Georg Brandt

Georg Brandt

Born 1969-03-12 Birth Place Essen-Kupferdreh, North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany Nationality German   Aliases Georg Brand G.Brandt

Georg Brandt is a German programmer and composer.

At age 13, he acquired a VIC 20 and learned BASIC and the basics of 6502 machine language. After one and a half years, he switched to the Commodore 64. In 1986, his first four demo songs were published in 64'er. He programmed two games and also arranged the Magic Bytes jingle.

After Abitur at Gymnasium Essen-Überruhr in summer 1988, he studied electrical engineering at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Audio Development

Commodore 64

At Rainbow Arts, Brandt used The Final Musicplayer in conjunction with his own sound effect and sample drivers. His last game used RoMuzak V6.3. Between that:

“

In 1986 I wrote my own music engine in 6502 assembler driving the 3 SID channels (i.e. 3 tracks), an optional virtual drum channel (4th track) and an additional sample playback channel (5th track). The engine was IRQ driven to make it in run in parallel to the game play.

The notes were stored in memory in a piano roll style. A simple memory hex editor was sufficient to view and create the song data. Each tracks melody line was described by note height (chromatic note number) and sound type. „Sound type“ was a reference to an internal predefined instrument in my sound engine. I used the note heights byte most significant bit (MSB) to store if the sound was played (meaning “key down”) or in the release phase (meaning “key released”).

Each instrument preset had an ADSR setting, waveform type (rect, sine, triangle, saw), pulse width modulation settings, filter settings and special effects like arpeggios/chords, additional attack noise a.s.o.

The virtual drum channel was routed to a SID channel replacing the melody playing on that channel for the short time the drum sounds were playing.

The sample playback engine simply wrote the sample wave data interrupt driven to the SIDs main volume register. The fact that one could playback a sample like this was rather a side effect and not intended or documented in the SIDs chip design. The samples were created from different audio sources using a DIY digitizer board.

For composing I used a simple JVC Keyboard and then transferred those musical ideas directly to the piano roll style tracks with a simple hex editor. Later I directly composed inside the hex editor.

I wrote music for Magic Bytes, Rainbow Arts and the German C64er magazine.

„

Gameography

Released	Title	Sample	Notes
1986-06-13	Rhythm Construction Set (C64)
1986-12-??	Werner - Let's Go! (C64)
1987-10-??	In 80 Days Around the World (C64)
1987-10-??	Street Gang (C64)		Main.
1988-02-??	Vampire's Empire (C64)
1988-0?-??	The Paranoia Complex (C64)
1988-0?-??	Donald the Hero (C64)		Rhythm Construction Set.
1988-11-??	Mini-Golf (C64)
1988-??-??	Vampire's Empire (AMI)
1989-05-??	Beam (C64)
1989-05-??	Tom & Jerry: Hunting High and Low (C64)
1989-08-??	Wallstreet (C64)
1989-12-??	Blue Angel 69 (C64)		Magic Bytes.
1989-12-??	Tom & Jerry 2 (C64)
1989-??-??	Tom & Jerry (CPC)		Arranged by Christoph Grewe.
1989-??-??	Tom & Jerry (MSX)		Arranged by Alberto Gonzalez.
1989-??-??	Tom & Jerry II (CPC)		Arranged by Christoph Grewe.
1989-??-??	Tom & Jerry II (ZXS)		Arranged by Christoph Grewe.
1990-02-??	The North Sea Inferno (C64)		Magic Bytes.
1990-04-??	U.S.S. John Young (C64)
1990-??-??	Mindbender (C64)
1991-0?-??	The Second World (C64)		Magic Bytes.

Picture Gallery

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  64'er 7/86.

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  64'er 5/90.

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  Found by DeepSID on September 2, 2018.

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  Facebook.

Links

• mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,95371/ - MobyGames.
• facebook.com/georg.brandt/ - Facebook.