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From ExoticA
Welcome to ExoticA
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News
2009-05-31
Early yesterday morning, our server had a failure. The cause is unknown, but we could not bring it back remotely.
Rather than waiting a few days to gain access, BuZz decided to purchase a replacement machine that could be activated remotely and used right away. After copying back ~37gb of data, most hosted sites are now running, but some services may be unavailable or unstable for the next day or two. There may be up to one days data loss, from when the database was last backed up off site. We might consider real-time database replication to further minimise data loss in the future.
Remember folks, always make backups :)
2009-05-14
There have been major changes to the various exotica music collection interfaces. The biggest feature addition is that for most of the tunes you can now download Ogg Vorbis encoded audio recordings directly from the search interface. The Ogg format is supported by most media players, and allows you to listen to the music without having to download a variety of different players. The Oggs are created on the fly in real-time, and as such are provided for convenience rather than accuracy, however you may well be surprised at how good they sound. To access the Ogg downloads browse or search for a tune, and a button will be displayed above the results that allows you to show the Ogg download links.
Read more about the new Ogg download feature.
2009-05-01
News has been a little slow in the last weeks. Partly because BuZz has become a dad! Natalie was born on the 7th March and now at just under 8 weeks old, she has had her first go on a Commodore 64 ;-). Work has continued on the wiki with Spectral contributing some audio recordings/comparisons for Shinobi, a small UnExoticA update from Codetapper, and a fair amount of wiki editing from XtC (as usual). Cheers everyone!
2009-02-27
Updated the search functionality for the Modland, HVSC and ASMA searches. Previously the boolean search defaulted to "or" if no boolean operator was used. This wasn't particularly intuitive for first time users. It wasn't a design choice originally but a side effect of the database defaults (which is only reconfigurable on a server level for things like this which is limiting). Please give feedback on this forum thread.
2009-02-18
It was brought to our attention that Jon Hare has set up a Cancer Research fundraising page in memory of Richard Joseph. I'm sure most of you know Richard's work, as he created soundtracks for many well known games (which are downloadable from his page on ExoticA). Please do consider making a donation. Thanks.
2009-02-13
Do you like demo and game music? If so, you should check out Bitjam radio, which is an online demoscene radio with more than 22,000 tunes in the playlist. After signing up on the site, you can request tunes as well as vote and comment. Bitjam radio can be found at http://bitjam.bitfellas.org. Bitjam is part of the Bitfellas demoscene site, which is hosted by ExoticA. Try the stream right now: mp3 | ogg
Music
- UnExoticA is an collection of music from Amiga games and Demo Scene productions. All files in the collection are presented in the original file formats.
- Modland is a very large, and well organised module archive created and maintained by Daniel Johansson, which contains over 360,000 music modules in 290 different formats. ExoticA provides a search interface for navigating the collection which includes the ability to search and display of instrument data.
- HVSC is the ultimate SID tune collection featuring over 36,000 popular and requested tunes from the Commodore 64. ExoticA provides a search interface for navigating the collection which allows the searching and display of related data from the SID Tune Information List
Galleries
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- Amiga Game Box Scans is a gallery of high quality scans of Amiga games boxes. There is some really fantastic and memorable artwork here. The scans available in this gallery have also been used to create the Exoticons icon set for Amiga computers. There are also Amiga Utility Box Scans and an Amiga Educational Box Scans areas in development.
- A gallery of game box artwork from Bob Wakelin each one with some comments from Bob about the work and designs.
Demo Scene
- Scenery - a guide to the C64 and Amiga demoscene. It has information on releases, parties and groups, and is extremely comprehensive. It's an attempt to cover an important part of digital history, to accurately document things and events that otherwise might be forgotten.
Media and Magazines
- AM/FM - A disk based magazine from the well known Game music composer called Bjørn Lynne (a.k.a. Dr. Awesome) featuring news, reviews, music and audio software.
- Exoticons is an Icon pack for HD installed Amiga Games created from high quality box scans. The most recent version contains 1500 icons and comes in a version for NewIcons and OS3.5/3.9.
- Alien Breed Tower Assault Movies - the complete intro and outro movies for this classic CD³² game converted from from CDXL. Includes humorous overview of main story with screenshots and comments.
Other Areas
- Lost In Translation is an attempt to show how well arcade games and movies survived the conversion process to the home computer or console - and vice versa!
- Visit the ExoticA Forum to discuss and chat with other users. Note that as the wiki and forum use different software you will need to make an additional account to post to the forum.
Daily Dumps
- Directory Listing - For preservation purposes and to make the content fully available to the public, daily dumps of the site as XML are available for download. The xml also contains complete revision history of each page and we have the last three months online for download.
