Okay, good morning. Thank you all for coming. We know you have a choice in conference talks. We appreciate you flying Sonic Pi Airlines so today I'd like to talk about making music with Ruby and specifically using a software system called Sonic Pi Sonic Pi was created by a guy named Sam Aaron who's a programmer working over in the UK and One of his primary motivations when he made it was to try to give people a creative experience with code That sounds a little funny because a lot of times people think of code as just something for making very serious business applications or Big crazy government databases or sharing pictures of your food on the internet. These are all very important But for Sam code could be a lot more than that It could be a vehicle for self expression and creativity And he wanted everyone to have an experience of that including and especially people who had never coded before So he tried to make Sonic Pi as accessible as possible It's completely free and open source it runs on Mac windows and Linux And it was specifically designed to run on the Raspberry Pi computer Which we saw a little bit of in the last talk if you were here. This is about a credit card size Computer costs about $35 you plug in a USB keyboard and mouse plug it into a monitor or even TV and you're ready to go Sonic Pi was written in Ruby naturally and the language it uses for creating the music is a very elegant and Very approachable Ruby DSL And after seeing Betsy's talk yesterday, I'm not even sure it's a DSL. It's for the most part It's straight up Ruby with a really really nice API So it's easy for just about anybody to get started with it And in fact Sam collaborated with a school teacher in the UK to develop a curriculum for bringing Sonic Pi into primary schools And teach ten-year-old kids the basics of coding But the real miracle the system for me is that on the one hand It's simple enough for ten-year-old kids to play around with and do bleeps and bloops and all kinds of interesting things But it's also sophisticated enough that Sam and other folks have taken it into live performance in nightclubs Coding up there while people are dancing dancing to code think about that for a minute so here's an excerpt of one of his performances if the Gods of the wireless are smiling on us at this moment So it's a little dark, but there's a camera on Sam in the upper right-hand corner having fun. Oh It's like delay And he usually has the code projected in the screen behind them so people can see what's going on And we're getting a good look at the loading Well, it gives you a taste of it anyway By the way, that's running on the raspberry Pi So you don't even necessarily need thank you to our sponsor. You don't even necessarily need a super powerful computer to run this So all this is fantastic, so it's a really cool system But one of the things that got me really excited about it when I first found out about it Is that it's a nice way not only to get people started coding, but to get people started making music I've been a musician for most of my life and I earned my living as musician for a few years until I turned bad and became a programmer my poor parents have still haven't gotten over that and I often meet people who say that they would like to learn to make music but They don't because it seems too daunting or too expensive or it would just take too long for them to get to the point Where they could make something interesting But Sonic Pi provides a really nice friendly on ramp to this and you can get something kind of fun going up quickly So when I meet people like this now, I can say try out Sonic Pi So in this talk, I'm going to give you a quick music lesson with Sonic Pi and hopefully convince you to give it a try yourself Now we've seen this slide a lot and I'm sorry to say there's going to be a little bit of this in this talk There will be moments where it'll seem perfectly clear and then it's going to seem like I take some weird logical leap Put in a couple numbers and I have an owl and I apologize for that So if you don't grasp every single aspect of it, don't worry about it Obviously, I can't turn you all into musical masters in 30 minutes or whatever remains But what I hope to do is just give you a few things to start a few ideas that you can approach the system with and just give you a little nudge across the starting line So that hopefully you can take it and run with it yourself So with that, let's talk about music Music can be a little daunting if you've never worked with it before it seems very vast seems very rich and it's also very very abstract So how do you even get started? How do you approach it? How do you start to wrap your head around it? Those programmers we learned that if you have a big complex seemingly insurmountable problem The way to attack it is to break it down into smaller more manageable problems And it turns out you can do that with music too One way to think of music is that it consists of four different elements melody harmony rhythm and timbre First three of these you probably have at least an instinctive sense of timbre you may not have heard before But really it just talks about the sound of the instruments producing the music So if you think about the difference between a flute and a guitar and a kazoo The difference between those three is what timbre is all about so I'll go through each one of these and show how they manifest in sonic pie and Hopefully give you enough to go on So let's switch over to sonic pie I also want to point out This is what sonic pie looks like when you first install it and run it you download is a binary and You're up and ready. You don't need to worry about installing ruby. You don't have to get your bundler file Just right. You don't have to install gems You don't have to worry about your version of Mac has lib 0 8.6 of whatever the hell is broken this week You're ready to go right away. You don't even have to open a terminal This main window is where you enter the text And then you click the run button to start the music stop button stops it and kind of that's all you need to know To get started there are lots of other things you can do adjusting the size adjusting the colors Saving your work, but really just type in text and go so for beginners. It's a really really nice experience to start with So let's start with melody What is a melody a melody is really just a series of single notes played in succession?  Well, let's start by playing a single note To do that we use the play command and see I love this software already The first thing I do is type play that makes me happy. So what do we pass to the play the note that we want to play? How do we do that well with a number? And we're often running now. What does this number mean? Well It's the equivalent of middle C on the piano if that means anything to you But the truth is you don't really need to know what it means. All you really need to know is that with higher numbers You get a higher pitch with lower numbers You get a lower pitch and as you increment one in integer at a time That is exactly the equivalent of walking up to a piano and just going up all the notes one by one Or going fret by fret on a guitar Now you can also do some things that you can't do on a piano That will work That's a note. That's not on the piano that note is definitely not on the piano But you can do it Now if you have some musical background, you know the names of notes you can actually work with those too This is another way of saying the same thing. It's the note C in the fourth octave For some people that's easier, but you can also just play with the numbers Play takes a few options You can set the release To make it sustain longer You can change the attack to make it swell up a little bit. So it's not full volume right away And you can change the volume But let's keep it simple at first. We'll just work with this and we want to make a melody So let's put a few notes one after the other and we'll just use even numbers for now See what that sounds like and we hit play Okay, that's not quite what we had in mind what happened there Well Sonic Pi has a very complicated system of timing underneath it because it wants to keep all the pieces of your music in sync And we weren't very specific here We didn't say how much space should happen between each note in our melody Remember, it's one after the other. So we need to insert some pauses in here To actually make it sound like a melody and how do we do pauses same way we do it in Ruby with a sleep command And now we're really often running Sleep in Sonic Pi works a little bit differently than sleep in Ruby In Ruby the number you pass is the number of seconds to pause and it's approximate In Sonic Pi the number you're passing in is the number of beats between each note It's not apparent right away, but when Sonic Pi is playing the music It's got a clock that it's syncing everything to there's a pulse going on in the background And in music we express this kind of pulse as tempo and we express it in terms of beats per minute or BPM It's a term you may have heard So by default Sonic Pi will go at 60 BPM, but we can crank it up if we want to using the use BPM command That's faster and that's slower. We can also speed things up by making our sleeps a little bit faster And we can play around with the rhythm that way Now this may not seem like much But with these two commands that we've just learned in the first few minutes here You can now play any piece of music that's ever been written by anybody It's anything that you can express in notation. You can do with plays and sleeps It's just a matter of getting in the right order But that begs the question. Well, how do you know what numbers to put in and if you're a beginner Obviously, you're not going to know that so how do you build a melody if you don't know what numbers to put in? Well, Sonic Pi can help you by introducing a little bit of randomness and By shaping the parameters of the randomness you can play around with the sound that comes out and get a little head start And then see what you like So let's do a loop So you can get a bunch of