3.1 Mockba-Modded Firmware for the Akai Force Installation Tutorial + Feature Demonstration

[Music] hi i am dream and you're watching the dream static music channel today we are going to be looking at the makba modded firmware version 3.1 of the atari force this is a modded firmware by a third-party individual that allows for extra features that aren't available in the current 3.1 firmware officially released by kai and there's more to come in this first section i'm going to walk you through tutorial style how to install this modded firmware on the force so let's get to it in order to pull this trick off you're gonna need four things you're gonna need your akai force you're gonna need this weird-ass proprietary usb cable that comes with the force you're gonna need a computer and then you're gonna need one of these mini sd sd adapter [Music] combo delete all right to start with you're going to go to the akai force warranty voiders facebook group link will be in the description of this video you're going to go to this post here which is in the featured section this is the download for the firmware and you'll notice there is a user and password for when you install and we'll get to that once we get to that point you're going to click that click download do a little dance once the file is done downloading you're going to want to extract it inside the folder that it extracts you will find a firmware updater that works exactly like the firmware updater that you would get from akai you will find a zip file with the number 662522 this sub file contains the contents that you will be putting on the sd card and you're also going to want to download in the comments this file here which you'll be using to patch a file in the original sd card contents which we'll go over shortly um uh this version here uh song mode slash uh automation slash follow actions whatever you want to call it uh is broken and downloading this file and replacing it the version that's on there will uh fix that all right to start with you're gonna want to put your sd card in and you're going to want to rename that [Music] 662522 [Music] and then you're going to want to format it and you're going to format it as x fat make sure that that's x fat or this will not work and do a quick format after that you'll have a nice empty sd card and you're gonna want to go back to the sd content zip you're gonna want to extract it then you're gonna to copy all of its contents and paste them into the sd card [Music] then once you've pasted all those in there you're going to want to go back to where you downloaded the patched apps dot sh file you're going to want to copy that and then go back to the sd card paste that in choose to replace after that you're done with the sd card at least as far as prepping it now you're gonna move on to installing the firmware itself you're going to want to set that sd card aside and plug in your force with the weird proprietary usb monstrosity of a cable now you're going to want to load up your force go to menu go to preferences or the little gear if you're in 3.0.6 still you're going to want to go to [Music] let's say hit info update and you're going to choose switch to update mode [Music] click update tap whatever you want to call it it's gonna shut down and then go into update mode all right now we're in update mode all right so now we're gonna want to go to our firmware updater and we're gonna click apply mod that's gonna start applying the mod and it's done and watch it go that looks like the normal force at first and then it does something different that would be the makba modded force notice there's a progress bar that goes across the first line of pads and then we get the startup screen which has multiple options there's a test app that you can go through and test various things on the force you can go through and test a number of things and of course if you have a moment of panic you can hit the shutdown button but most of the time you're just going to hit you can see which will start up the force in this section we're going to go over the first and most simple feature of this mod and that's multi-boot now off the bat you don't get that ability because you don't have other uh images firmware images to boot from there's a folder in the sd card content that you can add firmware images to and you'll see now i have this mpc 306 above npc that's the 3.0.6 version of the firmware if you add one of those images in the apps folder you can run whatever firmware that is now it's complicated as to how you get that firmware image so i'm going to save that for a separate video that i will do shortly after this one because you have to get into some linux commands and things to be able to uh extract and uh get that image to be able to put on there um but yeah you'll see right here i've got a menu well once i've gone into a project if you go to menu i mean you can tell right here if you're familiar with both 3.0.6 and 3.1 this is the older ui the idea with this and something i'm really hoping will be interesting for the future is that other programs other than [Music] the current actual mpc forced firmware that runs on this could possibly be ran because essentially underneath the hood of this is a linux operating system and for anybody who's not familiar in its current state on a pc and even to some degree on uh arm based cpu devices which the force is [Music] on a standard linux install you can run a real-time kernel which will make for low latency and at least with windows or with windows with a pc based computer x86 64-bit etc you can run a program called wine and a bridge program that will allow you to run vst effects and instruments on linux programs like reaper there's actually a native version of reaper for linux you can do almost anything on linux now audio wise that you can on windows maybe mac too but i'm not as familiar with mac myself um but yeah uh the idea is that maybe some point in the future we can have a more custom software to run on this thing so here's hoping for that in this next section we're going to go over my personal favorite feature of this mod which is the