I was checking out a fairly old version of the website of music production company CRYSTA Inc. to see if I could find any information on their music studio (normal human VGMdb research behavior) when I noticed something interesting in the works list of Luna Umegaki. She’s an amazing jazz fusion/prog composer and keyboardist who started composing for video games in the ’90s with TAMSOFT; she’s worked on the Toshinden series, INTI CREATES’s handheld Mega Man games, and a bunch of other random stuff in addition to having a cool band called Lu7.
The thing in her works list, which was at some point removed in a later version, was that she did music for a screensaver produced by the Japanese subsidiary of AMD called “True Performance Gallery.” This screensaver is just a rotating gallery of computer graphics, mostly 3D renders but some 2D art as well, created by Japanese artists and intended to show off what you can do with the power of AMD CPUs I guess. There are shockingly few extant references to this screensaver existing—just a single mention in the portfolio of one of the participating artists, Yutaka Igarashi. I’m not even sure how or when this screensaver was distributed; I poked around AMD’s old site but couldn’t find anything.
But miraculously, some uploaded a full video of the screensaver to YouTube in 2014, so Umegaki’s minute-long piano w/light strings & chorus piece is actually preserved. It’s pretty!
Incidentally, Umegaki also apparently wrote some amount of music for version 2 specifically of AMD’s N-Bench benchmark suite, which I couldn’t find a copy of or any footage of. If you actually have this lying around somewhere, please upload a video 👀👀👀
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