notes at the same time and we'll do a sleep And an end make it pretty now instead of play we want to get a nice random number now we could do this and This is a function that will give us a random integer between 60 and 90 So it's range rand integer and you give it two numbers It'll give you a random integer between those two we could try that but it's probably going to sound a little weird little bit too abstract There's a reason for that It turns out that in most of the music that we hear most of the time The composers aren't working with all of the available notes at the same time at any given time You're probably just hearing a subset of the available notes And we call that subset a scale and a scale is a lot like a color palette When you're designing a web app or a mobile app and you start putting the user interface together You don't just start grabbing any old color willy-nilly and putting it all over the place You do if you're a programmer, but probably not if you're a designer If you're a designer you take some time in advance and think through what the color palette is going to be You say okay, we're gonna use these four or five colors. This will be the main one This will be the secondary one and by making those choices and limiting the palette the whole Interface has a sense of cohesion and a sense of consistency to it scales are a lot like that by reducing the number of notes that we use Everything sounds a little more coherent So here's a piano and Some of these scales you already know whether you know it or not So if I start on this note here and just go up the white keys Probably sounds familiar. That's called a major scale Anybody remember Julie Andrews and the sound of music teaching the kids to sing Dorae me all that she was teaching my major scale There's also the minor scale That's kind of a darker quality to it results the whole tone scale Which has kind of a dreamy quality to it use this in a movie if you're doing a flashback, right? So all these different scales have different like like color palettes have different feelings to them I have different emotional qualities. So you don't necessarily need to know what they are You can just listen to them and see which one you like So how do we make a scale? Well sonic pie makes that easy to there's a scale function You pass it the note you want to start with we'll start with 60 because that's been pretty good to us and Then autocomplete helpfully pops up with all of the scales that sonic pie knows about As you can see there are quite a lot. I don't even know what most of these are And you don't need to know either you can look them up You can find out how they work how they're constructed from which whole steps and which half steps But really you don't need to know that you can just listen to them. So let's try the major scale Since that's the one we just listened to and we're not quite done yet Because the scale function returns a list just like an array of notes and if I pass a list of notes to play It helpfully thinks that I want to play all of them at the same time, which I don't really want to do so We're gonna ask it to choose one at random and we can do that by calling choose on the returned list Now we've got a nice little melody happening But let's change up the scale and I'm gonna speed up the notes so we can hear a little bit more What's this one or we can skip down? Whatever this one is So this is all you need to know you can just sit there and listen to them and say oh, yeah, I like that one I like that one. I don't like that one and Pay attention to your body that will tell you when you found something interesting if you're clicking through and you go That means you found something interesting and you should roll with it All right, so that's melody you're now all experts congratulations. Let's move on to harmony So harmony is when we have two or more notes sounding at the same time So melody has all been about one note at a time but harmony is when you've got more than one happening and a single instance like a frozen moment of time when you've Got two or more notes sounding that's called a chord and Sonic Pi will do chords for us much in the same way that does scales with the chord function Again, just give it a starting note and then auto complete does the rest Okay, now this list is even weirder than the last one the last one each at least had pronounceable words This is we don't know what this is Well, what this is is actually kind of a shorthand notation that's used in a lot of lead sheets It's particularly for guitar players to see it described what the chord is without having to spell out each note But once again, you don't really need to know you can just listen and see what you like That's kind of cool. Here's just a regular major chord Oh, that was minor this one's major There we go seventh chord and Then you can get into the really exotic ones that have math in them basically That's quite nice So now we've got a little bit of melody and we've got a little bit of harmony, but how do we put them together? Specifically, how do you know which chords are gonna go with which melodies? Well, as it happens, that's a little outside the scope of this talk That's a very big broad subject, but there's a little hack I can give you which will work around that Which is that any chord can be turned into a melody? Simply by articulating the notes of the chord one at a time and music we call this Narpeggio and actually there's quite a lot of music that works like this So There's a major chord, but you might know this tune. It's just an arpeggio too soon But anyway, it's just a chord This one you might know Two chords this one and this one how lazy is that? If Mozart can do it you certainly can So Let's see how that might work Let's set up a loop again And we're gonna take a chord and we're gonna sign it to a variable. So we'll just call this cool chord and we'll use that one and Then we will play the chord And we'll let it ring out for a few beats and while that chord is ringing out We'll construct a little melody based on the notes of the chord. So let's give it 16 times and then we'll play Cool chord I'm really glad Andy and Evan aren't up here Adam and Evan aren't up here to provide running commentary while I code We'll choose And we're gonna make these notes a little bit short because they're gonna go by kind of fast So again, this is gonna play the chord and then while that code Chord is playing. We're just gonna do 16 little notes based on the individual notes of the chord and see what that sounds like So It works Let's try a different chord. This one's kind of fun. Let's speed these up even a little more pretty nice Now we can also change this note around a little bit and just give it some movement So that's working pretty well. So it might be nice to automate this movement of the chord So the starting note kind of shifts around a little bit So we're programmers we can do that. So let's create a list of notes and We'll just kind of play around Jump up a couple jump back down and That'll work and then in here instead of a hard coded value We'll use the start notes list and there's a super handy function in Sonic Pi called tick and Tick is just a counter that increments Automatically starting at zero the first time you call it you get zero the next time you call it you get one Next time you call it you get two and so it's super handy for iteration like this So this is gonna take me through my chords one at a time now, of course, there's a problem lurking here Which is that my list only has four elements and tick just keeps going on forever So pretty soon ticks gonna get to four. It's gonna ask for index four in starting notes and cabloy nils. No good There's a couple ways around this one is that we could check the value of tick and then it gets to four We reset the tick and start over there's a method to do that But there's actually an easier way which is to use a data structure that Sonic Pi has called a ring and We can change it in that data structure by calling ring on the list And a ring is a special kind of list that you can iterate over forever Because the elements in the list just keep repeating themselves. So instead of a long list It's a ring in a circle So in this case if I've got a ring and I access Index four instead of getting nil It's gonna jump back to the first element and Five will go to here Six will go to here seven will go to here and then on and on so tick and just keep going forever And it won't get a nil And I'll just keep going forever until I guess we hit the logical number of how high ins can go So now we've got melody and harmony working together. That's great. Let's move on to rhythm So rhythm deals with Relative durations of notes has to do with the time aspect of music now We've already kind of been working with rhythm with our sleep commands because that tells us how long to wait but one of the more Interesting ways to work with rhythm is creating drum beats So let's start doing that and as we do that we're gonna change gears a little bit all the sounds We've been using in sonic pie so far have been synthesized sounds which means that sonic pie is doing all this crazy map behind the scenes to Figure out what the waveform should look like and send that instructions down to the sound driver move the speakers It's pretty complicated But there's another way to generate sound in your music, which is called sampling and if you ever listen to any hip-hop music Ever you probably know a little bit about sampling a Sample is just a pre-recorded sound It could be a very short sound or it could be long sound and that sound gets played back in the context of music Triggering a sample is no different than hitting play on your iPod. There's just a sound file that exists on disk And it's getting played back So we do that in sonic pie with the sample command and as you can see there's a bunch of samples built in that we can use So let's try a snare drum sound Sounds pretty realistic because it's just a recording and we're playing back the recording One fun thing to do with samples is to play around with the rate So a rate of one means