Nool Music Pack 1 is now free! You can use it in any kind of game, demo or multimedia production you want. You just have to credit me in your product and let me know what product you are using it in. Of course you can give me a free copy of your product if you want, but it’s not a requirement in any way, so don’t feel obligated to do so. You can send me an email at ray@noolness.com in order to tell me about your new product using my pack, or to request music to be made on a contract basis.

Download Nool Music Pack 1 in MP3 Format

Download Nool Music Pack 1 in Ogg Vorbis Format

Download Nool Music Pack 1 in 16 Bit Wav Format

Download Nool Music Pack 1 in 24 Bit Wav Format

I own both the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. I have searched high and low to figure out the best way to configure them and connect them to my entertainment center. After a bit of research, it appears that Microsoft and Sony took completely different directions with how to handle both video and audio support in their next generation systems. In this blog post I will describe how both systems implemented their video support.

The Xbox 360 can handle rendering in a few different ways, and it depends on the game. Some games will render to a specific target resolution and then upscale or downscale the video to the resolution you have set in the Xbox 360 Dashboard. Other games will render the game in one of a set of supported resolutions. If the resolution you set in the Xbox 360 Dashboard matches one of these resolutions, it will send the image directly to your television. If the resolution is not supported by your television it will render the game using the closest resolution and upscale / downscale the output as necessary.

Due to the way the Xbox 360 handles the upscaling and downscaling of the rendered output, you have to be very careful about how you configure your television. If you set the Xbox 360 to output at a resolution that does not match the exact native resolution of your television you may run into issues with the video getting scaled twice. This is due to the fact that the Xbox 360 will possibly upscale / downscale the rendered output, and then your television will also upscale / downscale the image to your native resolution. In some cases there will be no way to set your Xbox 360 to match the native resolution of your television and it will be impossible to avoid these artifacts.

In the case of my Westinghouse 32” television, I had to use a VGA cable in order to have it output video without the scaling artifacts. The resolution of the screen is 1366×768, which is not a standard HD resolution like 720p or 1080p. So if I used a component cable to hook up the Xbox 360, I wasn’t able to select a resolution that matched the television’s resolution. With the VGA cable it let me set the resolution to 1360×768 which was almost my exact native resolution. I was missing three pixels on each side of the screen, but you wouldn’t be able to tell unless someone told you about it. So with that configuration, at worst the video would only be scaled once.

On the other hand the PS3 will output the video at the exact resolution it is rendered at. The resolution used will be the maximum resolution supported by both the game and your television. So if the original image is rendered at 720p, it will send exactly that to your television. Your television will need to do the upscaling / downscaling of the game itself. This can either be good or bad. If the upscaling in your television is really good, you will get a great image. If the upscaling in your television sucks, everything will look like crap. This also means if your television’s native resolution does not exactly match 720p or 1080p, your video will be scaled no matter what.

At the end of the day, both methods of outputting video can be better in particular cases. If you have a television with good upscaling, that supports 1080p as its native resolution of 1920×1080, then the way the PS3 handles things will most likely work better for you. This is due to the fact that your television’s upscaler chip is probably better than what is inside the Xbox 360. If your television has poor upscaling, and your native resolution is supported, the way the Xbox 360 handles things will probably make things look a lot nicer.

After a huge amount of work Nool Music Pack 1 has finally been released! You can buy the pack in my store here. If you want to preview the music, I have some low quality MP3’s of the tracks you can listen to below. The last track has a clip of each song as a 192kbs MP3. The actual pack includes the music in MP3, OGG, 16 Bit WAV and 24 Bit WAV (yes I know that’s a bit excessive, but I thought you guys deserve the original studio masters of the pack) formats.

I had some extremely bad luck today. I just bought a 42″ Westinghouse LCD HDTV a few days ago, and I was quite impressed by it. On the way home from work I picked up a copy of Total Recall on Blu-ray, so I would have something new to watch on it. As soon as I got home, I put the the disc in and got ready to relax. As the movie started I noticed a horizontal bar of dead pixels going across the screen. Yesterday I watched a bunch of movies on the screen and the line wasn’t on there. At first I thought it must be a problem with the movie. After trying a few different devices that were connected to the TV, I realized the television was defective. So I lugged the huge TV back to the store and returned it. They didn’t have any in stock so they had to put one on order. I should have my replacement by the eleventh of the month (which is this coming Saturday). So in other words I have to suffer through the rest of the week without the new television.

