Cthugha (software)

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Cthugha is a music visualization computer program. It was written in the mid-1990s by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt for MS-DOS, and later ported to other platforms. It was freely distributed.

Contents

Blue fire Cthugha1.jpg
Blue fire
Metallic Lightning Cthugha2.gif
Metallic Lightning
Solar Flare Cthugha3.jpg
Solar Flare
Oil Shimmer Cthugha4.gif
Oil Shimmer

History

Cthugha was started by Australian coder Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt [1] in September 1993 as an MS-DOS program, [2] but not released to the public until version 2.0 in March 1994. [3] The program gained popularity with release 5.1p in October 1994. [4]

Cthugha was released for Linux ("Cthugha-L") in May 1995, [5] and for the Macintosh ("MaCthugha") in January 1996 [6]

Cthugha was used as the video wall background for the Australian children's TV game show Challenger, hosted by Zoe Sheridan during the late 90s[ citation needed ].

Burfitt stopped work on Cthugha in January 2001, and there were various attempts by others to carry on the project, but by that time there were so many clones of the software that there was little enthusiasm. Cthugha may have been the forerunner – either in inspiration, or possibly even as source-code – of the numerous and varied "visualisation" plugins for mp3 players and media players on many computer architectures.

In 1998, it was ported to the Winamp music player.

Usage

Cthugha uses a sound card's CD, line or microphone input. [1]

Reaction

The oscilloscope patterns of Cthugha have been described as "weird" [7] and "hypnotic". [1]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 HotWired 3.03 (page 156), March 1995
  2. SBpro - sampling stereo directly (not DMA) - comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard|Google Groups
  3. CTHUGHA 2.0 1/1 - comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos | Google Groups:
  4. Cthugha 5.1 released - comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos | Google Groups
  5. Cthugha available for Linux - comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard.misc | Google Groups
  6. ANNOUNCE: PowerMac version of CTHUGHA now available! - alt.graphics.cthugha | Google Groups
  7. Australian PC Review, October 1994