we're playing it one times as fast If we put in two we go twice as fast So that affects not only the length of the sample, but also the pitch The more we crank that up the higher it goes If you do that on a voice you get Alvin in the chipmunks This is no different than changing the speed on a turntable But you can also slow it down or even way down Anybody want to guess what happens if I put in a negative number? backwards Or even very slowly backwards all that with just that one little sound So now we've got some samples. We can start making some drum beats. So let's try a real simple one We'll use Let's use a bass drum. This house one is nice Then we'll sleep There we go. You got a nice four on the floor thing that the kids can dance to But let's say we want to mix that up a little bit. Let's throw in a snare drum that happens every other beat That's a pretty common pattern. So how do we want to do every other beat? Well, our old friend tick can help us out here, too So we'll say we want the snare drum sound if Tick is odd the first time it'll be zero second time will be one and so on Now we've got that going makes you want a moonwalk doesn't it? Now this could get pretty complicated pretty fast This is a pretty simple beat and it's already a few lines of code if we wanted to player in more stuff beyond that It could get tricky Well sampling can help us with this too because there are a certain class of samples That are almost like small pre-recorded pieces of music that can be looped played over and over again these are called looping samples and Sonic Pi has a few of these built-in too And they start with the word loop in the list So here's a drum sample that's ready to be looped. This is perhaps the most famous sample in history Now that's a nice full drum beat. It's got cymbals. It's got snare drum. It's got bass drum We didn't have to write any of it. It's all there But obviously we don't want to play once we wanted to repeat so We'll do the loop here and now we've got to put in a sleep, but how long is the sleep for? It sounds like it's about two beats. Let's give that a try Now that's not really working The reason is that the sample is just a recording of a piece of music It doesn't have any sort of information about its tempo that Sonic Pi can sync to it's just a data file So what we're trying to do is tell Sonic Pi to play the sample and then as soon as it's done start over again And so we want to sleep for exactly the length of the sample whatever that happens to be Unfortunately, Sonic Pi can give that for us with the sample duration Method And we just pass in the name of the sample And now we're saying okay play the sample and then however long that sample is I don't care wait that long and Then play it over again, and it's as though we coded it ourselves So now that we've got some drum beats. This is great. Why don't we add that to this little bloopy thing? We were doing over here So we can have melody harmony and a nice rhythmic thing happening at the same time And it doesn't work Why doesn't it work because we've got a nasty infinite loop up there And we never break out of that and so we never get down to the loop on the bottom So we've got one chunk of code that we need to execute and we've got another chunk of X code that we need to execute at exactly the same time Oh dear looks like we're gonna have to use threads Now threading is often a very very difficult and painful part of programming But happily Sonic Pi has a threading model of its own built-in. That's kind of a dream to use We just call in thread give it a block and we're done That code will execute in its own thread and that block at the bottom will start at exactly the same time We don't have to worry about the timing Sonic Pi will do it for us Okay better, but They're playing at the same time. That's great, and we had to add one line of code awesome, we're happy, but The two pieces of music aren't in sync and this goes back to the same problem about this sample Not having any internal sense of tempo that we can grab on to and sync up to Fortunately Sonic Pi can help us there with an option called beat stretch So what I'm doing here is saying okay Sonic Pi Play this sample, but I want you to adjust the rate for me either speed it up Slow it down do what I have to do, but make sure the length of the time it takes to play the entire sample fits two beats exactly Just lock it in for us and once we've done that we can now change our sleep to two oops sleep sleep Talking to my daughter sleep sleep and now That's all synced up for us So we've got melody. We've got harmony. We've got some rhythm. Let's talk about timbre So like I said timbre talks about kind of the sound of the instruments that you're working with So let's go back to an earlier example of just playing a melody So by default Sonic Pi chooses a synthesizer for us And that's this little bloopy sound that we've been hearing But there are lots of other synthesizers built in that we can use and we can select them with the use synth method So here's our autocomplete list beep is the one that it does by default, but we could try this one even this one Yep, that's one So exact same notes exact same rhythm But each one has a totally different feel to it depending on what the instrument is So you can sit there and just play around with that Now once you have picked a synthesizer, there's more shaping you can do on top of that by throwing in more options to the play Function we talked about tack and release to control the the way it sounds. There's another fun one called cutoff And cutoff applies a filter to the sound Now when we hear these notes playing there's really only one note that we hear more than any other That's what gives it kind of its musical quality But every sound that we hear has lots and lots of frequencies that are happening at the same time most of them We can't pull out and isolate. They're just part of the overall jumble But the relative volume of all those frequencies that are happening are what gives sound its character and With cutoff you have a chance to just chop off frequencies at a certain level So if I set a relatively low cutoff, which is like 50. Well, let's hear this without the filter So if I set a lower cutoff then basically all of the higher frequencies are thrown out And it starts to sound a little more dull with a higher cutoff Those frequencies open up and one fun thing to do with cutoff is randomize it So let's try this So that creates a little bit of movement And it's almost sounds like the notes are being accented, but they're just popping out a little bit more because they're brighter But one of the really fun things to do in the world of tamer is to play with the built-in sound effects So if you've ever seen a band playing you've probably seen the guitar up on the front of the stage And they've got a whole bunch of pedals in front of them And they're playing along and they stomp on the pedals and suddenly the sound of their guitar changes drastically So these are called effects and it's a way of providing some sort of interesting sonic sheen onto the music As it's coming out as a whole. So let's take kind of a simple example here Just a couple beeps and bloops and let's say we want to throw some reverb on that So we use effects with the with FX command and once again autocomplete to the rescue and once again, we use a block So we're saying this chunk of code should be passed through the reverb That was a little subtle I can change the parameters I can make the room bigger so it's as though it's playing in a bigger room You can play with the mix with zero you're hearing no reverb With one you're hearing all reverb That was some great faces right there all around the room and There's many more parameters to play with you can also apply some echo Echo and you can play around with a bunch of parameters there now What if you want to do reverb and echo at the same time? You just nest the calls And nest the blocks and you can nest those as far as your CPU can handle Now the really nice thing about the way this is set up is That only the code within those blocks gets affected by the effect So if I do let's do a sleep here and sample And we'll go back to our snare drum again Wherever you are so that snare drum had no reverb or echo applied to it But at the same time it didn't interfere with the reverb and the echo that was tailing off from the code above it They just don't have anything to do with each other And so as this block feature makes it really easy to see exactly what's going on It's one of the most elegantly designed parts of the system. I think All right, so let's play around with our newfound knowledge of timbre and mix this up a little bit. So let's use a different synth for our chord maybe FM that's good and Maybe we'll use TB 303 for our melody this one I know is a little loud So I'm going to turn it down a bit and it's a totally different piece of music Let's play with the cutoff a little bit here We'll randomize it Changes it all again Now there's one more thing I'd like to show you which is there's a better way to do threads As you may have noticed every time I want to change something I have to stop it and start over again And if I just keep hitting run over and over again It's going to create new threads on top of the threads that are already playing That gets a little crazy in a hurry, but it's a shame to have to keep stopping Well, fortunately, there's another way to do threads and it's called the live loop And a live loop is sort of a thread and a loop combined into the same thing You have to give it a name. So we're gonna call that one beeps. We'll get rid of this end We'll do a live loop here Call this one drums Now I can keep hitting run And I don't get that build up each time because it because it's got the names It knows not to reload a new one But the other thing that's really cool about this is I can make changes and then when I hit run again It will pick up those changes and the next time through the loop. They're integrated So let's change this around some more Let's change this one new synthesizer there and Maybe we'll add a little