Crash-Stop: Fubar 2019 > Searching for error in obscure or obsolete operating systems (part one)

‘Searching for error in obscure or obsolete Linux distributions – referencing component mismatch, video misinterpretation and using older hardware to make Glitch Art ( through necessity or perversity)’

( With demonstrations).

## I will try to be as accurate with the information given as it may be subject to scrutiny and attempts at replication so I will try to state version numbers, programs and setup specifications as accurately as possible.

With reference to Legacy OS 2 (misreading of mp4 video files) and other misinterpretations in a live or persistent installation which can be captured within and by the OS using quick-player and xvidcap ( different results given by setting 24 bit or 16bit colour both reproducible and capturable) with demonstrations. And with reference to preferred video cards and why they might work better than others – the xvesa solution.

In this presentation I’m going to be talking about exploiting the way that hardware software, and operating systems interact . I'll try to be as accurate as possible in what I say because some of you might want to reproduce what I've found , bear in mind that I’ve been working this way for a couple of years and a lot of what I’ve discovered is through trial and error - when I say this works , it works with the equipment I have, especially when it comes to agp cards, later motherboards may not reproduce these effects. I use everything from a p3 600mhz right up to a Pentium d dual core and through various Amd's up to socket am2+ the constants that remain are an Ide cdrom drive ( some older live distros wont boot on newer sata drives) an older agp or pci graphics using xorg or any onboard graphics card using xvesa which I’ll explain later.

But First a word about exposure

Exposure and opportunity costs

The Theme for this years Fubar is ‘exposure’ and some of what I’m going to be talking about relates to that – there are different costs associated with exposure, some if not all borne by us as artists , for example materials , printing , basic living costs , ( opportunity costs , to pay for one thing I have to forgo something else , with exposure thats generally money and time ) , or in the more traditional Art model the pay to play cost ie. paying to be in or to mount an exhibition , or being asked to pay to be in a magazine article , things like gallery 1340art or Peripheral ARTeries.


1340art


PeripheralARTeries

The traditional art world relies on the scarcity value of the physical ( or non physical ) product of the Artist to make profit for themselves and little profit for the artist. I see exposure as an echo of that scarcity value in that we publish our works online where it is impossible for anything to have scarcity value therefore we are often asked if we will work for exposure (in other words for free) in return for a nebulous and contradictory association with a product they are often trying to sell . This is exploitative in the extreme , in a medium by its very nature which is non-exclusive and gives us as much exposure as we want or can push for free ( beyond the costs of access and materials) 'exposure' has no value unless we get paid .

At every turn there are those who try and make us give our time and our work for free to profit from it in return for ‘Exposure’ ;

Thats a 'no' from me.

To counter this I publish all my work under a creative commons license and try and share my methods and ideas when asked to devalue even further any profit which can be derived from exclusivity, I am my own exposure. Though In this talk I’m going to be dealing more with hardware and software, to even get to the point of where people are ‘offering’ you exposure you must first make some work , to make work you need materials , or hardware .

Like most of us here I don’t have much money, I’ve always had to rely on building , buying and repairing my computer gear secondhand, sometimes from car boot sales , or charity shops or even rummaging through the bins at the local dump , friends give me there old hardware or hardware they’ve found and I do favors for them in return. So, I’ve built up a stock of obsolete and obscure computers and parts which live in my attic waiting for me to find some use for them .

Some of the computers lurking in our attic.

I’ve used, abused and advocated Linux since the early 2000’s. Having bought a copy of windows 98 for one of my very first computers I then found a copy of Red Hat 7.3 in a local library that I could not only take home and install for free I could copy and give it to my friends, this open source philosophy has come to inform and influence my work ever since . Using Linux for art purposes just makes more sense to me especially as you can run a lot of the distros as live systems that run from usb or CD – so part of what I do is enabled by the fact that I've built up and used a collection of Linux distros, again partly because I'm trying to squeeze the most out of limited hardware .

I don’t believe the entry level into making glitch art, or any kind of art, should be too high, which is why I’ve always advocated open source software and have a dislike of proprietary programs which cost exorbitant sums of money, can’t be tinkered with or shared ( unless you use cracks), and try to share whatever I’ve learned with others and release any of my work under a creative commons license ( cc with attribution).

