lot of software and also hardware. It improved the Apple IIe a lot.

The first project I needed the enhanced ROMs for was this card. It is an IDE interface for the Apple IIe and it has a Compact Flash inserted in stead of an IDE drive as you can see. I already got it running in the mean time, so now I can install and start software on a CF in an Apple IIe. How cool is that? :) It should be possible to boot from it as well, but I haven't got that working yet. I still need a floppy to boot ProDOS first, but I'll try to figure that out as well.

But there is more. Even cooler is that I installed an Ethernet card in the Apple IIe. It is so great that people are still developing hardware like this for these old machines. I also needed the enhanced ROMs to get this running, but as you can see it works! I hooked it up to the internet this morning and started the IRC client from the Contiki package. If you click the picture you can see a little conversation I had this morning with MiVo on the #JMJ channel. Really cool that this actually works :)

Here is another picture of the Apple IIe back on its spot. The only thing I still need to find out is how the CP/M card works that was in the machine when I got it. I didn't get any software with it though so I'll have to go on the internet and look for it. It should be fun because I also have CP/M on the Commodore 128d and it would be cool to exchange files in this way I guess. Well not useful in any way, but fun for sure to get it working.

Apollo Promo Video to Thank you Voters!

Because I'm so happy that Apollo won the 'Best international CD 2011' price at the German Schallwelle Awards I made this video to thank you all who voted for me! I made this video originally for a lecture my oldest daughter. Enjoy :)

Apollo Best International CD of 2011 at Schallwelle!

I just recovered from a very long and exciting day yesterday at the Schallwelle electronic music award ceremony in Bochum Germany. I knew I was nominated with 4 other artists, but since the competition was very fierce I didn't expect to win at all. Then when the category 'best international CD' came up I suddenly heard my name with my Apollo album as the winner. I was in total shock since I had to go up front to the podium and a microphone was put under my nose. I had a total blackout and no idea what I said. Ah well nobody looked weird at me afterwards so I guess it was OK. I was (and still am) very happy of course to win this award. An honor to be picked by both the audience and jury from a long list of albums. Another nice thing was that my friend Eric van der Heijden won the 'best artist international' category. And Ron Boots our label owner and good friend was sitting right in between us. He had a good day too :) He was so happy that he announced a 10% discount in the Groove Unlimited webshop for our music the coming week.  I want to thank you all for voting, because that got me nominated in the first place and helped with the final result for sure! Thank you, thank you, thank you :) Well this certainly motivates me to go and make some new music to thank you all. You can read more about the price/event and all the other winners on this website: http://schallwelle-preis.de/. When I have more pictures I will post some nice ones as well. More information on the album here: http://www.synth.nl/apollo (in case you don't know it yet).

New Website with 3D Animation work

I know some of you like my 3D work as well as my music. I plan to do lots more work in this direction with or without my music. But because it doesn't really fit on the Synth.nl website I just put up a new website on http://www.osenbruggen.nl/. I'm planning to do some jobs for customers as well together with my wife. We already build a few websites, videos, logos and animations for customers and we are hoping to get a few more jobs in the future of course. We are using the name 'Van Osenbruggen Productions' for this from now on. Maybe you have seen the name popping up in one of my videos already by the way. Well anyway on the website you can find the videos, websites, logos and animations we did so far. More will come for sure :)

Another Studio Session with Remy

As you might have heard before, I'm working on a collaboration album with Remy Stroomer. We already did some sessions in his and mine studio and yesterday we did another session in my studio. My wife took a couple of pictures when we were just getting ready to play some more music together. In the mean time we have nearly 80 minutes of music that we both like and that should be enough for the album. So now the editing and production fase will start.

There is still a lot of work to be done from now on for the both of us, but we are making good progress. I cannot make any promises yet, but I hope we can release it somewhere in the end of this year. I'll keep you informed about that on here. So keep an eye out for more news on this blog. I can promise you already though that it will be an interesting mix of both our styles. I hope you can all have a little bit of patience for it :) OK. Back to work.

