mindEYE music visualization hardware

[blackhula]

Hiya,

This Tuesday night I'm doing vido projection for a "New Media" music event being given by the city of Chicago.  I got real short notice for this, but it seems that if I blow the dust off of my Amigas I can do it!

Anyone here use the mindEYE hardware/software?  I've got everything here, excpet the software.  My floppy is corrupted, so there's nothing I can do.  Is there anyone here who can help me out with this project before it's too late?

BTW are there any other pieces of software that I should be looking at to do realtime visualization?  I plan on using an Amiga 1200 fed into a Toaster.  Any cool eye-candy graphics programs that you can recommend?

Thanks for any help guys!

[blackhula]

That's a wonderful list of software!  I was lucky enough to locate another backup I made of my MindEYE disc, so I've got it sort of working.

The problem is that it only seems to work if my 1200's Workbench is in a lower res mode - can't be more than 32 colors, otherwise the display is all scrambled.  I don't know why the mindEYE software cares, I thought that it opened its own screen and has its own screen display controls.

The 1200 is a very stock machine, no fancy graphics cards or even an accelerator - just a RAM card to add 4 megs.  At leat it is working, but I was hoping for a little more color - perhaps I need more RAM and that's what's messing things up?

As you can tell, it's been a long time since I fooled around with the Amiga.  

I'm glad to see the various software that you're using to do club visuals.  For this show, I will likely run the mindEYE's output into a Video Toaster switcher, with some random DVD playing into it as well - that way I can overlay mindEYE animation over video, etc.

Is there an advantage to using the MindLight software that you mentioned?  I'd love to give it a try if I could find it somehow...

THanks for your quick reply!  I'm getting a bit nervous as the show is only two days away.  

[blackhula]

Actually I'm not using it at a club - I'll be using the Amiga at the Chicago Cultural Center.  They are running a series on New Media, and I will be doing music, Amiga video, and painting.  

I'm happy to be using the Amiga since it's what I know best or video (even though I haven't used an Amiga in a while), but it's hard to think that this wouldn't all be much easier with a laptop.    Then again, if I were doing this as a PC presentation, I would probably just be triggering random video clips, instead of generating cool patterns automatically in time to the music.

There don't seem to be any pics of the mindEYE online.  I'll grab a picture of mine some time soon, but here's a brief description:

http://amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=1648

Here's a link to were I helped review this unit years ago for Amiga Report (it's in Amiga guide format, but you can also view it as HTML and just ignore all the extra codes)

http://www.lysator.liu.se/(v5)/amiga/ar/guide/ar501.guide

If this goes well, hopefully I'll be asked to do it again - this time with a little more advance notice!  

Thanks for your help everybody.  If anyone can tell me more about mindLIGHT as mentioned above, let me know!

[blackhula]

===
    Amiga Report 5.01
    ...The MindEYE software is really intended for NTSC or PAL video output, and as such you'll get your best results using these. AGA video modes and color resolutions are supported in the newest software release...
===

  I helped write the review, so I did check it as well for just this kind of information.    When you fire up mindEYE, it does have its own menu for resolution choices since it opens up on its own screen.  The choices that I make there seem to be ignored.  

  Also, if my WB is set to a higher resolution, the mindEYE craps out.  It's got to be that I'm running out of RAM.  I'm off to try just booting directly into mindEYE without workbench o see if I get better results.

===
Perhaps the backup you're using is not of the latest software version. Don't know where you'd get a replacement though.
===

  I'm sure that I'm using the version of the software that came with the device, and it's the same unit I helped review in the Amiga Report article.  It's even the same 1200.  Either I had more RAM in there back then, or we had the exact same problems and I'm just not remembering.  

===  
I'm quite curious about the MindEYE now. Is it a particularly rare piece of hardware?
===

  The thing about it (as cited in the review) is that it was quite expensive.  There had been a precursor piece of hardware (that i've never seen) called mindLight that was also pretty pricey.  That coupled with limited distribution (I'm pretty sure that these were made by hand) would make it a pretty rare piece of gear.


===
btw, isn't there some PC software to do this, that you could fall back on in a pinch? I thought if winamp has free visualisation plugins, which work pretty well,
===

  Ah, this is why the Amiga still rulez.    Winamp does have those great visualizations, but only with pre-recorded music.  My video performance is accompanying live music, so mindEYE is perfect since you can change parameters on the fly while it's responding to live music.

  There is also the issue that lots of visualizations authors ask specifically that you not use their stuff in clubs or whatever without paying them, and I don't want to cheeze of fellow artists.  

  Thanks for all the great help everybody.  I'll try to upload some pictures of the mindEYE, and if there are any good pis from the performance on Tuesday, I'll offer those up too... but please - by all means let's keep talking mindEYE.  I need all the ideas I can get!  

[blackhula]

Okay, I got the funkiness figured out.  Well, "figured out" is a bit of an exaggeration - I've got a workaround.

If I boot with no startup and start the program from the CLI, all is good.  Since I'm running Opus WB replacement, perhaps that just takes up a bit too much of the 4megs of RAM to make mindEYE happy.  Though when I popped in an 8 meg SIMM, things didn't improve.

Whatever.  If mindEYE is happy in 4 megs of RAM, I'm content to load it up from CLI.  It's pretty wicked once it gets working.  In 256 colors, there are some very nice color effects that happen.  It's amazing to see how reactive mindEYE is to sound i.e. drawing shapes and zooming around to the vocal track.  Really nice.

It's so nice and abstracted that I don't think the audience will think that it looks "old".  All the WinAMP visualizations do clouds and plasma and insane realtime 3D effects, but there's room for this kind of simple 2D shape stuff too.  

Here's hoping that I can keep it working until Tuesday!

[blackhula]

The mindLIGHT 7 does look really cool. Are they expensive?  I ask because I've got a LIVE board, and it would be neat to set up a regular ECS machine with LIVE and mindLIGHT, in addition to having one set up for AGA.

Why do you recommend low res?  Is it for fluid animation, or does the software just not handle the AGA stuff as well as it could?  My tests with my 1200 in hi-res 256 color were good, but if there's room for improvement I'd look into it.  I'd test it out now, but I already packed up the system for the show.

The one additional thing I was really hoping for was to get a Video Toaster up and running so that I could do some crazy ChromaFX on mindEYE output, and there's also a nice filter that blurs & smears incoming video.  That blurriness would help mindEYE look even more trippy which could only be cool.

I'm really interested in mindEYE's abilities to handle images as well as just popping up streams of random shapes, but for this show I think that I'm just going to leave well enough alone.  After the dust settles, I will definitely experiment more with it tho.  I haven't seen anything this interesting on the PC, and besides that - I don't have a laptop to lug around.

I'd love to do mindEYE stuff with a controlled palette, so the output is less rainbow looking.  I thikn that you could get some pretty sophisticated looks with some nice abstract shapes and an abbreviated palette.

Big plans, but it'll have to wait.  Just getting this running has been a thrill.  Now I just have the rest of the show to get ready for...

Oh, if you have any suggestions on where to get some nice abstract IFF images that I can load into mindEYE without messing around too much, I'm all ears.  Stuff like fractal graphuics, abstract shapes, etc. etc.  Eventually I'll generate some textures out of Forge, but until then I'll just have borrow stuff from the net.  It's been such a long time for me, that I don't even know where I'd start looking...

Thanks everybody!