MaCthugha

A long time ago, my good friend Dug turned me on to a neat little program he ran on his linux box called Cthugha. At the time (circa 1994), it was the only thing of its kind, a real time visualizer of sound. He played music through his linux box and swirls of color pulsated on the screen in sync with the music. It was the neatest thing I'd ever seen.

It ran kinda chunky though. I think the screen resolution was something like 320x240 and it ran at a rate of something like 10 fps on his 33 or 66mhz pentium or 486, I'm not sure which. At this point in time, Apple had just released the first generation PowerMacs, and thanks to my internship at Apple, I was lucky enough to have a 7100/80. So my next thought was, "I bet I could make it run faster on my mac." To which Dug replied, "Source code is on the internet. Go download it." So I did.

About a week later, after may late nights in front of my computer in my underwear, MaCthugha came to life, and my PowerMac delivered on the money. 320x240 at 30+ fps, 640x480 at 10fps. I returned my new creation and all of its source code back to the internet.

It wasn't long before I had a bunch of new net-friends who thought I was the coolest. Little did I know I'd end up meeting and becoming good actual friends with quite a few of them, or that it would help me get jobs, or that it would eventually go mainstream with Winamp and iTunes. Since then, a few others, namely Andy O'Meara with G-Force (which kicks a lot of ass, great work Andy!), have jumped in to further this exotic and underappreciated artform. Meanwhile, I get the occasional e-mail asking me about MaCthugha and I then reply with a glum response of how I've let it fall into disuse.

No longer. MaCthugha is making a comeback. Only, since I always hated the name, I'm calling the renewed project Catnip. I think my cat Disco would approve.

Now that I've gotten the history out of the way...