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| Another update in 2 weeks??? What is happening here. Well, I was a little busy with re-vamping my conversion of Sega's Passing Breeze tune from the arcade game 'Outrun' which happens to be one of my favourite arcade games of all time (well, I did stuff so much money into this machine in the late 1980's just so I could listen to the music). What a sad life I had! OK, so now that has been dispensed with, it's on my MP3 page ready for download. I have removed the link to the older version which was poorly mixed (and at a very low quality). This one is at a higher encoding quality, plus it is so damn loud that you might want to turn your speakers down a fraction. It's extremely loud and I tried 3 different sound configurations to test for too much distortion, of which I couldn't find much! |
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| What's this? Just over 2 months go by and another update. Maybe I have just woken up! This time it's something I have been promising myself to do for a while. I remixed my "A Sporting Chance" theme and uploaded it into my MP3 page for your pleasure. This tune has also been converted to the C64 and awaiting a release on the Cosine 8-bit site. Enjoy! |
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| After an incredibly lazy year of no updates, I have now uploaded my report on the UK Open speedcubing competition which was held on the 18th of November 2006. At the bottom of the page, I have also added 11 videos I captured during the event. I had never won any gold cubes before for participating in these competitions and now I have two from coming third in both the Megaminx event and the Rubik's Magic! I hope to in the next few days get the videos I took during Dutch Cube Day converted from my phone and turned into WMV videos for uploading onto this site! At this point in time, I cannot devote much time to site updates due to an incredibly difficult job I am currently doing at work. Keep watching and maybe you'll get a surprise in the new year! |
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| I
have just updated my multimedia page. There is yet another file in the
multimedia page (another Megaminx solve) which is fairly fast (just over
3 minutes 42 seconds). For the people who also visit this site due to my music from days of old, might be interested to know that today is 20 years since I first got hold of a Commodore 64. Yes, the beige-breadbin (as we like to call it over here) invaded my life (and my parents bank account) on the 20th of December 1985. For fun, I am also in the middle of creating a music pack for fun using my EMS V7.03 editor. I've had a long busy period at work and it's still a working progress. I aim to create 20 tunes (one for every year I have owned one of these machines) of which there are a few at the moment. Watch out on our 8-bit Cosine Systems website! |
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| The
hosting migration process was very painless. The name server progagation
took about 1 hour to kick in which is very very fast (I think it took
12 hours the last time I had to change it). I have made another Megaminx solve movie for the multimedia page. The solve is performed with my newer solution which is getting me an average of just over 4 minutes at the moment. I have also updated my puzzle page to show a couple of new records I have recently achieved, including a new 3x3x3 cube record of 27.71 seconds which was is classed as non-lucky (no steps skipped - though very easy cases were encountered in this solve). |
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| The
Cosine-Systems domain is now being hosted on a new server. I have tons
more bandwidth and webspace now and I am awaiting the nameservers to populate
across the internet at the moment. These should take place by 12 November.
The site may experience some downtime in the run-up to the changeover.
In the meantime, I am attempting to repair some scripts that are not functioning on the new host. These are the visitor counter and the guestbook on the site. However, I may change to a different guestbook as I find it gets spammed a lot these days (sometimes as often as 10 times per day - but I delete all spam entries). This makes for an unhappy web experience for all (and makes me just as unhappy)! If people try to spam the guestbook with links to inappropriate websites, their entries will get deleted! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!! |
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| I
have been extremely lazy to do any updates here recently, mainly due to
a fried brain from a busy period at work. Anyway, I attended a UK cube
meet nine days ago. You can read Dan Harris' report here
and view his picture gallery here. After not getting a single sub-40 during the cube meet, I decided to see if I could beat my 37.43 second non-lucky solve on a webcam movie, and I did! Browse to my multimedia page to download a 31.75 second solve which was actually quite lucky (1 F2L solved from a top layer corner insertion - two F2L edges placed on a 3-cycle (not lucky) - final F2L edge placed normally - had the cross on the last layer, corners also placed correctly - two corner rotation algorithms and a 4-edge opposite swap to solve). If things go quiet from me for a while, it's because it's holiday time!!! I fly off to Crete tomorrow, however, silly me not realising the 26th of July is 25 years since the worldwide launch of the Rubik's Cube, three cuber friends are going to be on TV (I'm recording it all onto DVD for them) and heading to an anniversary-type party at Hamleys in London, but, I have to miss out due to my holiday. The question is "What would you prefer? - 2 weeks on a Greek island or playing with cubes at a top-London toystore"? OK, see you all on my return.... |
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| A
few things have changed in this update. First of all, you will be able
to find my report of German Cube Day 2005 under the Rubiks Cube menu (there
are 4 submenus to this one). The pages might take some time to load on
slower connections. Sorry for the delay in getting this site updated.