more attack to this one So it swells up and we've been sticking with this cord for a while Let's try a different one and I will slow down everything and this is what makes the live coding and performance aspect possible Thank you very much This is how Sam and others do their DJ sets They just can let this these live loops run and swap them out on the fly create new loops and it's really cool and the nice thing about is it doesn't take you out of your flow and You can do this too. You can just start really simple then add things But the thing is when the music keeps going you just kind of get sucked in So some next steps for you if you haven't already done it download install sonic pie. It's completely free. It works great There's an excellent help system built in it has a great tutorial that goes in detail through all the different things that can do There's great documentation for all the different method calls that are available There's also a whole bunch of examples there that range from the very simple to the very complex And you can just copy and paste them into the editor and start hacking on them and finally just play with it I've given you a lot of information and a lot of stuff And we're all full of information from three days at the conference But this is a system that really just invites you to just fool around with it and see what happens So try keeping it open in your desktop at work when you've got a little pause You got to run a long test suite or the internet goes down Just pop over type a few lines make some sounds then you have some background music for when you do start Typing again So thank you for your attention. That's where you can get sonic pie That bit. Lee goes to A gist that has almost all the examples that I used here today. So feel free to mess around with those I'm Darren Wilson on Twitter. If you start playing around with this I'd love to hear what you do. So let me know and if you have questions If you get stuck on something if you want to pair sometime I would love to I think there's a fantastic system and I encourage you all to try it. Thank you I've got a few minutes so I could take some questions if you have any Yeah, the question was can you create your own synths? Yes, you can hack the source code and submit a PR But it's built on a since are all built on a system called super collider and there's a lot of documentation around how to do that and so you could you could plow through the source code and and See I think I think it's might not be as hard as you think I say that as a person that hasn't done it Any other questions? Yeah, is there a way to take a picture of sheet music and use notes for that? theoretically, yes, I've seen systems that do OCR That will turn a piece of sheet music into MIDI Which is a format for specifying notes and pauses and rhythms As far as I know there is not any kind of MIDI to sonic pie converter Someone might be working on it, so I'd say it's a distant theoretical possibility not doable right now. Yeah Sure, because one of the things I didn't show you is that With the sample feature you can actually use Samples off your local desktop and not just the ones that are built into sonic pie So if you've got a file on disk that's got some guitar sounds in it You could totally integrate that and you could use less electronically sounds if that's what you wanted to do The disadvantage of that is that the system is not quite as portable that way One of the nice things about the way the system works is all the instructions are text So that's why I was able to post a gist with all the music that I did today You can copy and paste something and send an email to somebody and they'll have it for real But if you're using your local samples, then you don't Then you have to send that person the samples and becomes a little trickier, but it's possible Yeah, oh does it have a support for other formats like VST and other soft synths not right now as far as I know I don't know if anybody's working on it Yeah You can't export as MIDI the question was can you export as MIDI or MP3? You can't export as MIDI, but there is a Record function on there that will record your performance and save it off as a wave file And then from there you can turn it into an MP3 So the question is does Sonic Pi have any sequencing capabilities where you can set up patterns and say play this section play this section play This section there isn't anything built in the API to do that, but you could certainly do it with Ruby Because you can define your own functions. That was something I didn't show and Certainly you can do things with loops and say, you know play this part five times and then it'll drop down to the next part so you can certainly code it and I have a if you go to my github gist. I actually did a Matrix style drum machine Sort of just a little API for if if you've ever worked with those like the old Roland drum machines I built something to kind of simulate that. I am an enthusiast, but hope to one day be a contributor when I grow up I Got time for one more. Yeah. Sorry. Oh Gems No, you can not at this point. I mean you could integrate into the source code, but not within the code that you're you're writing Okay, I'm out of time, but I'll be wandering around and getting lunch So if you have any other questions, feel free to grab me. Thank you so much


So there is a beautiful pipe ceremony this morning. I know it happens every month. They have a good food one to invite people up. What was your role in the pipe ceremony today?  As I guess First Nations University, that's one of our uniqueness is to have our ceremonies and our feasts. And it makes you feel that you've done something worthwhile. This morning, I joined the pipe ceremony specifically to pray for the well-being of the First Nations University for the staff, faculty, and students. What does your role as an elder in the university mean to you? I guess I find that my role as an elder in the First Nations University is that as an elder, we have to understand that our roles are to really help students to try and help them overcome difficulties that they have maybe academically, perhaps maybe financially. We go even as far as trying to help whether there's marital problems. And I think that we always have to focus on trying to make the student understand that education is so important in today's society that we really talk to them and try to assist them in sticking with their classes and completing their courses in any way they can. What is the most common problem that students approach you with? Usually, I build a trust relationship with students. And what they tell me is all kept confidential. And in my mind, I have set a place here in this room where I envision that there's a wooden box.  I don't carry it with me. I don't even discuss students' problems with my husband. And I think trust and confidentiality is very important. But in comparison to the majority of time, I think it's financial problems that they have. You know, they get student allowance once a month. And sometimes they try and make living for one month on that budget of their allowance is very difficult. That's where the frustration comes in. And sometimes they have to pay rent out of that. And sometimes there's families. So that's the most common problem that students come with. It's always financial problems. How do you feel when you are able to help the students? I know when I help a student and maybe a month later, I see them walking in the building, still carrying their books. I know that's an achievement that they have listened well and that I have helped them. I guess the biggest pride as an elder here is seeing students walk across stage to get their diplomas, certificates, and their degrees. I know they have to go through those certifications. And then comes the degrees. But a lot of times, you know, the students sometimes, they need a lot of guidance in choosing a career. Because sometimes they come in, maybe they'll take classes from INCOD and, oh, no, we want to go this other way. So I think that's where they need a lot of assistance to tell them what classes to take in order to maybe go into social work or whatever their career is. Are there things that you have learned from the students? Over the years that I've been here, I've learned a lot from the students. Some new things, ideas have emerged. I do realize each generation is changing. You know, many years ago, I think in the early 70s, I took classes true at that time, the SIFC. At that time, the cost of everything was not as high priced as today. Today, everything is the prices are way up. So that's one of the great changes I see happening. The other thing is when I took classes only, maybe two classes a month, it was called, I guess, the module system where we take maybe political science for one month. It went like that. But today, the difference is students are taking full classes. And you know, sometimes I feel that when they do that, it's kind of overbearing for them. And that's the change I see. Do you think that they'd be more successful if they were taught the module way? I think so because it'll give them, you know, traditionally, a long time ago, First Nations people, we never lived under structured time. And when I say that, what I mean was, we don't get up at, say, we have to be there eight o'clock. We have to be here a certain time. Today, we live in that kind of a society. And as First Nations people, long time ago, my grandparents used to say, take your time. Understand what you're doing. You know, do things in a very, I guess, slowly to get, I guess, the hang of whatever we're doing to do. But today, you know, everything is such a fast pace that we're trying to keep up. And sometimes it's within us as a First Nations person that that wasn't the way we were raised up. For my part, I wasn't raised up like that. Like I did things at a slow pace. And I remember my grandparents saying, when you do everything at a certain time, you're hurrying up, it releases, it gives you a lot of stress. And combined with trying to, you know, study and all that, sometimes I feel pity for the students, you