Since I didn’t have my new screen to watch movies on, I decided to do some work on my music pack. The music pack has been done for a while, there are just a few things I have left to do before I can start selling it. The first thing I needed to do was create some promotional artwork. So I started working on it and everything was going great. Suddenly the screen went black, and the computer wouldn’t turn back on. I also noticed that the light on the power supply wasn’t lit like it normally is when its plugged in. In other words the notebook was dead. I am guessing the power module went, which is most likely part of the motherboard. It’s a MacBook so it would cost a lot of money to fix it. I guess I could sell the parts on eBay or something like that.

So now I am in the process of recovering the data from the MacBook’s hard drive. I have a MacBook Pro that I use for music recording, so I figured I could just throw the hard drive in it, and recover the data. Only if it was that easy. In order to get to the MacBook Pro’s hard drive you have to take apart the entire notebook. I spent a little more than an hour getting the thing apart. The screws in the MacBook Pro are tiny, and almost impossible to remove. And then just to taunt you, Apple put two Torx screws in the MacBook Pro, that you need to remove in order to get the hard drive out. Naturally I didn’t have a Torx bit for my screwdriver, so I just used a bit of brute force with a tiny philips head screwdriver.

Once I got the thing open it was pretty easy from there. I just plopped in the hard drive I wanted to recover, booted up the machine and started backing up the files I need to an external hard drive. I was a bit amazed that Windows Vista didn’t have any sort of activation issues. I was really worried I would boot the notebook up, and it wouldn’t let me get into the the system. Fortunately Microsoft didn’t decided to make this bad day even worse.

Yeah, today was just one of those days…

I have been planning on reworking my website into a blog format, and finally I got around to doing it. I added a bit of new content like a few YouTube videos, and migrated all the existing stuff on my website into WordPress. I am going to be posting on my blog frequently, so check back every so often (or add my site to your RSS reader). It’s so much easier to manage things now that I have redesigned the site…once again.

Speaking of new stuff, I will soon have a web based store up and running. The first product that’s going to be up there is my new music pack. The pack has actually been done for a while, but I needed a way to sell it. The music pack should be released in the next couple of weeks, after the store is ready to go.

And once again if you find anything interesting or helpful on my site, remember it’s completely ad supported. So if you see any ads on the right side of the screen for products that you find even the slightest bit interesting, give them a click. I get paid for Google ads based on how many users click on the ads, not how many users view them.

This is a neat little game I created for GID 22. It uses beat detection to spawn blocks and also to control their movement. You control your little block with the cursor keys and try the avoid the evil killer blocks of doom. Each level is really just a song, and when the song is over the next level begins. Once you beat a level, you will start at the beginning of the new level whenever you die. There are three levels in total, and if you can beat them all you win the game.

• Download BeatBlock.

Video of BeatBlock Level 1

Video of BeatBlock Level 2

Video of BeatBlock Level 3

• Click Here to Download All of the Songs in MP3 Format.

The only restrictions on this music are you can’t use the music in any game, demo or product and you cannot make money off of the music in any shape or form (for example by selling it) without getting permission from me. For permission to use these songs or to request custom music on a contract basis, contact me at ray@noolness.com.

I was the graphics programmer for the Legions tech demo, produced by Garage Games. Below is a link that gives some details about that demo.

• See the press release at Garage Games.

This tool is the NoolPreview Tool that I first released here. This tool allows 3D Studio Max users to create TGEA ShaderGen materials and preview them without leaving their favorite tool. In order to use the tool you will need one of the exporters from this site. The exporters on this page have small change made to the code so that the TGEA ShaderGen material can be used by the exporter. Click here to get to the download page for the exporters.

• Download NoolPreview v0.5.

• Click Here to Download All of the Songs in MP3 Format.

The only restrictions on this music are you can’t use the music in any game, demo or product and you cannot make money off of the music in any shape or form (for example by selling it) without getting permission from me. For permission to use these songs or to request custom music on a contract basis, contact me at ray@noolness.com.