I have had flu and been in bed for most of the last week. I am better
now and going back to work tomorrow! I have also uploaded a new movie into the Rubiks Cube multimedia section. It shows me solving my new Simpsons Magic puzzle (mostly to demonstrate for Stefan Pochmann that mines works pretty well)! I have moved my guestbook to a better place in the menus so that it is easily accessible now. I also recently suffered from a hack attack on the guestbook, so that has been rectified. HTML codes and any scripting has now been disabled for security reasons, though there is still a vast array of smilies for you all to use! Please sign as it is rather bare because I had to wipe it clean after the hacker did his damage! |
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| Just
a small update to the site. I have recently got hold of a "Rubik's
Master Magic" via EBay and have taken the time to learn Stefan Pochmann's
speed solution to it. I started practising and solved it for the first
time yesterday. As of today, I have had a fastest solve time of just 7.69
seconds (which is pretty fast for just 24 hours of practise). I have managed to capture this solve with my webcam and have uploaded a video clip of this solve for you to see. It is stored as usual in my Rubik's Multimedia page. Pretty soon I will have to renew my Puzzle collection page. It's well out of date now and instead of 37 puzzles, I now have 46 puzzles in my collection (two new Dogics, another 4x4x4, Diamond Ball puzzle, Master Magic, Skewb Cube, another keyring cube, one new Rubik's Clock and a Mefferts Platypus Ultimate). |
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| After
mentioning in my last update about the Dogic line of puzzles, I have received
news from Mefferts
that the moulding of the Dogic puzzles has begun in earnest. Mefferts
will be shipping the first batch of Dogic puzzles before the end of the
year, but not before Christmas time. Although Dogic I, II and III are
12, 10 and 5 colours respectively, Mefferts also plans to ship a two colour
version as well as a 20-colour version in assembly kit format. I've had
my order for Dogic I and II for quite some time now, and I think I may
even go for the other ones too before they become far too rare! If you
haven't already ordered this puzzle, head over to Mefferts
now and order yours! The other thing I have done recently is to take my Mefferts 5x5x5 cube apart, chip some tiles off and re-arrange the puzzle in the standard Rubik's cube colour scheme. My cube was a strange colour scheme with the White and Orange faces swapped, though the rest of the puzzle was the standard cube colours. In order to achieve the colour switch, I also had to chip away a total of 15 edge pieces and re-glue them in their new places. 4 tiles broke, so I am ordering some new tiles to replace them, plus enough tiles for spares and to cover my Rubik's 5x5x5 cube too! Speedcubing.com has had a bit of an overhaul of unofficial records recently. I am now unofficially the fastest person to have solved an Octagon cube. OK, an Octagon is not a cube shape, but the kernel of this puzzle is a standard 3x3x3 cube kernel (I will get round to recording a video clip of this puzzle). I am also in 2nd place of the rankings for folding the Rubik's Snake puzzle into the ball shape with a very fast time of 7.05 seconds. Check the multimedia page for this snake-to-ball solve, it was also recorded too! Last, but not least, I have been working on PC programming again. I have decided to give it a shot and write a new music player (which will be E.M.S. V7.00) with a better software synthesizer than before. I have re-written the tone generators used in E.M.S. V6.06 and this time, it's now 100% pure 80x86 assembly code (also utilising the FPU). I measured the code size for the tone generators this morning, and it came to 0x3FD (1,021 in decimal) bytes which just skimms under the 1Kb threshold, but I am sure that this will grow as I add new features into them! Next thing I have to do is to convert the multiple filter routines into pure assembly code now! Wish me luck, the coefficient calculator is a PIG!!! |
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| I
have updated my multimedia folder with a video clip of me folding a "Rubik's
Snake" into the ball shape (from a straight line). Not only did I
record it with my webcam, I also broke my previous record which is now
7.05 seconds (my previous best was 7.14 seconds - just 0.09 seconds faster
this time)! And, as usual, you will find the clip in the Multimedia page! I am also awaiting delivery of Dogic 1 and Dogic 2 puzzles from Mefferts. Not too sure how long before they will be released! But what really bugs me is seeing these rip-off merchants selling them on EBay in excess of $400 when Mefferts are re-launching this puzzle, plus they will initially be shipped at a mere $40! If you really want a Dogic, then head over to Mefferts site and pre-order yours (there are a few variations available to you too)! |
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| Today,
the Cosine Systems website has undergone a little bit of a face-lift in
terms of appearance. Not only that, a completely new section has been
added to further fuel a hobby of mine's, namely the 'Rubiks Cube'! In the next few weeks, I will be uploading additional pages to this site showing you two different methods for solving the Rubik's cube. I would have been working on them, but I am currently on my busiest time of the year at work with hardly any time to work on this site at the moment, so it's a working progress for now! Also in this update, there are photographs of a recent trip to Holland to 'Dutch Cube Day' which was held on the 10th of October 2004 (look under the Rubiks Cube menu)! Plus, there are now some multimedia movies in the Rubiks Cube category of which some are of me solving various puzzles and some clips I captured with my digital camera at 'Dutch Cube Day' of some cube friends solving the Rubik's Cube blindfolded!!!! I have also brought all the old news over to the new design, so if you have never been here before and have a morbid sense of curiosity to what I have been up to in the past, then you can read all the way back into the mists of time! |