automation feature this is going to be the first half of what the automation feature can be used for and this is specific to a daw-like linear recording session this allows you to in a linear fashion play your clips in whatever order you want to automatically without having to hit the buttons on the force using a follow action style option with a midi device a virtual midi device that tells the force which row to launch whether to go down a page or up a page and it can also tell it to stop automation is essentially what i call song mode um and what many people might be familiar with as follow actions so here we go here's how it works essentially any song that you have you go through and you set up a midi track and in that midi track you're going to have your input port set to none and in your mini output port within only the modded firmware you will find mock the automation in as your midi output port and you will choose midi output channel one and you can close that and then any track that was excellent any track that you make you then have a number of in any a number of notes that can do particular follow actions [Music] [Music] included with the makba modded firmware is the automation folder uh and in that automation folder is this pdf which gives you a breakdown of how to use the automation feature uh the beginning of it's a little outdated uh as it refers to an extra step that used to be in the process where you had to load from a particular firmware option in the menu at the beginning of starting up the force which you don't need to do anymore it just works on the regular 3.1 firmware uh essentially once you do what i've shown you so far uh then just to use the automation you just need to know what notes and that midi track do what all right so obviously uh looking here we've got uh a g sharp two uh launches the first row a two launches two uh a sharp two watches three so on and so forth and then we get down to pages e7 will go up a page we'll do the up arrow uh and f7 will do the down arrow and then b5 stops all so essentially the way i do it and you know obviously different people are going to want to use this in different ways personally for me it's easier to just go down a page i tend to record my clips sequentially so it's easy for me to just first launch you know um go down a page and then play the first page again and then you can just copy and paste that clip in as you go along um but if you want to do something a little more interesting uh or bounce around more something i plan to play around with more and i will probably do in a future video you can launch to the various pages you want on here and then go down or up and etc on the pages uh and and launch the various rows and this next section the second part of the automation feature i'm going to demonstrate one of the most phenomenal things about the automation feature uh or rather the uh the midi device the virtual midi device used for the automation feature uh and that's how it can be used with a controller to launch clips and perform with the force from one or two other separate controllers all right one of the benefits of the automation in a live performance setting is if you have a controller or multiple controllers set to multiple midi channels you can use one like i have set up here to start up [Music] your different rows move down the pages even stop music and then on another controller on the same controller with a different mini channel for a different input [Music] you can perform at the same time so for instance i can start this song and then i could [Music] i can play [Music] live on one instrument and control the force all from this controller so [Music] of course backup page one or launch one so if you have a whole bunch of rows you can just keep paging down until you get there and then every time the page goes down you're starting over from scratch as far as launch one to eight so essentially just like it works on the force and then you can stop your clips if you want to so yeah it not only is it automation in the sense of being able to automate a track you know recording in a linear fashion like a doll but it's also a wonderful tool for performance all right these next two features are linux based what can be done with windows they have to do with the linux operating system that is at the core of the forces os the first half of this it i would i would not do if you're not familiar with linux at all the second half however can be very very useful um and allow you to transfer files back and forth between the force and the computer or other device without having to plug it in you can just do it wirelessly over your own local network all right for this next part we're going to need to be able to find out what the ip address is for the force obviously you're going to have to have it connected to wi-fi or through your ethernet port for this it's ready to go to preferences in this case i'm going to go to wi-fi otherwise you would go to ethernet i'm not connected through ethernet so i'm not going to bother with that now in order to get your ip address you're going to need to hit sorry shift that'll bring up info tap info and it will say right here ipv4 address and it says 192 168 99.84 so that's the ip address for this force right here on my local network all right now that you have the ip address we can move on to a couple of really interesting features that come with the mod now these features are also as far as i have seen standard across the various mods that people have put out for npc and i suspect any other force mods as well [Music] uh the first one being ssh control of the machine which is sort of controlled but also sort of uh well it's beautiful we'll need program in this case i'm on windows so i'm using the program putty which you can find online for free and the host section once you start it up you will put in your ip address uh the microcosm [Music] all right we're going to leave it to port 22 and leave it on ssh hit open and as you may recall i mentioned additionally that you need to put in a password at some point so this is that uh your login and root password is force