It’s a nostalgia trip. It’s a net art piece. It’s a parallel dimension.
It’s also working music apps running (sort of) in your browser. It feels a little bit like playing with an elaborate doll house where you can open the fridge and add tiny food and the oven pretends to work. But in case you haven’t already been infected with the quantum distraction power of the Windows 93 browser yet, it might interest you to know that there are music apps inside.
There’s Pd – kinda. (Double-click the icon and it spawns a non-editable patch running in your browser.)
There’s also LSDJ, the quintessential Game Boy tracker. And there’s Nanoloop, the classic, beautifully-minimal Game Boy music maker that later migrated to iOS and Android (though that takes out the fun of buying weird hardware from Japan to hack our Nintendo handhelds). Those both appear to be running in a Nintendo emulation layer in-browser.
Play that and a glitched-out Pokemon plus get and disinfect yourself from computer viruses before you watch an ASCII Star Wars.
It says something about the evolution of net art, here as it’s steeped in layers of history and nerd-hipster irony. (Can I re-launch my campaign to make “nerdster” a thing?) It also might say something practical about how more-powerful browsers really could change the way we share music tools. Native software still seems perfectly safe from the browser; we still use native tools for desktop and mobile. But I’ve yet to see someone make good use of the Web as a teaching tool, or to share work. This is a reminder of what’s possible, hyperlinked to loads of tools and code for developers to explore themselves.
And I bet they would make something absolutely amazing, if I didn’t just destroy their productivity for the rest of the week by sharing … this. Wait, I may have just explained why we haven’t seen more Web tools. You read it here firs– hey, stop double-clicking that dolphin and read, darn it!
Details, and links to some JavaScript goodness (and another appearance of the Web Audio API):
Jankenpopp & Zombectro are running the thing,
the Mighty Doctor House is hosting the thing.Credits
animate.css | CSS animations
GameBoy-Online | GameBoy Color emulator written in JavaScript
www.piskelapp.com | Pixel Art and Animated Sprites editor
threejs.org | JavaScript 3D library
codemirror.net | text editor implemented in JavaScript for the browser
codef.santo.fr | Canvas Oldshool Demo Effect Framework
www.asciimation.co.nz | Star Wars Asciimation
jGravity | A jQuery Gravity Plugin
howler.js | Modern Web Audio Javascript LibraryMany are still missing… we’ll try to credit everyone soon 🙂
If we forgot you, we’re sorry, you can ask us a link at contact@windows93.net