Jochen Hippel

Who is Jochen Hippel?

Jochen Hippel is a musician from Kirchheimbolanden in southwest Germany. He played one of the most prominent roles in computer music during the 16-bit microcomputer era, composing the music for tens of games. He was also an experienced Amiga programmer and ported many of Thalion Software's Atari ST titles. He no longer composes music for a living and in 2006 he was working in Logistics for Matheis+Koebig Baustoffe

Jochen's first computer music was a set of Christmas songs that he arranged in a rock style on his school's Commodore 64.

As a member of The Exceptions under the handle Mad Max, he wrote most of the music for their demos including the B.I.G. Demo. The demo was essentially a large collection of C64 tunes that The Exceptions ported across to the Atari ST's Yamaha YM2149 sound chip using Jochen's own driver to get the most out of it. Jochen then had to fix all the music in order to get it to sound correct on the ST, the YM2149 has no resonance filter, no ADSR enveloping and no ring modulation. Composers used a lot of special effects in their music which was difficult to replicate on the ST sound chip.

Another note of interest is that the B.I.G. demo contained an additional demo screen entitled "The Digital Department" containing 6 digital versions of C64 music. The sound routine however used each channel of the YM2149 as a 4-bit DAC and played samples for each instrument. This is the first time ADSR samples are heard on the Atari ST, unfortunately only one more piece of music is ever written using this routine, albeit the 16 minute long Knuckle Busters tune by Rob Hubbard. This appears as a guest screen in the Cuddly Demos and was used to torment Richard Karsmakers of ST News who was promptly chained to a chair as the disk was formatted before his very eyes!