Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. A strange calm has settled over me. Don't say we didn't warn you.

You better laugh at the following, or all of this will have been for nothing.

I started writing tonight's column at about 6:30 PM. I was writing well, there was a good selection of letters, a good balance to the column, and some interesting subjects to discuss. I was one or two letters away from finishing up, and decided to paste some track names from the CC OST into a reply.

And then Front Page crashed. Exception error. And I hadn't saved since I started.

This was about 8:30. As you can imagine, I was a wee bit upset about this. But no problem, thought I, generally Microsoft applications are smart enought to save the document being worked on to an external file. I can just start from a few minutes back, no loss.

Nope.

But surely there must be some save file, somewhere, right? And indeed, doing a quick search of the computer found one wpe39.tmp file that was last modified right when I crashed. It was a reasonable assumption that this file represented my work - after all, many of the surrounding files in the directory (Front Page/temp) were intermediate saves of other, previous columns. This must be the one.

But it was all scrambled when I tried to read it in notepad. Hmm, thought I. There must have been some problems with the save process. It's probably just an offset problem - the crash may have caused some corruption in the data while saving. A bit got skipped in transcription, and now the byte codes are offset. I've seen it happen before. If I look at the raw data, I may be able to salvage something.

I quickly found a binary file viewer for Windows, but unfortunately it didn't let me edit the data at the bit level. No problem, I thought. I'll just write one myself.

So off to LabVIEW I go. For those of you unfamiliar with LabVIEW, it's a visual programming language similar to C. Except that instead of writing text code, you "draw" pictoral code. Loops look like actual loops, and data flows through wires from one box-like function to the next. Slight instability on insanely huge code aside, I love LabVIEW. It's very easy to visualize algorithms and debug in, and it has a whole host of incredibly nifty, useful features, essentially a bigger built-in function library than Java or Visual Basic. Coding a bit-shifter and ASCII viewer should take no time at all.

Relatively speaking.

Two hours later, I was up and running. I had the .tmp file code in the program, and a nifty little GUI that let me see the original ASCII, the hex translation, the raw ones and zeros in an edit window so I could add and subtract the needed bytes, and the final product. Just type in a few zeros, find the right configuration, and I'm set.

So I start typing. Those of you familiar with ASCII know it's an 8 bit code, meaning it has eight ones or zeros that comprise a letter or character. If my offest theory was correct, then at most I'd have to add seven characters to the raw bitstream to achieve the right alighnment. So I start adding.

1. Nope. 2. Nope. 3, 4, 5, nope, nope, nope. 6. Nope. 7.

I think you know what the answer was.

I tried everything. I rechecked my code to make sure it was doing what I wanted. It was - if I changed nothing, the inputs and outputs were exactly the same. If I added 8 zeros, the output matched the input, except for the space character I had just added. I looked all over my output window, hoping despearately to see something, anything resembling an HTML tag.

Nope.

So here it is, 10:30 PM. I haven't had dinner yet, I've missed the Simpsons. If I'd done the intelligent thing, and restarted the column immediately, I'd most likely be done by now. As it is, I've got a bunch of garbage ASCII sitting in a program I'll most likely never use again.

And no column.

But I'm gonna do my damndest to get this thing on the road. The entire system seems a bit flaky at the moment, so I can't promise anything, but I'll see how much of a real column I can get out before things head south permanently.

Onward.

Ok, I hope you realize that when I said "back to back to back", I meant that I listened to all three disks in order, not the whole soundtrack 3 times through. That much Mitsuda could drive a man insane.

I've always feared Brink of Time because of its cover. But I'll take your word that the music is worth listening to.

As for a CC arranged alblum, I'm gonna say something really strange and bizzarre: I don't think one is called for. Consider that in the early days of game music, an arranged album was a way to find out what a soundtrack would sound like if it were actually music, instead of bleeps and bloops from a two-bit sound chip. It was a way of putting flesh on pieces that had only existed as skeletons, a way to listen to something that was close to what the composer actually imagined when he/she was composing the music.

As for modern arranged albums, I think they're useful to explore variations on a theme, to expand ideas only hinted at on the OST, or repair mistakes or oversights left in the original work. Creid does a great job at revisiting some of the more interesting themes in Xenogears, and gives actual musicians a chance to play with the music.

But Chrono Cross doesn't really fit either of the above categories. The sound quality is excellent - while a professional musician might be able to tell the difference, to me the emulation is perfect, right down to the guitar chord changes. And the composition itself is beautiful. I can't imagine tracks like Home Galdove or Another Termina sounding any better than they already do. Mitsuda will likely do an arranged album, I belive he's alrady made mention of it, and I'll probably buy it to see what it's like. But at this point, I'm skeptical.