OverClocked ReMix began life in late 1999 as a section of the emulation comic strip OverClocked.Org. Just as I started OC to force myself to try to improve at 3D graphics by regularly using 3D Studio MAX, OCR was started to force myself to get back into electronic music, which I'd been interested in since I inherited my sister's Yamaha PSR at age 11. It soon became clear, with the large number of excellent submissions and increasing popularity, that OCR deserved its own site, and so the sub-domain http://remix.overclocked.org was born and the initial orange layout for "OCR1" was created.
As I began to learn a bit of PHP, I decided to implement some of what I knew with OCR2, a redesign that featured different sections dedicated to chat, ReMixing, links, etc. with different color schemes for each, and basic PHP-driven searching for mixes. This was also the first appearance of the Arkanoid-font logo that remains in place today.
There were then a couple of prototypes for a design that would be database-driven, the first of which actually went live for a short while until I was forced to realize how embarassingly, well... abstract it was.
The single biggest change in the site's history came with the final release design for OCR3, which was database-driven for the first time, added the headphones-and-SNES-gamepad graphic to the existing Arkanoid-style logo, upgraded the forums to PHPBB, and much more. The entire collection of MP3s was retagged with ID3v2 tags that matched the database info, and a relational database structure was created to allow association between games, mixes, composers, remixers, etc. Veteran ReMixer McVaffe helped test and provided feedback on the final design, for which I am eternally grateful.
After the release of OCR3, several additional updates were made. The ReViews forum was integrated with the site database so that mixes were linked with their review threads, downloads of sound archives (NSF, RSN, etc.) were added so that listeners could compare the mix to the original, additional database fields were added, and the underlying code was switched from spaghetti PHP to an XML/XSLT templating scheme.
OCR4 represents a clean-up of the PHP, XHTML, CSS, and XSLT codebase that OCR3 initiated. The site is now completely XSLT templated, outside of the forums, and the design itself is dictated entirely by CSS. All documentation, including this article, has been moved out of flat files into MySQL, navigation and sorting options have been both expanded and normalized, and in general everything has been cleaned up to a significant extent. OCR4 was released primarily to form a consistent, clean base from which to build additional functionality on to the site, without the specter of having to recode the underlying guts.