Bootstrapping Apple IIe over Audio

I recently did another project that took me a lot of time and effort and that I wanted to share with you. When I was in school I learned to program assembler on an Apple IIe. Back then I had a C64 myself with a tape drive and the Apple IIe already had a disk drive on it with 5,25 inch diskettes. Back then that was the coolest thing I ever saw and I started saving up  to buy a 1541 disk drive for the C64. A while ago I could get an Apple IIe from someone for free and I couldn't resist that. The only problem was there were some diskettes with it but not much usable stuff. Well not for me anyway. But how to get software on it I don't have any other hardware anymore with 5,25 inch diskettes. I did manage to get a couple of boxes of new and unused diskettes though.

I started looking for a way to transfer diskettes from a PC to an Apple IIe and found this little tool called ADTPro. The only thing is you can install a server on the PC side but you also need a client on the Apple IIe of course. Well this tool can do something that is called 'boot strapping'. It is a way to get an OS running on a Apple IIe without anything to start with. It supported serial and I happened to have a Super Serial card in my Apple IIe, but I could not get it to work. The hard thing is though with serial you never know why until you get it working. Could be interfacing, cable, protocol. Who knows.

An other option was using audio. The Apple IIe has a casette port that wasn't really supported in the DOS implementations because it had diskette and everyone used that, but with some assembler calls you can get you Apple IIe to read data from the audio in port. You connect you Apple IIe with audio in and out to the sound card of your PC and after a few system calls the ADTPro tool starts sending audio through your sound card into the Apple IIe and loading ProDos directly into the memory. And then when you have ProDos loaded you can again transfer the ADRPro audio client over audio to the Apple IIe. And suddenly you have the ability to transfer disk images from the PC to the actual floppy drive. It only takes a very long time to do that.

The first thing I send over because of this was a serial terminal program. With that program loaded I could finally find out why my serial connection wasn't working. It turned out to be a problem on the PC side. The USB to Serial device I used under Windows 7 crashed after a few bytes. So I installed ADTPro on an older Windows XP machine that still had an actual serial port on the motherboard. And that worked. Now I can transfer diskettes at 11520 bits/s and that is as quick as the disk drive in the Apple IIe is anyway. So it is just as fast as a normal disk to disk copy. The next thing I found out though is the Apple IIe has old Roms installed. It is not the 'enhanced' version. And I need that to get an ethernet card and IDE interface running. I just got some Roms of E-bay and am waiting for them to arrive now. So I guess I'll have an update to this story somewhere in the future. Well I enjoyed this project and I am happy I got the Apple IIe running now :)

petSD for the Commodore PET 2001

A long time ago I bought an old Commodore PET 2001 in quite a good condition. It came along with a tape drive with just a few very simple games on it. Of course there is much more software out there for the PET but I needed a reliable and comfortable way to get it on there. Then I found a DIY kit on the internet called 'petSD'. It simulates a disk drive and stores it files on a SD card. It is quite easy to build. The only thing that is a bit tricky is the SD adapter itself since it is SMD and has very small pins to solder.

The website has very clear instruction for the assembly. You can also see a battery on the PCB and that actually is for a clock interface that should tell the PET the current date and time. I don't think I'll actually use that. But then it was time to switch the power on and everything looked OK. I did notice the odd looking centronics like connector and thought that would hook up to a port on the PET. And I was wrong :) Good preperation..... NOT !!. It is a IEEE 488 interface and there is one on the PET offcourse but it has a different connector. So you actually need a cable to hook it up. I thought it would be easy to find something like that on E-bay, but WRONG again.

After a long search and reading a lot of forum articles I managed to stumble on the TPUG (Toronto PET Users Group) from Canada. And they had them on stock :) So after that I had to wait for that cable to arrive before I could test the petSD. And today it arrived! So I hooked it up right away and did a LOAD "$",8 and LIST and got a directory listing of all the programs I already put on the SD card. So it actually worked :) Very cool.

