VJing and jamming with Pitfall, controlled from MIDI drums? Heck, yes!
Max/MSP/Jitter is a multimedia environment that also happens to be a development tool, the upshot being that you can do bizarre things like emulate the chips of Atari, Sega, Nintendo, and Coleco game systems (covered previously).
Now imagine you could turn those emulations into a playable video/music instrument. Imagine you could map the pixels of the graphics to any object, stretch and warp it to other objects, or even use it to control a giant lighting array. The source could be the game itself, or visualizations of the RAM and ROM memory accesses. You could use any instrument to control gameplay (like a MIDI violin, or a laser beam, or whatever you wanted). That’s exactly what the mmonoplayer gang have done with a free Jitter external:
You’ll need Jitter (try the demo), and you’ll need some ROM files to play the games. I love that the creators describe it as virtual circuit bending — and bending is literally the word, as you warp and stretch video matrices. More features are on the way, too: audio support (yes, please!) and other game systems.
If you do anything interesting with this, do let us know. Via Will Carter at the USC Interactive Media Division and Wallace Winfrey on the great, new Cycling ’74 forums.
