** 2 page review / 1077 words **
** Suggested side banner: FALCON LIGHT SHOW SOFTWARE **

Photon therapy

Falcon users can now join in the Virtual Light Machine fun, Shiuming Lai checks out the party...

** WHIPMAIN.GIF hereabouts **

When Atari had Jeff "Psychedelia" Minter working as a Jaguar software developer, it was almost predictable that he would channel the machine's graphical power and his past experience into making a pretty impressive sound-to-light generator. All it needed was some easy way of feeding in sound. Just as luck would have it, along came the Jaguar CD unit, for which Jeff programmed built-in Virtual Light Machine (VLM) software.

Quite how light can be virtual when you can actually see it is perhaps not relevant. VLM is cool, and now Falcon users can also enter the chill zone thanks to No/Escape. Whip! takes VLM a stage further by being expandable with modules and is supplied with the necessary details on programming your own effects.

Fortunately, no instructions are necessary to use Whip!, as a very simple control screen contains all the buttons which are all clearly labelled with text and graphics. The left half of the screen is the sound desk, where some sliders allow you to adjust input gain (aided by a neat two-channel oscilloscope) and output attenuation. Whip! basically reads analogue signals coming into the microphone socket and loops it back out to the headphone socket. Somewhere in between, it's in the digital domain, so the DSP chip can get its paws on it and do fancy things.

The right half of the screen displays the program information box and the current bank of VLM modules in a scrolling list. Some effects may have variable response parameter settings, to create different moods according to the type of music played.

At the time of writing there are already 12 VLM files available for Whip!. Three of those are from Evil of the prolific Dead Hackers Society (a top Swedish demo crew), who has been quick to ply us with VLM versions of some of his trademark effects. Among the other effects, here are some of my favourites:

** UL **
* Classic: Old school kaleidoscope with city night-life fluorescent pinks, blues and purples swirling and arcing in time to the music.
* RGB Split: Three soft-focus coloured lights gently pulse and sway with dizzying superimposed simple harmonic motion. At the points where they intersect the colour values are summed, giving white when all three (red, green and blue) are exactly in-line. The motion and colour intensities can be adjusted, giving the impressions of lying drunk on a dance floor to regaining consciousness from heat stroke in a desert.
* Julia: Using a low input level, this bean-shaped fractal twitches like a bodily organ freshly carved out of its host.
* Stars: Gut-wrenching 3-D starfield.
* Flight: A series of frequency spectrum plots zoom towards the screen, like the "Flying the bacon" video feedback effect in the bonus stages of Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar. The signal peaks give it added vertical dimension, and to top it off the lines turn into something resembling cosmic dust as they come forward. A real flight of fantasy.
** /UL **

Whip! is very user-friendly and highly enjoyable (although if you suffer any degree of photo-sensitive epilepsy I strongly advise against use). I can think of a few things to make it even better. If it could incorporate a CD player control panel to work in conjunction with a CD-ROM driver, it could read music over the SCSI bus (and output on the DSP port in case you have high quality offboard DACs) and actually function a bit more like the Jaguar VLM as well. At times there is a delay while the hard disk is accessed, to load the modules, it seems. It makes no difference if you have 4 or 80Mb RAM under your Falcon's bonnet, it will still do this.

Probably the most effective addition would be fill patterns to lead in and lead out in the random cycle mode, to smooth transitions instead of jumping abruptly with a blank screen in between. That would give it real panache.

Anyhow, I'm sure No will continue to develop Whip!, it's a Falcon "must have" - and if you've been looking for a good excuse to buy that 42" hang-on-the-wall flat plasma screen television, this could be it.

** Boxout 1 **
Discs we tried it with...

A couple of albums which begged to be used for this review were:
** UL **
* Moon Safari, one of last year's most acclaimed releases, from French electronic band Air. The spacey, sometimes retro aural landscape complements Whip!'s default effects settings wonderfully.
* Radium "Arkos (1) - Rckkehr Der Kosmischen Kuriere". I bought a copy of this from the Neuss Atari fair in April, where its producer, Michael Neihs of June Audio, was using it to demonstrate the sound quality of the Line Audio Jam PRO Falcon audio expander. The interesting thing is it's also produced with the Jaguar VLM in mind. This one has more rhythmic aggression, and some dark ambient/ethereal synth chorus passages, making for an emotional VLM show.
** /UL **
** /boxout 1 **

** Boxout 2 **
June Audio contact

To order a copy of the June Audio CD as used in this review, and a list of other titles, drop a message to Michael Neihs: line.audio@usa.net
** /boxout 2 **

** Boxout 3 **
Top tips

** UL **
* Don't chain the Falcon into the signal path between the source and speakers, otherwise the sonic fidelity will be degraded. Tap off either at source (from a spare output like the headphone socket of your CD player) or en-route.
* If sound quality doesn't matter, and you don't have a hi-fi source to hand, but a CD-ROM drive with analogue outputs, use this. Wire it to the Falcon's microphone input and start a music CD playing using something like CD Player by Alexander Clauss, or CD Audio (bundled with the ExtenDOS Gold driver) from Anodyne Software.
** /UL **
** /boxout 3 **

** product boxout **
Whip! 0.3

Author: No (Norman Fenske)/Escape
Email: nf2@inf.tu-dresden.de
http://escape.atari.org

Requires:
Falcon with colour monitor (RGB/TV or VGA), 4Mb memory minimum

Pros: Well-presented, can produce sense of relaxation, comes with programming information document

Cons: No digital input, can't read directly from CD-ROM drive

86%
** /product boxout **

** Images and captions **

** WHIPBUMP.GIF **
It's that effect again. Let's see how long before some joker produces an ASCII art VLM module...

** WHIPTRIP.GIF **
This shaded polygon object has a tendency to blow the mind!

** WHIPTUNL.GIF use 'em all if you can **
** WHIP_ANA.GIF **
** WHIP_KAL.GIF **