all lower case change directory to root directory there i'm in the root directory um if you have no idea what i'm doing you know no idea what any of this stuff is i do not recommend doing this this is for people who have experience with linux and who want to really tinker with some things again you could break your force and then some in this so if you have no idea what's going on here i suggest you don't even bother but the next part while you can break the force with it if you do it carefully if you use it carefully it's very convenient for just about anyone and that is sft essentially who are connecting of course the vip address as if you were to connect into an ftp online so these are all the folders in your force in the media section you have your various different drives this is the sd card uh hence why it's named that uh your force disk of course and then you've got your your internal and stuff obviously you don't want to mess with any of that you do however if you want to be able to remove files back and forth between your force and your computer you do want to go into your force disk uh anybody who has who doesn't have a force disk and who just uses uh files you know just saves files to the main drive on the force i mean you can do this too by going to that drive but that's another story um anyway so like for instance let's go to projects the project i'm currently working on is a tapestry of binary corruption live live to denote that this is the one that i was demonstrating using the automation as a live performance tool all right so let's say i've got some uh samples here let's say i want to move one over to my force bloop my network's a little slow because i'm outside in the shed but should get over there all right and there it is all right so now on my force if i go to load places force disk let me get right over here to my stuff and if i go to that project data folder [Music] that's a little loud but you get the idea um it's there and i can load it if i want to into a track all right this next feature is based on the previous linux stuff i showed you this has to do with uh you're going to be using the ssh to to do this and that's to take screenshots and video captures um all right let's get to it all right so for this next trick we're going to go into the tools folder and the sd cards content via ssh as i showed you before uh and with this one you will be able to do screenshots and video capture the video capture is buggy i think the cpu especially if you have something playing on the forced tv you can't quite handle doing what it's doing audio wise and doing video capture but the screenshot works great i will demonstrate both of them now all right so i'll go to ssh again i'm in the tools folder as you can see above that i changed directory to media 662 522 and then tools and so here we go let's do sc.sh oops dot slash sc.sh and we should have a screenshot now screen screenshots and video captures should be saved in the same folder where you put them as you see there's a file there with a bunch of numbers in png let's go back to login let's go to that folder all right under the sd card into tools i've got a weird program that i use for video for pictures and it does not seem to want to open this correctly so i'm just going to open it and paint and there we go now one thing obviously with with this is it puts it just a wee bit sideways that said as complicated as all that process was and the sideways factor included there is a module coming soon that will be able to be implemented on top of makba's mod that will allow you to go in and do all this via a web browser through http and from there you'll be able to take screenshots and it actually automatically puts them at the right orientation on the right side up or whatever but more on that later now let's do screen capture so this one oop i want to actually click on my video so this one is the vc script oh yeah you have to specify an output file uh forgot about that all right so vc.sh then let's say uh i think i want to say it does avi so let's say test.avi and so it's screen capturing now so let's uh let's do something that screen capture might our video capture might actually see again if you're playing music when you're doing it it doesn't tend to work very well and uh [Music] i honestly don't remember how you stop it i think you just stop it so we're just gonna yeah close that session and then open another one yeah actually i'm just gonna go in here and let's see if it made that file refresh yep there it is so again sideways uh i'm not for sure but i suspect this model that's coming may fix that again you can and of course you can just open it in any video editor and turn it etc but yeah that's video capture and screen capture thanks for watching this video um if you like the content you've seen here if you want to see more videos having to do with the force firmware 3.1 or more videos having to do with the modded mod and future modules that are coming up definitely uh click like below subscribe uh blue blue although you know everybody was points down so i'm gonna point down uh so yeah click like like subscribe comment leave a comment say something tell me what you think about this mod tell me what you think about uh the 3.1 firmware tell me i'm a jackass and i should just get i should just off and get over myself uh or you know say what you think uh ask me some questions about the mod if you want to whatever just uh hang out and comment all that jazz all right take it easy go you

Channel: Dream Static

Views: 1,724

Keywords: Akai Force 3.1, Akai Force, Akai Force Mod, Akai mod, MPC Mod, mpc mod, mockba the borg, mockba mod, mockba-modded force, mockba force, mockba, akai force 3.1, akai force, modded akai force, akai force mods, akai force mod, akai force midi launch, akai force song mode, akai force midi launch buttons, akai force ssh, akai force sftp, akai force transfer files, best beatboxes, best synth mods, synth mods, best groovebox, akai force follow actions, akai force automation

Id: q95a7EVkHSc

Length: 32min 1sec (1921 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 15 2021