know, so. That was how it was with me growing up. Like I went to school, but at day school, we had to walk to school. We took our time, had fun on the way. You know, we got there and we went to school for, from nine o'clock, but today it has changed drastically. Yeah. That was my next question about sharing both your childhood and growing up. What are some of the things that you learned from your elders? From my elders, back home on Standing Buffalo, we have the very, very old elders. And our community has agreed that we let these old, old elders rest. It's time for them to be at peace and not to be worrying about what they have to do. It's from the 55 to about 65 year old or some that could go further than 65. We say we are the active ones. And from the old elders, all my teachings really come from my grandmother, my grandfather. I think back today that some of the things that I do, that I say the way I behave, my belief system all comes from my grandparents. They were my teachers and also from the other elders. When I have a question, today I go to them. I sit with them and I ask them, questions like maybe I'm having problems with my siblings, my family. Well, I'll go to another elder and ask for their advice. And usually they tell me, give me ideas how things should be working, the things that I should be saying as an elder. That's my guidance today. That's what I'll walk with, going to the old elders in my community. Then growing up, was it easy to like approach them? Growing up, when I was, my grandparents instilled a lot of respect for everything within me. And growing up, we didn't have television and all this new technology. So I just had my grandparents and I was taught to sit and listen to what they were saying. They told me if I didn't listen and if I didn't try to hear them out what their teachings were, someday down the road I'll have a lot of problems. And I believe that's true. So like today I try to tell that to young, I go into the classrooms a lot and this is what I tell young children, you've got to learn to listen. And I think the most important thing is respect. Today a lot of our young people have lost that. You know, when an elder speaks to them they don't tend to listen. At times I've even been told that, well those things happen when people were born on a buffalo road, you know? But I said it still applies today no matter how we live, you know? It's all right to learn our traditional ways in our prayers, our ceremonies, as well as go to the mainstream way of education and learn, get your degrees and when you balance both out you're the one that's going to be successful. What does the term warrior mean to you in today's society? Warrior? Today, in today's society, I think young people take the word very not seriously. Long ago a warrior meant that you had to go out there and like fight for a good cause, to protect your people, for protection of land, maybe for protection of your tribe, you know, and those were the warriors. And when in our language we say when you fought with another tribe, I always remember my grandma saying, hey, we are kasha each epe, they give them an eagle feather and it's painted red. That means they fought the enemy for a good cause. Today, the word warrior by young people is used and taught up in a different term, in a different way. Today, warrior is truned around very loosely, we're warriors of this, we're warriors of that. And to me, that's wrong. And today the word, a lot of times gang members think themselves as warriors, and that's not right. I always say that there's warriors of many different careers. Those that maybe get their doctorate degrees, they're warriors of education, maybe in the government system, like leaders, they take a lot, those are warriors of government systems. And maybe as a family gathering, one takes the lead, that individual is a warrior of protecting his family, his relatives. That's the way I look at the word warrior. And the other way of a long, long time ago, it was all mostly, it was a great honor to be a warrior. And today it's looked at like there's a lot of negativity attached to the word warrior. And like I said, our gangs believe in that, and that's not right. Do you think that there is room to reclaim that? From the students here, do you think that there's room to make it in the positive light? I think it all depends on each individual. You know, young people have ideas, different ideas, but I think as elders, if we sit with the young people and talk to them, explain to them what we know as describing the word warrior, that'll help a lot. And maybe I always say children are never too young to learn. Maybe if we go into the classrooms and start teaching about grade three, four, five, and teach them the word warrior, long ago it was a great pride to be a warrior. They were decorated in different ways. I come from a family, their last name is Chawiyaka, which means the rarer of an eagle feather, and that pertains to the great, great grandfather who was a warrior. He defended his people, his tribe for, I guess, land, and that he was a great warrior. So from there, that name was given to him, the rarer of an eagle feather. That's what it means, Chawiyaka. And maybe things like that, we could teach the young people so they'll have a better understanding of the word warrior. Why is it important to combine the traditional teachings with the academic studies? I think a lot of our academic studies, if we work hard enough, we could almost implement our traditional teachings into the academia. I used to be a language instructor for 17 years in my community. I took the time and the effort to go to each classroom, maybe in a science department. When they're teaching a science class, I would go and sit with a teacher at the end of the day and say, what are you teaching tomorrow? Maybe she would say, we're teaching about plants and that. So when I went in from my class to teach, I spoke in my language, but at the same time, I taught the meaning of the plants in how we use them for medicines, how we shouldn't, we should protect the flowers because each flower that grows on Mother Earth is a medicine for some tribes and for ours included to Dakota people. And that way, they had a better understanding. Sometimes they planted beans in a cup. Well, I would talk about growing plants for food. So we combine both and it seems it worked out very well. And I think here at the university, I do go into the classrooms, especially in the indigenous classes. And I talk about many things in today's world as how they're living. And I talk about the old traditional ways, like just the Saturday I was in a class, they had a class from 10 o'clock. I was in there talking about, I guess the galaxies, the stars and that, what they mean to Indian people. And what I learned, I revealed to the class there and they were really surprised that as First Nations people, we walked with the knowledge of the stars. And how important are the TP teachings today? Okay. I'd have to say I come from the Dakota Sioux tribe and there are TP teachings are different. I know the TP teachings of the Kree and the Soto are together. And I liked their version of their TP teachings, but as to in our Dakota way, we have the TP and in the middle from the top to the bottom there's a stake where there's a, it used to be long ago, we say tied with tochmeso, which means the edges of the hide was cut when the hide was cured and ready to use for clothing, making TP, whatever. And all the hair was scraped off in that. The edging around was made into a rope and there was a slit and they were attached. That was tied from the center pole to the stake down in the middle of the TP. We believe that's a very sacred significance of the Sundance Lodge. The Sundance Lodge, we have a sacred tree in the middle. And there's many teachings to that tochmeso, to that stake that's tied in the middle. And then we believe so far the bottom of our TP is the people, everybody, the children and that. Then the next part, there's many teachings of the youth, the young people. And then towards the top is the teachings of adults, adult people, teachings of how to be a mother, how to be a father. And way the top is the elders. The teachings come down. That's our belief of a TP, the structure of a TP. And when you look at the TP, they open out the flaps. And that's when we say the great Tonkanshina, Wakai Anaji, the grandfathers got its arms open looking up to that. That's how we know that there's ceremony taking place in a TP. That's how we understand, okay, there's maybe name-giving ceremony because the flaps are open. And that's what we believe in, is that they're called the people. And the other thing that the TP itself, when it's made of hides, there's many ceremonies that take place because our worldview as the Kota people, we believe that anything that's alive, the trees, the grass is very sacred to us. That's why we use the term mitakuyawase. When we say that, we acknowledge the four-legged, the birds, anything that's out there and has a beating heart and it's alive. In our way, when they first finished the TP with maybe all buffalo hides, that's when there were ceremonies and there was a big feast, we prayed to the spirit of that buffalo that's gonna shelter us. And that's how we lived long ago. And today, of course, you realize all TP's are made with canvas. And sometimes I see people doing pipe ceremony and they're doing a big feast. But I think those traditional ways, spiritual ways should be done if the TP is made fully of animal hide because they say the spirit of that animal is within that TP, it is made with all those hides maybe of buffalo, deer, whatever. That's what we believe in. And so, did you grow up on standing buffalo? I was born at home and standing buffalo delivered by grandmother who was a midwife. And I lived there till I grew up then of course I was sent to residential school until 1952, at that point there was a school built on a reserve, so then I went to school there till I spent five years at the day school then I went back to LeBret again where I did my nine and 10. And by that time we were able and we were allowed to go to provincial schools. So then I attended school for grade 11 and half way of grade 12 in a little village called Lipton, Saskatchewan. So my sister and I were the first ones to go to a provincial school from our community. I know that you weren't encouraged to speak your language or anything at the schools. How did you hold on to that? Well, growing up with my grandparents my first language was Dakota language. And as I grew up older, my grandma had relatives in Pipestone, Manitoba. They used to write to her in our language. So then she would open the letters and then I would read up to her. That's how I learned to read and write my language. Other than that I spoke, when I first went to LeBret I hardly knew how to speak the English language. But you know, when you're really, I understood right away when I went to LeBret don't speak your language, that's a bad way. You know, the nuns will tell us. But I knew immediately that, you know, praying about my language. Because my grandparents used to say dakhodi api ishwoga dakabdenawa ka'a. Our language and the words in it are very sacred. I didn't know the meaning at the time, but now today I realize what they meant. So when they used to school us they couldn't even say, don't cut your own, like how are you?  