And then it was time to test some games. My youngest daughter also joined and played with the old machine. She was complaining that it was slow :) LOL. Sure it is. But now I can put all the software ever made for the PET on a 512 Mbyte SD card. I already found some games that don't fit in the standard 8 Kbyte of RAM. So next thing is looking for a memory expansion for the PET. So if you happen to have one laying around. Let me know :) OK. If you are interested in the petSD project. You can find more information on this URL: http://www.retro-donald.de/sinchai-shop/

Apollo made the top 5 at Schallwelle awards!

I'm very proud to say that my Apollo album made the top 5 in the Schallwelle awards for best international album of the year. I will be present during the award ceremony that will take place on the 10th of March this year. There are still tickets for sale if you want to attend too. You can find more information on http://www.schallwelle-preis.de/. On that website you can also find the other nominees. As you can see the competition is fierce. I don't expect to win, but I'm very happy to be in this list again. I'll be happy anyway because when I don't win I don't have to give a speech in front of all those people. That is some kind of price for me as well ;) So good news anyway. Thank you all so much for voting! I really appreciate it. This motivates me to go and make more music again.

Boot Selector and HxC for Amiga 500

The last weeks I haven't done much music. The Apollo album has taken a lot of my energy and I needed a break. So I have been working on some projects on another hobby. Next to synthesizers I also collect old retro computers and game consoles. In the place where my studio used to be (before I moved to the basement under the garden) I have build a bit of a computer museum. The last weeks I spend a lot of time testing and repairing stuff and adding modern electronics to old hardware like on this Commodore Amiga 500.

The software for this machine used to be distributed on 3,5 inch double density floppies. After a couple of years these diskettes go bad since their magnetic layer deteriorates in time. So I bought this HxC floppy emulator for it. You can put floppy images on a SD card and select the image you want to load on with little knobs. Once you have the image you want to boot in the display you hit a key and the Commodore Amiga doesn't know better than it is talking to an actual disk drive.

Most people replace the internal disk drive with this HxC emulator, but I didn't want to do that since my internal drive is still working fine and I also have a lot of diskettes that do work. The Amiga 500 is only ably to boot from the first floppy drive though and that is the internal one. I put the HxC on the electronics of a external drive but that becomes drive 2 then. So you need to be able to switch them. I build something for it called a boot selector. It takes two pins from the floppy controller chip inside the Amiga 500 and swaps them when you toggle the switch.

In this way the internal drives becomes drive 2 and the external drive becomes drive 1. So now I can boot from the HxC and my Amiga 500 is still original. I didn't want to drill a hole in it either for the switch so it is sticking out on the back with a flat cable coming through the housing. Now I'm going to transfer some of the diskettes that still work to the SD card and look for some new ones. I'm happy that the boot selector works. Time for some retro fun. I did some more projects so maybe I'll post some more of them up here.

Nominated for the SchallWelle Award

Like the previous years I have been nominated for the yearly Schallwelle Award that is organized by the German Electronic Music club Schallwende. The price is decided by both a jury and the audience. As a listener to electronic music you can vote on your favorite artist and album in both national (that is German in this case) and international categories. Feel free to vote if you want. You can find Synth.nl under international artists and my Apollo album under international album. You can find the voting link here: http://voting.schallwelle-preis.de/.

Only 3 AtmoSphere copies left!

Yesterday I visited the Ron Boots & Friends New Years concert and had a great time. At the stall that my record label Groove Unlimited had there I learned that from the original print of my second album AtmoSphere (2008) only 3 CD copies are left! After that they are out of stock and I don't know yet what is going to happen. All three copies are signed by me personally by the way. So if you don't have this album in your collection yet, NOW would be a good time to order one before they are gone. You can find more information on the album and also the link to the Groove website on: http://www.synth.nl/AtmoSphere