Hacking Jeff Minter’s Virtual Light Machine: Unpacking the Code and Community Behind an Early Software-Based Music Visualizer

Abstract

Foreshadowing in purpose and execution the music visualizers that were widely distributed with software media players during the early 2000s, Jeff Minter’s Virtual Light Machine (VLM) was distributed in the firmware of the commercially unsuccessful Atari Jaguar CD games console, which was released in 1995. The VLM was designed to play an audio CD and generate real-time animations in more-or-less tightly coupled synchrony with music. The following year, Minter published “Yak’s Quick Intro to VLM Hacking”, an online guide describing how to customize the visualizer’s 81 graphical presets that revealed a hidden menu in the software. Minter’s software work, not widely known outside of the community of video-game historians and enthusiasts, deserves inclusion in a broader history of consumer music visualization technology. I draw on born-digital primary sources—including newsgroup posts, web pages, and the original code for the VLM itself—to understand the extent to which the practices explicitly and implicitly endorsed by Minter are congruent with our contemporary understanding of hacking.