30 Oct ETC: Day 4
I feel like I’m starting to run out of steam today. Yesterday felt comparatively productive, but I’m not too upset since I’ve been getting a lot done these past few days. Today I learned one of the last pieces of equipment, a framebuffer that runs off of an old Amiga computer (loaded off two floppy disks). It allows you to store 32 frames in a circular buffer, and you can play the buffer back as a loop and replace certain frames as you go around to make animations. The catch is that it only operates with 16 gray levels and 256 lines of resolution. You can however replace each gray level with a different color if you wish for simple color mapping.
After that, I wandered around town, hit the local candyshop, and tried to clear my head for a little while. There is an amazing, huge bookstore right across the street that primarily sells antique books. I looked through several arithmetic textbooks from the 1800s, one of which had an addition table and a subtraction table (in addition to a multiplication table).
When I came back, I tried another lo-fi bullettime experiment using audio triggers. I spent the rest of the afternoon running my jitter patch in and looping it back around as a source and manipulating the feedback overtop of the source video…but that proved to be a difficult beast to tame. I then turned to reddit to find out if any of my fellow nerds had any interesting ideas for the equipment I hadn’t thought of yet, but I haven’t hit a goldmine yet.
The rest of the night has been trying to get a handle on using the +/- 5V oscillator bank to generate video signals, and then playing more with simple feedback and audio triggers on the wobbulator. No big plans for the last full day tomorrow except to gather some more random source footage and begin to pack up.