Re: Bios Agent Plus 1218 Cracked
Vinnie Breidenthal
While waiting for some tests to run at work I felt I'd like to play around with some musical instrument at the office. Anything would do. Even a toy piano. So I went through the local second-hand stores and toy stores. The best I could find were some 15 Eur child's toys, which would have been sufficient except that they either had way too small keys (some toy pianos have decent "mini" keys) and/or they had two-voice polyphony.
Having exhausted the local options I figured I could buy some Casio keyboard or something. Nothing interesting in a sane price range on eBay (or the Finnish equivalent, huuto.net), which is understandable because shipping an electric piano isn't exactly cheap for individuals. And everybody expects to get close to original price for theirs, for some reason. Or alternatively would only sell as "pick up only", and I'm not about to travel a whole day just to pick up a toy keyboard..
So I started looking at the cheap piano-like things in online stores. My budget had to be expanded a bit because there simply isn't anything sensible out there apart from Teenage Engineering pocket operators, and I didn't feel like going that route. And even the cheapest "real synths" - Korg Volca line - start from around 150e without a power adaptor or shipping.
I also looked for synth modules without keys; I have one midi controller I'm not using at the moment, so I could have just hooked that up. Didn't find anything cheap. There might be a market for cheap synth modules, maybe a bunch of VSTs running on a raspberry pi?
So what do you get with 150 Eur? 61 velocity sensitive keys, some 390 "voices", or instruments, many of which are simply small variations of each other, so I'd guess there's around a hundred or so unique instruments. Those can also be layered (playing two "voices" at the same time) or split (one instrument on left hand, another on right hand).
Some of the instruments sound better than others. The primary instrument seems to be the grand piano, which sounds nice at least to my ears, but then there are instruments like "orchestral harp" which has absolutely nothing to do with a harp. A lot of the sounds are quite "general midi".
It also comes with a ... I guess you could call it an automated backing band. With 100 "styles". Select style, hit play, hit a chord and the "band" fills the background, following the chord you set, while you play the lead. The band can also do a couple "fills" and there's a "intro/ending" feature, plus a fade in / fade out. To my ears it all sounds quite corny, but it's a fun feature nevertheless.
There's also a recording function, but that's pretty useless as you can't save the song in any way (apart from analog recording, but what's the point in recording the notes in RAM..?). You can live play on top of your recording, so it can be used as a kind of play looping, except that the song doesn't loop, so it's usefullness is rather limited.
There's also USB connectivity to a PC, and it can apparently be used as both a midi controller as well as a midi instrument. I haven't tried this though. Power-wise it can use either the bundled power adaptor or four AA batteries. No idea if it's USB powered, probably not.
There's three settings for the velocity sensitivity, but even the least sensitive settomg felt a bit too a bit too sensitive to my taste. But I guess if it has to err in one direction, this is better than requiring heavy operation (like a real piano). The keyboard can also be set in a button-operation mode where all key presses are considered to be in max volume.
Talking of options, there's a bunch of chorus and reverb options, but that's as far as any kind of "synthesizer" stuff goes. Those options are also behind rather awkward button presses, but at least they're there. For example, if you want to adjust chorus, you first tap "option" until the display says "chorus type", then press + or - until desired value is there, then tap "option" again until you get "chorus value" and press + and - to adjust the strength (which defaults to 0, or off). So testing different chorus options is "tad bit" awkward.
First one is a mx29gl128fht2i-90g: a 128 megabit flash chip which no doubt works as the ROM containing the samples, songs, firmware and whatnot. I pondered why not a ROM chip, but then, flash is probably cheap enough and you probably won't end up with a warehouse full of obsolete ROM chips.
So what's the Medeli chip? Medeli is apparently a Hong Kong based synth manufacturer I had not head of before (even though the name could be a pretty good pun in Finnish). Looking at their catalogue, the Medeli M17 is identical (apart from the model name and brand prints) to the Startone MK-300. And as it happens, Medeli M15 is identical to the Startone MK-200.
