February 2026 – Red Five Software

Topps Star Wars User Guide – 1

I am old enough to have collected Topps Star Wars bubble gum cards when they first came out in 1977. So, about ten years ago, I was quite pleased to find there was an app in the app store that brought the experience into the twenty-first century. I will admit I played it for a few years, built up quite a collection (for free) and then gave up with it. I would go back once a year, collect that year’s base cards and a few inserts and then quit again. Anyway, it has evolved over the years and is quite different to the original app. I couldn’t really find any user guides, so here is my attempt.

Aim

The aim of the game is to collect virtual cards. You do this by opening packs. There are literally thousands, if not millions, of different cards. Each year, a new set of base cards comes out. These are the bog-standard cards. There are usually a couple of hundred to get. They all feature a character from one of the Star Wars films or one of its many spin-offs. Some are just photos with a fancy background and picture frame. Then there are the limited edition inserts. These are usually original artworks and the most fun to collect. Each card has a value depending on how rare it is. These are ranked as Base (1 to 10), Common, Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare, Epic and Legendary. You may end up with hundreds of a particular Base card, while there may only be one copy of a Legendary card among all the collectors.

Collectors

Because you and all the other collectors are collecting from the same supply of cards. Most of your time will be spent sending and receiving trades. This is when you swap one or more cards for one or more different cards. You can get so far with the free cards, but to be a proper collector means paying out real money for what is essentially virtual cards.

Tips

Here are my tips for getting the most from the game. The last one, I have only just discovered, and it is a real game-changer.

Free cards are free cards. At least they don’t take up any space online. You soon get to a point where cargo drops and workbenches are only useful if there is an event on.
Pick an aspect of the cards and collect that. Chasing a certain character, film or art style makes it more fun. Lock the cards that you really like. If not, then you may actually trade one away by mistake.
I think that the older a card is, the more it is worth. Five 2015 cards are not worth the same as five 2026 cards.
Don’t be too precious when collecting base cards. There are so many of them out there that you WILL get them all eventually. As long as each trade gets you one card closer, it doesn’t really matter if there are sme dupes in it.
When trading, make sure the other person is online. A little green dot by their name means they are online, and a yellow dot means they have been around recently. They are most likely to respond immediately. No dot means they could be asleep.
Once you have a few Rare, Super Rare and Epics, the “take one and leave two of the same value” really works. There are people out there with loads of Epic dupes, so it’s no loss to them to trade a few for a new card. Rare, Super Rare, and Epic are where the collection points are, so the more you get, the bigger your collection value.

I hope you find that useful. If so, I will go into more detail about playing the game.

CC Parameters in Ableton with VST3s

My favourite part of the performance music sequencer Ableton is the follow actions. This is the facility to add a certain amount of randomness to a piece by playing with the % chance of one clip moving to another. Not much use for producing a club banger, but very useful for more experimental stuff. You could have three clips, where clip one plays once and then goes to clip two. Clip two plays a random number of times, and then goes to clip three. Clip three plays a random number of times and then randomly goes back to either one or two.

As well as doing it with clips full of notes, you can do it with envelope data as well. This is where I came slightly astray. If you set p a channel as in track 6 of this image, the envelope data will be sent to the assigned track, in this case “Piano”. The only trouble is, when you come to drawing your envelopes, you have to do it against the generic channel number rather than the controller name. So if you want to draw an envelope directly in a clip in the Piano track, you would see a list of all the available parameters at the bottom of the screen. If you do it in the “Midi” track, though, you just get a list of all the generic controller names. Unless you have a conversion chart from your VSTs creator, then it is trial and error trying to find the right one.

Now I had the VST3 for JC-303 installed, and I was trying control the filter cutoff and resonance via a separate track. Whatever I tried, though, nothing seemed to work. This had worked with an old VST2 version of the plugin. After much googling, I discovered this was by design rather than a bug. It seems VST3s don’t really do old-fashioned CCs. Instead, they use Parameter Automation, which gives you greater control over the parameter. Whereas the old way gave you 128 steps between 0 and 127, the new value is a floating-point number between 0 and 1. This gives you thousands of steps. Some VST3s still accept old-fashioned CCs, but they require some method of bridging one value to another.

It is a bit annoying, but I suppose it is a bit of a niche use. My options appear to be;

Stick with VST2s. That feels like a bit of a step back.

Get Max For Live. Currently, I am a Standard user. I don’t need the full Suite, so I could just get the Max add-on.

Hope someone writes a wrapper for VSTs that allows this communication to happen. There are lots of old VST2s out there that may not be updated. This could very well be useful to a lot of people.

I will update you with any changes.