Back in the beginning and the middle of the 80’s, I was constantly visiting computer shops with shelves filled with home computers, ready to type on them. Lots of 10 PRINT : 20 GOTO 10 testing. I think we all did that back then. There were Spectrum, ZX81, Amstrad, BBC, Oric. You name them. And one day the C64 was there too. I believe the first game I saw on it in a shop was Jumpman.

My dad finally helped me buy it in April 1984. I remember my first few games for it were Omega Race and Return of the Mutant Camels.

I was always keeping a keen ear to the sound chip of the C64 right from the beginning in 1984. I was pausing at the title screens of early games such as those by Interceptor Software with their classical covers, the excellent ADSR in Super Pipeline, and the vibrato in the Ghostbusters chorus.

But it was Rob Hubbard that really magnified this significantly. The first I heard from him was the title tune for Monty on the Run. To me, he was the Newton of the SID chip. Not only revolutionizing the techniques and bringing a lot of new ideas about how to make full use of it, but at the same time also arranging awesome compositions with fascinating solos. Others also had their magnetism, like certainly Martin Galway and his clean and patient sound, but to me, Rob Hubbard was clearly in the lead. He made me want to compose music on the C64 too.

Rarely. I did try to emulate Rob Hubbard for the old player tunes Quick Blast and Ode_to_the_64 but for the most part I wanted to do my own stuff. If I was inspired by others, it was mostly about their sounds.

I didn’t like the way they did it. Most of them at that time were all hexadecimal bytes with no direct connection between the voices. I wanted notes, I wanted to visualize the duration, and I wanted the voices to be connected so I could see what was going on. So it was part the general awesomeness of having your own thing combined with clear ideas about how to make it much more WYSIWYG. When the first Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski appeared on the Amiga, I already had similar ideas about how to show and edit it. His layout made me go, Yes, that’s pretty much what I was thinking of! Only I didn’t want the sequences to glue the voices together.

I actually didn’t want a group at first. Maniacs of Noise had spawned a lot of copycat groups on the C64 with similar words and cadence, and I didn’t want to go me too! I was fine just being one composer. But I was soon going to a show in London, and Klaus Link Grøngaard, the first user of my editor, saw the opportunity in seeking C64 developers there and present our music together. And for that, he claimed, we needed to have a group. It all came down in one phone call. At first we discussed why that was really necessary. Then I agreed it was probably best, and we went on to figuring out the name. The only rule I set was that it shouldn’t have the same cadence as Maniacs of Noise. I wanted the name to be as different as possible.

Apart from having a group where others could join in, we didn’t really exploit it that much. Most members were doing their own things for the demo groups they were part of. Apart from exceptions like Lollypop on PC, we didn’t have a lot of action in games. I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference if Klaus Link Grøngaard and I never created the group in the first place.

Except maybe for our web site later on. I guess being part of a group came in quite handy there.

Probably the two things that always annoyed me the most about the SID chip was that it didn’t have independent filtering on each voice, and that the filtering differed so much across C64 units.

Luckily, this was more than made up for by the many other features it did have. Pulsating, ADSR, ring modulation, hard sync, various waveforms. Think about what the sound chips in other home computers could do at the time. It wasn’t much.

I felt I was done with the SID chip in 1992 and needed to try something else. AdLib on the PC was interesting and new; it brought a lot of new things such as 9 voices and building sounds with FM, and I was eager to build a new editor for it. One of the reasons was that I felt AdLib wasn’t utilized as efficiently as it could be. Almost all of the games at that time just used its built-in features for envelope control, FM and vibrato, including all the restrictions this implied. I wanted to bring everything along that I had learned on the C64; real-time modulation, real-time vibrato to avoid the restrictions, arpeggio, sliding, tracker editing, and more.

But it had its disadvantages too. The most annoying was the waiting that had to be done when sending data to the AdLib card. It didn’t even have handshaking, so I had to do a lot of idle delays and that took up a ton of CPU time. Later I got the idea to keep a cluster of all of the registers on the AdLib card and only send new data when it was actually different. That cut down the CPU time, but it was never beautiful like it was on the C64.