Cthugha-LAn oscilliscope on acid
Cthugha-LAs of 2004-02-23 Cthugha-L is under a new license. All shareware restrictions are removed - the new license is BSD-based.
The future of Cthugha-L now is in the hands of Martin Albert. Visit his homepage at http://cthugha.eu.tt.
There will not be any new versions, not even bug fixes. My time as a student is over and with a real job I don't have the time to work on Cthugha. Also I'm a bit "bored" by Cthugha now - it was fun when we were working on it on three different continents and every week a great new thing was added. But that time is over now.
Don't be too sad, most modern media players now offer some visualization of the music. And I have the impression that many of these visualizations are inspired by Cthugha. But still none of them has the big variaty of effects that Cthugha offers.
Cthugha displays your sound card's CD, line or mic-input, then processes
it into a hypnotic, swirling, 256-color confection for your eyes".
- WIRED 3.03 (p. 156: Music to Your Eyes)
I am the author of the Linux version of Cthugha. Cthugha was originally written for DOS by Kevin"Zaph" Burfitt. I've ported it to Linux, Rus Maxham then created a version for the Macintosh and now Zaph is working on a new version for Windows 95. If you want to learn more about the other versions of Cthugha please take a look at the Official Cthugha Homepage.
On the right side you can see a screenshot of Cthugha-L. Off course it is not so impressive without movement and sound.
If you like Cthugha-L please send me a
postcard, that is all I ask for (unless
you use Cthugha commercially).
I have not received very many, so it seems, that noone likes (or knows)
Cthugha for Linux.
Cthugha-L displays with svgalib (cthugha) and the X11 window system (xcthugha). And it creates 3D images with OpenGL/MesaGL (glcthugha). All three parts come in the package.
Cthugha-L is written for Linux, but the X11 and OpenGL version should also work with other kinds of unixes.
Here you can take a look at
some screen shots taken with xcthugha.
And here are some screen shots
of glcthugha.
Some more screen shots here
So you can't wait to see Cthugha in action. Here is a small demo if Cthugha using Java 1.1 (Netscape 4.0 should work). It uses no real sound (only some random data) and displays always with the same method.
Thanks to Justin Moore for updating my extremely inefficient code.
I am not working on JCthugha any more. But if you want to know more, how Cthugha works it might be a good idea to download the source. JCthugha includes only the most important parts of Cthugha.
Run JCthugha at 64 by 64 or 128 by 128.
make install-pre assumes that "." is in the path. Please update your path if necessary before running it.
sound problems: If you get errors concerning the sound device, you might have to use the --snd-method parameter. A parameter of 3 should fix the problems.
recording overruns: You can completely ignore that errors. It only tells you that there would be more sound availalbe than Cthugha can display.
const: There is the problem with the configure script. With
newer version of gcc it assumes, that const is not working. If this bug
shows up you will get tons of error messages. A simple solution is the following:
After running configure edit the file config.h, delete the
line containing #define const.
There might be more errors in Cthugha - for some I might come up with a quick fix, for most probably not.
If you find a new bug or problem please send me an email so that I can fix it.
The current version is 1.4a.
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Last updated: February 23rd 2004