But you know, when we went up to the chapel early in the morning they'd wake us up, send us to mass. I used to sit up there in the pews and I knew we had to pray. And I knew we were allowed only to pray in English. So I used to pray in English and ask, I guess Jesus or God, to help me to keep my language. You know, because that's what I taught me at home. Always pray for your language, you know. Even pray in Dakota, today that's how comes I pray in my language and I hung onto it that when I think I was blessed that I didn't lose my language, neither my culture. You know, a lot of the way I live today is following my culture. Culture is a way of life that we have to understand to follow. Traditions is totally different. It belongs to maybe a family. They do something a certain time of the year and it carries on for one generation. That's what tradition is. Maybe a family is good at making star quilts. That's their tradition. But culture is totally different. It's a way of life. And that's the way I understand it. And that's the way I teach language and culture together. Did you ever, like after residential school, did you ever, like pick up any kind of, like convictions or anything? I know a lot of people had experience. Oh, of course. There was a time in my life that, I guess I was a social drinker. I'll admit weekends, you know, I drank. But I quit that because I had to teach my language and I knew that our traditional ways, our culture doesn't coincide with doing drugs or drinking. So I kind of fought the battle. You know, sometimes my friends would invite me to maybe, especially Christmas party, like everybody was there smoking and drinking and, but those are the times I remember I'll run to the bathroom and I'll pray. And I was able to handle it, like I had to sit with them, laugh with them and talk to them. But you know, sometimes when I left, I used to always think, why am I doing this? I could have been sitting with them having fun and you know, that and yet, but then again, I used to think, well, I'm teaching my language. I've got to stick to that, you know? So sometimes it was a battle. I think I just weekends, I drank when I was drinking and then I quit smoking in 1984. I smoked before that, but not heavily, you know, just because I used to be in class all day and there was no smoking allowed. So maybe in the evening, I'll have tea and a cigarette and that. And I knew like tobacco was used in a very sacred way and I had to respect that also. So there was a lot of, I wouldn't say roadblocks, but there was a lot of respect that I had to carry myself in order to be a good language teacher. Is there anything else that you want to add? I think like sometimes students come in here like today where we sat with interim president and I guess to her executive and they're having kind of different emotions and ideas about the new board and they're battling that. So like I was telling them, I said a lot of times there are things that happen that's way beyond our control. We can make a change, we can do anything about it. So in our cultural way, I said, we have to understand, we pray hard and we have to look a different way and think of that in a positive way. And like she said, well, what is that? I said, a lot of people are unhappy with Dr. Shanene Pete no longer going to be the president. You know, everybody had their hopes up high and saying that, you know, she's put her name in and maybe she'll be selected. But I said, we are getting a new president. I said, so pray and accept him, shake hands to him, welcome him. And if you do that, good things will happen to you. You know, that's our belief system. I said, a lot of times we live too much in a negative where we do harm to ourselves by getting stressed, depressed, many of these negative emotions. And don't do that to yourself. You have to be strong enough to change things to the positive. No matter how terrible they might be, no matter if it's happening to your own family, to yourself, always be strong to think, well, there is this positive way and maybe I should be thinking that way. It's entirely up to all of us to make changes. It's nobody can do that for us. And if you can do it, you know, pray, sit in our sacred place to tipi and pray hard and ask for that guidance and they'll always help you. Because sometimes, you know, there's many things that even in our daily lives, our families, maybe one family member is doing wrong.  You know, those are the ones you're supposed to pity instead of getting angry at them, saying, you know, things we shouldn't be saying to them. Instead, in your mind, pity them, try to help them.  Don't try to imitate somebody else because each and every one of us are special. We each have a spirit and we have to learn to nurture that. And that's where, like, all these teachings come out from that spirit within us and we've got to be knowledgeable, like generosity, kindness, always focus on a positive, rather on a negative. And I think that's life.


The world as we know it today is completely different from what it was a decade ago. The center of gravity of global economic activity has shifted. The new markets have emerged and global economy is more integrated today than it was ever before. There has been advances in technology which have redefined the way we connect and interact with our consumers. There has been emerging trends in business and technology, actually in business and society along with changing demographic profiles which are presenting new opportunities to enterprises for technology led innovation and growth. I strongly believe that the next decade is going to be marked by major transformations. Many of them come to my mind, digital consumers are going to change the way businesses interact with their consumers. Emerging economics are going to continue to be the new hubs of innovation, growth and talent. Sustainability is going to see a paradigm shift. It is no longer going to be about sustainable consumption, but it is going to be about fulfilling our social contract with the environment in which we operate. There are new models of commerce which are emerging. These models will be driven by the need to be mobile, micro and inclusive. I see healthcare becoming more patient centric, personalized and preventive. I see organizations continuing to they continue their pursuit to become smarter in order to drive simplification, collaborative learning and adaptability. And finally, I see computing going to be pervasive and touch every aspect of our lives. It is very clear to me that the difference between those who lead, those who lead the market and those who struggle is in three key areas. Number one, how they sense the emerging future? Number two, how do they influence the behavior of markets? And number three, how they scale products and services in a rapidly changing consumer landscape? It is all about sensing, influencing and scaling. The owners is on the organizations and its leaders to re-examine their businesses to prepare and cater to these emerging reality. This is an unprecedented opportunity. An opportunity for enterprises to work together as a strategic ecosystem and build their enterprise of tomorrow. These ecosystems need to drive innovation through collaboration and co-creation with all the stakeholders. Finally, we must bear in mind that innovation paradigm itself is changing. Innovation is no longer about creating bigger, smarter, faster products, but about creating leaner, affordable and durable ones.


What's going on everyone Sam here with late in sports guards ripping one box of 22 tops clearly authentic baseball for Mitchell H Good luck here Mitchell Here we go cuz Huntley is not our Huntley starting. That's why six would be my guess I Think a zonovan night. Yeah, I had no idea his name was Zonovan. Yeah, I just knew it was Zee Night. Yeah, they call him Boogie too I think Boogie Night. I think so. Yeah Nice one here. We've got Jake McCarthy congrats on that one there. That is awesome on the rookie auto There you go, Mitchell always good to pull a rookie out of this That'll do it for the break congrats on that one again, Mitchell. We'll get it right out to you buddy. Thank you again


Self-awareness is the enemy of the ego because self-awareness keeps the ego in check. Self-awareness interrupts the flawed narratives and mantras of the ego that keep us locked in a false identity that we've had constructed for us since we were born. The ego wants to be right, it never wants to be wrong or corrected, it never wants to change. That's why the people that always want to be right in life have the biggest egos but the people who are open to be wrong and to change and to grow have the most self-awareness. Develop your self-awareness and manage your ego. This is what I've been learning in my life for many years now. Hope that helps. Love you guys. Cheers!