Every so often in GAC you will see a thread where someone has made a great post and then someone comes along and asks either what hardware or software and some other bright spark comes along and replies that its probably a high end mac or some other expensive software hardware ie mac or photo shop or After Effects plug ins you have to pay for ( though recently this has mutated into the what app question which is a whole different kettle of fish) I'm talking about 2016-2017 era when all of this starts for me )

so in late 2016 early 2017 someone new to GAC asked Dawnia Carney aka Letsglitchit what was the minimum spec computer you needed to make glitch art.

What is the minimum spec computer you need to make glitch art?

The answer was basically whatever you have to hand and that sometimes charity shop finds of old PC's might have novel or interesting software which could do unique things –

One of the first things I noticed about GAC was that people openly shared their methods and ideas , in much the same way that the open source movement does. As the rules of the group state:

'Not every piece needs a description, but we would rather you elaborate on your techniques if requested. The sharing of information and dissemination of knowledge is how movements grow'.

The Founder of Gac, Mathieu St Pierre, had stated he used an old version of Sony Vegas to make his work and that was enough to make me spend a lot of time rounding up old versions of software to try out different things, especially early xp video editing programs and trans-coding software – though here I must mention Avery Chesters work and his compression club website which is an astonishing collection of codes and programs from the dawn of prehistory to now , Avery is quite a modest guy but I've had a lot of conversations with him and shared ideas and sources and I think we need to acknowledge his importance to what we do . Find compression club here compression club

Avery Chester - compression club

Compression club is interesting in that it enables you to work with possibly the most obsolete operating systems that are still usable for our purposes ie win 98 SE and XP – I have machines running both ( on equipment pretty similar to what im going to be demonstrating today) but I don’t want to digress there cos that’s a whole different presentation – I'm just mentioning it because it has some bearing when you consider that I'm looking for malfunctions in software and hardware to exploit for the purposes of making video for instance this program was created by a Dutch scientist PETER B.L. MEIJER to help blind people navigate using sound and a webcam as kind of radar.


vOICe website

(Below vOICe in action)

An early version of Vlc on Windows xp will play back zmbv encoded on that machine in a different way to zmbv encoded on say a more modern version of Linux .

Zmbv encoded using zmbv codec provided by Dfendreloaded on win xp using Honestech encoder.

Zmbv encoded using ffmpeg 4.1.3 on linux mint 19.1, playback on same computer same version of vlc ( 2.2.6) as above.

To satisfy my own curiosity I ran through my computer graveyard and started off with a p3 Celeron running at 333mhz , using an old distro I had looked at called legacy OS ( I'm always looking through DistroWatch trying to find new or interesting distros ) Find legacy OS 2017 here http://wikka.puppylinux.com/LegacyOS


Legacy OS 2017 website.

So using legacy OS ( which is really a version of puppy Linux using the old 2.16 kernel ) , on a p3 celeron with 512mb ram and a 32mb Riva TNT , you can do some work, the word pad effect is just about doable, The gimp will read and import bmp as raw, but slowly ( for when the wordpad effect mangles the file to far you can import the file as raw if you know what the original dimensions of the image are ) , video playback is bearable but not usable above mpeg or xvid or for anything like transcoding or sonification using audacity. ( legacy os has ffmpeg , sox , commandline stuff, gimp mhwaveedit and other transcoding scripts, but busybox not full gnuutils which means some of the command line stuff i'd do using xxd or sed is not going to work) . If I swap out the card for a 64mb geforce 2 , I can get better graphics , but still not much more usable.

But if you switch up to a 700mhz coppermine things become better , same os as before same ram , but way faster ( these are all desktops by the way , early laptops can be hard to configure especially sound and graphics ) - I made most of my early posts to Gac in 2013 using a Gateway 5300 solo with A 900mhz P3 and 512mb of ram and Debian 6 , it does work but graphics and sound suffer from lack of oomph - and you cant tweak the hardware to get the maximum. so there you have it , if you choose the right os - lower number linux kernel , and have the parts , you too can glitch likes its the early 2000’s.

Final specs for making glitch art on low end machines

Having found the lower level of what was usable and due to various hardware failures my main modern(ish) desktop had died, (old machines can be very temperamental), I found myself with only one working desktop which was an old socket a amd sempron 2800 given to me by a guy I work for on and off but it had an ati agp hd3650 graphics card . I tried out legacy os in view of what I’d been saying on Gac to try and use it as my main computer

Final Configuration.

I don’t remember exactly how I discovered the first error, probably just looking through some videos on an external hard drive but it ended up like this

Still capture on Legacy Os 2017

And video playback was like this :

And looking through the programs that come with legacy os I found the screencapture program ' Xvidcap' which meant I could also record what I was seeing on the screen.