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| I
have updated the EMS Music downloads page. There is a new module which
is a cover of the Jeroen Tel C64 theme for Robocop 3. If you don't already have a copy of DeliPlayer 2 then you will need to go and download the latest version from the DeliPlayer website to play my EMS modules on a PC! The Robocop 3 tune is only 7K in size (yes, it is a softsynth tune using 27 channels)! |
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| Ahhh,
DeliPlayer 2 Public
beta version has been released. Now you can try out the first version
of my software synthesizer. Downloads and links to DeliPlayer 2 are available
from the new EMS download page (see icon on the left). I have uploaded
4 demo tunes in software synthesizer mode, plus I have also included all
the old Amiga EMS V6.01-V6.03 modules too. The sound quality is far better than under DeliPlayer V1.30 where all my development time was spent. I've been told that when improvements are made for future replayers, the quality of sound should increase too! It still suffers a little from crackling, but nowhere near as bad as it was on DP1.30. |
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| Due
to changes to be implemented on MP3.com next month, I have had to move
all my MP3 downloads onto this site. The MP3.com site will still exist,
but the new rules specify that only fully paid premium customers can have
unlimited MP3s on their site and all others will only have the latest
3 MP3s on the site. The downloads page now contains all the files from the MP3.com site along with what was already stored locally on this site. Now all I have to do is watch that my bandwidth doesn't get swallowed up now. |
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| Due
to changes to be implemented on MP3.com next month, I have had to move
all my MP3 downloads onto this site. The MP3.com site will still exist,
but the new rules specify that only fully paid premium customers can have
unlimited MP3s on their site and all others will only have the latest
3 MP3s on the site. The downloads page now contains all the files from the MP3.com site along with what was already stored locally on this site. Now all I have to do is watch that my bandwidth doesn't get swallowed up now. |
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| I
have now uploaded some examples of my software synthesizer running in
MP3 format. The synthesizer isn't completely finished. I still have to
optimize some routines from C++ into assembly (some have been done now)
and it may take a while to do these. I also have to double buffer the
sound because I get really small clicks on some sounds due to the render/output
points of the software synthesizer overlapping. The 3 music modules I have done up to now range from a mere 2.25K up to 7.39K in size (packing them also shrinks them down to miniscule sizes)! Stormlord will fit in under 3K when packed (and that is 13 channels of music)! |
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| EMS
V6.05 has been completed. It has been sent to the programmers of DeliPlayer
for inclusion in the next release. I added some Formant Filters into the replayer in the last few days of debugging. If you want to hear a small MP3 demo of the softsynth running, right click here to download (842K in size). There are absolutely no sound samples in this demo, all the sounds you hear were calculated realtime!!!! Trivia: The music data size (including all sound definition data and music notation) was only 2,380 bytes in size, and after compression, it shrank to a mere 865 bytes in size!!!!! |
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| My
EMS V6.05 player is still under development along with an instrument editor
too. There is literally tons of parameters to the new synthesizer (pretty
basic, but it's my first VC++6 application), the maximum number of parameters
for an instrument is 512!! Maybe overkill, but a simple sound requires
a mere 32 parameters. You can see a picture of the sound editor by clicking here. I am not sure to how soon I will be able to release demos with this player, but I am trying desperately to finish it before the launch of DeliPlayer 2 sometime soon (hope you ACE'd your exams Peter)! |
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| My
EMS V6 player has been ported to the PC to run under DeliPlayer
by myself and DeliPlayer programmer Peter Kunath. The Amiga version is discontinued now, and new additions to the PC version are redundancy compressions and new sample formats. I have programmed a compiler for this player as I used to write the music under an assembler, and the current player version is now 6.04. I am also working on more advanced synthesis routines for this player now, but these might be a while before they are implemented. Watch this space! |
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| FastTracker
Modules (also known as XM-Modules, XM's) are musical files which contain
sampled instruments, and the playback should be the same on nearly all
computers (providing that the playback program has been emulated correctly).
I currently have a few modules on this website, and Dean (Bassline) Gurney
has asked me to release some of his FastTracker music on my website. Dean
is a Cosine Systems member as well as dARKSTATe (drum'n'bass type music
which isn't my taste). You can check out our XM-Modules page for our music! My MP3's have been broken up into 2 distinct areas. Tunes that I have composed or arranged, and will not cause any concern for copyright have been uploaded into my MP3.com site. Other tunes that I have arranged have been directly uploaded into this site. You can access all files directly from my MP3 page. Two new tunes will be added to the archives shortly, so stay tuned. |