Welcome back to Classic Replay. This video is to celebrate the best computer games between 1981 and 1984. This list concentrates more on arcade star games, ports and clones, which are among some of my favourite, but nonetheless all of these games mentioned are still highly playable. And let's not forget, this is set across all the popular formats of the time and not just the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. What better way to kick things off than with Ant Attack on the ZX Spectrum? I'm one of those early herds of nerds that enjoyed computer games. It's crazy really when you think about it. Whilst gaming had crashed in the US, here in the UK back in the day, these were very special times in gaming. Ant Attack's greatest attraction lies in its brilliant three-dimensional graphics. The programmer Sandy White has created an absolute masterpiece here, with the aim of the game to rescue ten victims of the ants, stranded on various buildings. Arcadia is a space invader's inspired clone. The ZX Spectrum version was long amongst the best-selling games. The player's ship has twin guns and can move vertically halfway up the screen, as well as horizontally. The aliens fly across the screen, bombing as they go, and once one batch is dispensed with, a whole set of different creatures appear. The game's appeal is to those who like hectic, relentless shoot-em-ups. D64 version has superior sound and graphics, provides more levels of play, but damn, it takes 18 minutes to load. Astro Tracker is still a great little game for the BBC Micro. It's a wonderful, fast, and difficult game in which the asteroids shatter into more pieces than the usual, and purposefully crash into the player's ship. The aliens, too, are swift and small, enough to be difficult to hit. The key use for firing is inconvenient, not a problem under emulation, but on real hardware, after prolonged use of it, which is highly necessary in the game, can become really tiresome. Still, this is a pleasant game from DinoDini. You can also change the foreground colour and background colour. Attic Attack is still superbly detailed. It takes the treasure-seeking, monster-hunting attributes of an adventure game and transfers them into arcade action. There's a sequence of rooms spread across five floors, where the aim is to find three hidden pieces of a key that will unlock the front door and allow you to escape from the haunted castle. A scroll at the side of the screen contains details of treasures discovered, time taken, score and energy level represented by a roast turkey. When the birds' bones are picked clean, your man is dead. Aztec Challenge is a seven-level test of swift reactions. On the first level, you control an Aztec running a gauntlet of spear-throwing warriors to the comparative safety of a temple. On the next level, you must climb the temple stairs whilst dodging falling rocks, then navigate a booby-trapped corridor, traverse poisonous creatures, then you have to cross a room with booby-trapped tiles, swim across a piranha-infested lake and finally cross a narrow bridge that is missing most of its slats. The music is eerie and there's a choice of one or two players. This could have been the ultimate Indiana Jones game. Elaborate instructions aside, accompanied by folksy music tell a tale of a nuclear destruction and the end of civilization. Despite all this, the game is still pengo. The player can choose three different mazes within which to do battle. This clone has some slight variations over the arcade original. The main difference is that the blocks bounce back if they do not encounter a crack at, so that it's essential to move out of the way quickly after pushing one to avoid being crushed on the rebound. It makes for hard and a tough game. This was one of the great games of the BBC Micro, which crams amazing detail in just 20K. The look and feel of the arcade original is retained, although as you can imagine for the time the graphics had to be massively simplified. The sound effects, albeit loud and brash, are still excellent. It's a difficult game, possibly even more difficult than the arcade original. Fortress is a fantastic game from programmer Matt Newman. Some games need no introduction. At the time it was hailed in the US as one of the best Commodore 64 games ever made and I believe its quality is due to the varied action it contains. Beachhead is basically an anthology of battle games. The game also has a practice mode that allows the player to try out any level. Bruce Carver, the programmer, produced something really special here. And although the second game is highly playable, you just can't beat this original. Animations and sound on all levels are fantastic and without question this is the flagship version. To the untrained eye, this is basically Choplifter. For those that don't know, Choplifter is an American arcade game in which the player guides a helicopter through heavily guarded territory to rescue hostages. There are five different missions to survive, with the final challenge being to destroy almost immediately a nuclear reactor that suddenly appears. You'll need a steady hand and clever manipulation of the keys. The game still plays excellent and it still looks great. This is yet another great arcade clone of bump and jump. The purpose of this car racing game is not so much to win as to destroy as many opposing vehicles as possible, either by bumping them off the track or taking flight in the air and landing on top of them. Music and sound are slightly inferior to the arcade original, although it can be turned off. There's a one or two player option and it's slightly easier than the arcade original, which is great for me and great for the kids. This is an absolute classic from Jeff Minter. This is a game that set the standard for all games to come. Set across 42 screens of bizarre action. There's a choice of one or two players and 12 levels of difficulty based on the distance the camel has to survive before reaching the next level. Your trusty camel can fire in eight different directions, sit down, walk or jump. You have five lives and you're going to need them. This one from Mirasoft has exceptional animation. It's a simple cat and mouse game set inside a well-stocked kitchen. It's a clone of the arcade game Burger Time, where the player controls the cat, easier done with the joystick than from keyboard, in catching the mice, carrying them to the door and dumping them through it. It's a fantastic little game on all formats. I'm not sure if this is a clone or an authorized version, but it's visually identical to the Electron version and the Commodore 64 and VIC-20. But I like this version the most because the controls are tight, you can use a joystick. And the sound for me is slightly superior to the other versions. If you're a centipede fan, this is still the one to play. Now this one appeared on almost every platform known to man. Rushing up and down ladders along platforms, you must collect as many golden eggs as possible before three greedy roving ducks consume piles of corn. As you can imagine, contact with the ducks is fatal and there's a bonus for corn left. So in between stages, whatever you do, try not to collect it. The whole game is set across eight levels and if you use a hardware add-on, the ZX Spectrum version comes with speech. Sometimes I'll take the kids to the park, naturally with all those green fields. I'll often hum this song because of this game, set in deepest suburbia to the sounds of an English country garden. The game is ridiculously amusing and in essence it's a variation on the theme of painter. In this game, the guy has borrowed his neighbour's lawn mower and now the neighbour is chasing the guy to get his lawn mower back. It's another classic from Jeff Minter. Programmer Dean Lough created an absolute classic for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. Aided by the adrenaline pumping sound of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyrie at the more hectic moments, this was once considered one of the best air battle games for the Commodore 64.  There's an excellent targeting system and the game still feels great to play today. Thank you Doug Anderson, the programmer behind this game. I played the absolute tape out of this back in the day. I thought this was brilliant as a kid. You even have to dock with the mothership to refuel and replenish ammunition. The weapons are ferocious and the shield will absorb lots of hits. Also, you have to make sure that you destroyed the aliens before docking to refuel with the mothership because whilst refueling the mothership would take punishment. What's brilliant is you can enter your score into the top 50 and save it. Almost definitely inspired by the speed of chase through the redwood forest in the movie The Return of the Jedi. The game puts the player in the seat of a powerful motorcycle. You race between trees and shoot fleeing motorcyclists and the occasional helicopter or tank. Once two cyclists seen twisting amongst the trees ahead are killed, the scene switches to a night patrol. There are eight levels to conquer before the game reverts to the first level. As you can see for the time, graphics are amazing with a fantastic sense of speed.  This is an authorized version, faithful to the original, with pleasant sound and graphics. This is one of the post Pac-Man games depending on a degree of cuteness for its appeal. Our hero is a little white robot attempting to protect a vegetable garden from two pests. If you didn't know already, Dig-Dug can destroy enemies two ways, either by pumping them with air until they explode or by burying through the earth and dropping a rock on their heads. I still play it. Programmer Paul Norman created an absolute gem of a game.  