An Interview with Holger Gehrmann

There are too many to list. I guess Rob Hubbard was the first one who had a constant quality and used features of the SID (e.g. ring modulation) that most others didn't at this point of time.

Besides the classics Commando, Gyruss etc. I liked Floating Point Action, a song only a hardcore programmer can compose (same as the name of it).

Hmm, funny question since I even wrote music for the old VIC 20… 😊

I loved the filter and the ability to change the aspects of the square wave form. The SID could have had more channels, and sometimes short attack and decay times caused strange internal timing conflicts, I have no idea why. What I disliked most was that they changed the filter algorhythm. Composers want their songs to sound exactly the same on all systems.

Maybe Hollywood Poker.

When I look at my PC running Windows I really miss the short booting time the C-64 had. 😊 I think at the time when the C-64 was on the market, programmers did anything to push its hardware to the limits. In fact it's amazing to see a multi layer scrolling game with 32 sprites or more on a machine that is based on a 256 character set and 8 sprite channels. And for some reason one memory is about punching a second read/write hole in the 5 1/4" disk covers so that you can store data on the other side too.

I founded it together with a friend after I already made some games with him before (e.g. for Golden Games). He did the graphics, I did the programming (and the music). Same at reLINE.

Rarely. In the last years I composed some CD audio tracks, e.g. for BIING!, but mostly for myself.

reLINE, and what does this entail?I mainly program user interfaces, script languages and run time optimized subroutines. Lately I started with DirectX and Direct3D. I also do quality assurance jobs for companies that sell professional applications that are not game related.

Karsten Obarski composed some great songs for the Amiga that I converted to the C-64, e.g. the Oil Imperium soundtrack. I also loved his Centerbase soundtrack that I made a CD audio version of. I think they were milestones.

In a way. Chris and I seem to have a similar taste about music. I love some of his pieces, but when I composed on the C-64 I didn't know him. We got in contact much later when the Amiga was released. He composed for Rainbow Arts, and they had the same publisher as we had.

It's a big difference to use samples instead of analogue sounds. So it was a bigger step from the C-64 to the Amiga than from the Amiga to synthesizers.

Yes, but it's still the composition that counts. Even the old great James Bond soundtracks written by John Barry would sound great on simple sound chips. I tried that by making a remix of the JB theme on the Adlib-chip and Amiga/Soundblaster in Dynatech. You can't reproduce the atmosphere a real orchestra creates, but it still sounded great. He is just a good composer.

Nowadays people who buy a game expect a movie soundtrack, not just some nice little songs. Today you can play MP3s in real time, so why should anyone compose 3 channel analogue songs? I think it's OK this way. When you buy a car racing game you want to see realistic 3D graphics that would have been impossible 10 years ago. And you want state of the art sound too. Looking back on the old times of music is nice for old guys like me, but the kids want other stuff.

I haven't heard them yet. After reading your question I made a quick search and tried to download a remixed Top Secret soundtrack made by him, but for some reason it didn't work. Maybe you could email them to me.

For me it's an honour to see that people like my compositions and take the time to make remixes.

When I have time I surf the web and download SID collections or remixed MP3s of old songs. Sometimes I download some old games too, but to tell you the truth, when I see them now I am kind of disappointed since they looked so much better in my memories.

I always created my own sound formats, and I never used any common sound formats at all. On the VIC 20 I wrote just simple BASIC programs to play music stored in DATA lines, on the C-64 I made Soundcontrol and a sound programming language called SOPROL which I also used on the Atari ST. The Amiga version of SOPROL was used in early games like Hollywood Poker and Space Port, and the Amiga-Soundcontrol which allowed similar macros like Chris Hülsbeck's TFMX was used till BIING!. On the PC I wrote players for the Tandy and Adlib sound chips, later on for Soundblaster and General Midi cards. My least favorite one was the Tandy sound chip since it really sucks. It's like a 3 channel PC speaker…

Thanks for reading. 😊