Anyway, it's funny how things have progressed. To me, this is a toy which with to play with while waiting for scripts to run, but looking back a few decades, this does a lot of stuff even the most high end professional gear couldn't dream of doing. But then again, the $5 raspberry pi beats the supercomputers of a few decades ago too.
I seem to be attracted to a certain genre of media that I decided to call "monster of the week" stories. This is a term that some people used for the x-files episodes that didn't drive the central story, but instead had the agents investigate a strange incident. As a term I think it fits the "genre" well enough.
X-Files is said to have been inspired by Kolchak: the night stalker, an early 70's TV-series. I haven't seen any of that, but timeline-wise it would be around the same time as the John Sinclair publications. Both of those naturally draw inspiration from the old horror books like Dracula or Frankenstein, and back to Bible or even earlier folk stories.
For one reason or another there's never been an English incarnation of the John Sinclair stories, but it was published in Finnish as yjuttu in my childhood for a while (I acquired most of the issues through an online auction a few years back for... research purposes).
John Sinclair is a senior officer in the Scotland yard, and ends up dealing with supernatural cases either through his job or through the people he knows. He's a normal mortal human, but has some allies and supernatural weapons (like a silver cross and silver bullets in his gun), but there's fairly little power creep in the series.
As writing quality goes, it is definitely pulp fiction, and the issues can be read in random order, even though they tend to connect in some ways - sometimes with strange results, such as the hero suffering from injuries that should take weeks or months to heal, only to end up in another fight the following day. But hey, it's fiction.
The stories always end up in situations where the hero (or whoever the hero is protecting) is in grave peril, like after being gravely wounded end up trapped in a coffin inside a morgue. Which is naturally on fire. The rescue happens without fail at the last possible moment. I read somewhere that some patients find the John Sinclair stories to be uplifting because he always wins, regardless of the odds.
X-files is another member of the genre. It's entirely possible this will be read by someone who doesn't know what that is, so here's the gist; X-Files is a TV series about a couple FBI agents that dig through paranormal cases. Agent Mulder is a believer, and Agent Scully is a sceptic. Whenever something weird happens, Mulder is all over it, and sees all the evidence, while Scully manages to miss the strange things. When the series goes on this dynamic changes somewhat, but as an example, in some X-Files book I read a friggin Aztec pyramid turns out to be a spaceship and flies away, and Scully is conveniently inside a tent while this happens..
The agents are completely normal humans, even though both end up in some paranormal experiments like being abducted or whatnot. There's almost no power creep at all. The agents do gain (and lose) some allies along the way, but those are more recurring characters than actual assets.
The series is built of "story episodes" and "monster of the week" episodes. The story episodes more or less move the story forward (the story, however, is so convoluted and obscure that it hardly matters - I do not believe they had designed it beforehand and always just moved in random directions). The monster of the week episodes are so detached from each other that you could pretty much watch them in random order. There are some monsters that come back, so watching those in correct order makes sense, though.
While watching the series I found it funny that most of the time, when a "monster of the week" episode came up, I could tell what the monster was from the first 10 seconds of the episode, largely because they appeared in the AD&D Monstrous_Compendium.
I did not watch the series to the end, but I don't think I missed much. And I guess they've reviving it again. X-Files has also inspired a bunch of other TV series later on, but I haven't really followed TV.
Harry is a wizard.. who is also a private eye. That's how things start, anyway. The series has serious issues with power creep, with every book having to throw more crap at Harry for some reason. I haven't read all the books, but Harry gains allies, toys and powers all the time, and at the same time the universe seems to throw more and more baddies at him. If in the first book he has to fight a single frog demon in his apartment, in some latter book he is the sole defender of reality against forces of evil with the dead rising from the grave to aid the vampire menace while the wizard council is having an open civil war, etc. You get the idea.
Now, Harry is not a normal human to begin with, but a friggin wizard, but still I find the power creep rather annoying. The series would have been interesting even without the power creep. Like with the other examples, there's plenty of grave peril with someone (Harry often enough) finding just enough strength in themselves to save the day, or close enough.
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