There's a complex soundtrack fitting of a film score and until the head shop in Barbarian from Pali Software this featured some of the bloodiest death scenes to be seen on a television screen. It's a fantastic game and if you haven't played it on both the Atari and the Commodore 64, it's an absolute gem. I guess you could say Fred is slightly inspired by Donkey Kong but it's a maze game that I first played on the Amstrad CPC and was notable for its scroll and graphics. The player plays out the role of an archaeologist trying to discover treasures from a tomb and quite simply the aim is to reach the surface but it's not easy as you'll have to avoid monsters which include rats, chameleons, ghosts, mummies, vampires and skeletons. It's an absolute classic. Fruity Frank is an absolute classic for the Amstrad CPC. I believe this also appeared on the MSX but don't quote me on that. The harvest is here and it's up to you to collect all the fruits on the screen. However, watch out, there are numerous bad guys out to get you.  Collect all the cherries and it's on to the next level. The only difference between this and the arcade sensation Mr. Do is that you don't collect the letters of the alphabet. Matthew Smith did himself proud once again with a sequel to the brilliant Manic Minor. It provides an excellent challenge and graphics that really have stood the test of time. There are some moments that are reminiscent of the game Hunchback but there's over 60 different screens. You control Willie who has to visit all the rooms of the vast mansion cleaning up all the debris of the previous night's party. This is as close to an adventure game as things get and you'll need a pen or paper to map out the mansion. It's still one of the best said expects from games ever made. Ultimate Play the Game produced one of the best alien zapping games. The player controls a jet propelled astronaut who on his first level has to assemble his spacecraft from bits lying around on the screen and then fuel it by collecting fuel packs that drop from the sky. You'll be constantly put under pressure from the alien lifeforms. There are five types of aliens to combat and as you can imagine each wave becomes harder than the one before it. The graphics are still excellent and well detailed and there's an option for one or two players. This is all the proof you need that fancy programming or dazzling graphics does not guarantee the best games. The graphics and animation look crude at best. All the player has to do is control a stickman and get him to get to the top of the levels. Miss the gap in the platform and you'll bump your head and be momentarily unconscious but once you pass the first level obstacles from trains to witches and dinosaurs begin to roam along the lines. Believe it or not it's still a challenge. For a while Killer Gorilla was a close copy of the original. Like the arcade original this clone features four levels with the main difficulty being found on the third level. Nothing beats the home port of the ocean software Donkey Kong arcade conversion but until that came along this is all we had. It's a version that doesn't stray from the original with good use of colour and half decent sound. It's time to load this one up and bring down the scaffold. The love and obsessive care that has been lavished on this game is evident from the moment it begins to load. The instructions are provided to a delightfully out of tune Blue Danube and a picture of suburban bliss in the 1930s. Set in a mine the game is simple to play as there's only three keys left right and jump. This is a game all about pixel perfect timing. You must navigate platforms collect keys and make your way to the exit. Whatever the version Manic Miner is among the great achievements of popular culture for the 1980s. This absolute classic is by the legend Don Priestley. In the days when the ZX81 was virtually the only low-cost micro available one of the best games for it was Mazogs. This is the spectrum's answer to it. With better colourful graphics and bigger and a bigger maze. Our hero has to find the gold, dig it up and bring it out. Once you have the gold the return journey is more hazardous as you can't hold a sword or gold at the same time. This is a fantastic classic with four levels of difficulty. Pac-Man undergoes a sex change and he or should I say she is all the better for it. This is the definitive conversion from the arcade original and although the change is more cosmetic the game requires different reactions and tactics from the arcade original. The result is another classic game for the Atari computer. Back in the day I'd have recommended this one without reservation. Atari Soft really did know how to handle arcade conversions. Probably the best micro computer version and possibly the best of all the arcade games available for the BBC machine. It is a tough, tricky and fast game using seven keys to control movement and firing and one that takes considerable practice to master. As you can see for the time sound and graphics are excellent. If you're a fan of the arcade original you'll not tire of the BBC version of Planetoids. The graphics vary according to the machine. We're probably the Commodore version the best. These machines copy as best as possible the style of the original arcade with large sprites and fluid animation but unfortunately they give a jerky motion whilst cornering. It's appeal has certainly survived the process of translation and although it doesn't look great today I still can't recommend it enough. This one might just be a little bit too basic for some though. Believe it or not this is one of the games that set new standards of graphics for the ZX Spectrum.  You need to use a different spray for each individual insect.  The aim of the game is to allow the flower to bloom. Very addictive. This is the authorised version of the game faithfully reproduced for the BBC Micro and other 8-bit computers. Special mention must go out to Cybertron for the Commodore 64 because it's as good and at the time it was much cheaper. As with the arcade conversion you can use two joysticks, one to fire in your chosen direction and the other for movement. So all in all a close copy of the original excellently adapted to the requirements of home play. A glossy colourful copy probably the best available for any micro back in the day. It sticks as close as possible to the arcade original adding nothing nor taking any away. It includes a Hall of Fame for the top scores. It's also amongst the most difficult versions of the game. Sadly this was only ever released for the BBC Micro.  Sound and graphics for the time both reached high standards. Jeff Minter strikes again with this absolute classic Sheep in Space. This one combines a speedy battle in space with some strange adversaries. In this game the player controls a flying mutant sheep in a world that exists above and below it. The one the mirror image of the other. Your sheep will lose energy quite quickly and the only way to revive this is by landing and eating grass. There are 48 levels of play and the game may be started at any one of the first nine. With outstanding sound and graphics this creates as good as any version of Cuba to be found outside of the arcades. Our hero Slinky, a spring, has to jump over the squares and around them to change the colours. There's some nice little touches in the game. If Slinky clears a level without losing a life there is a high speed instant replay of all the moves taken. But the best of all is that success is greeted with a large firework display. Among the hardest of all space battle games this remains engrossing partly because of its difficulty and partly because of its unpredictability. The game looks strangely familiar using black and white graphics with the spaceships drawn as white outlines against starry space. The command is unpredictable. The player needs a score around 70 points to be granted another ship but sometimes a score of 50 will suffice and at others a score of 80 will not be enough. You'll be outnumbered and outgunned right from the start just the way we like it. Wow, this is an early game by Jeff Crammond. The invaders differ slightly from the usual figures but otherwise this is an excellent copy with sound that is close to the arcade original. As one might expect there are three levels of difficulty. On the second if the player fails to shoot the mothership as it goes past a force field is added and the aliens move faster. On the third level the aliens bombs home in on the player's laser base. Sadly only ever released for the ZX Spectrum this webrunner clone is equal to 600 times the area visible on screen any one moment. Across the expanse the player drives a red racing car to collect eight gold cups whilst being chased by rival black cars that will attempt to crash into him. It is also necessary to refuel the car at any given opportunity with the display showing a map of America which marks the towns containing petrol stations and also indicating the position of the red car. An absolute triumph when you consider it was all crammed into 16k. We've already covered a zaxon clone but this is the official port. For the time as you can see this has splendid graphics and is a near damn close copy to the arcade original. If you look closely the spacecraft cast the shadow as it flies which allows the player to judge the height they're flying at. There's also the option of a two player game this is a fantastic arcade conversion by Peter Adams. I had to finish with this excellent classic from John Gibson a complex battle with three different settings open country, desert and sea. As you can tell the player's view is from the cockpit of a fighter and the aim is to protect the refugees. If you look closely they even stopped a wave. The player's craft is armed with guns and missiles. The game combines variety and excellent graphics as you can see full of tiny little details tremendous stuff. I hope you've enjoyed this video. If this gets enough likes views and comments I'll do another that focuses on 1984 to 1986. If you'd like to see this channel grow please don't forget to subscribe. Until next time BYE