Gavin Raeburn

Gavin Raeburn

Born	1968-04-26
Birth Place	United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Aliases	Gax Gaxx Jeff Minty

Gavin Raeburn is a composer, sound designer, programmer and producer.

Raeburn's influences are Ultravox and Visage. Around 1986, he started learning machine code on the ZX Spectrum. Expecting the Spectrum to decline after a year, he learned machine code on the Commodore 64 and had his first games published throughout 1987 by The Power House. From circa June 1987 to 2009, he worked for Codemasters. In 2010, he was a founding member of Playground Games where he is currently also working.

Audio Development

Commodore 64

Raeburn composed at home on a synthesizer and arranged in his own driver, tuned at 433.5 Hz. In 1988, he developed his driver on a PDS (Programmers Development System) and started sampling drums and speech at 12015 to 13137 Hz, 4-bit.

Except for the samples which are almost mute on the 8580, each of Raeburn's songs sounds the same on every SID chip.

NES

Raeburn programmed the sound driver and the music was written in assembly. Allister Brimble later developed a tracker which converted music to Raeburn's sound engine.

Raeburn was one of the few people to use the DPCM channel of the 2A03 for music. He used waves created by his Casio CZ-101 keyboard. This wave can be heard in Bee 52, Pro Tennis from the Quattro Sports cartridge, and Stunt Kids.

This sound driver was also used by an unknown company for their bootleg Famiclone ports of Colosoftware's C64 games.

Samples

The drum samples used in Raeburn's later C64 games and in The Ultimate Stuntman (NES) are from the Casio RZ-1 drum sequencer. The digitized synth sample used in Bee 52 (NES) and Pro Tennis (Quattro Sports (NES)) are from the Casio CZ-101 digital synthesizer.

Gameography

Released	Title	Notes
1987-0?-??	Toddler (C64)
1987-0?-??	Terminator (C64)
1987-0?-??	The Equalizer (C64)	Sound Effects.
1987-05-??	Gun Runner (C64)	Jingles.
1987-06-??	ThunderBolt (C64)
1987-07-??	The Enforcer (C64)
1987-12-??	Dead Zone (C64)
1988-04-??	Gothik (C64)
1988-09-??	Professional Skateboard Simulator (C64)
1988-??-??	4 Soccer Simulators (ZXS)
1989-0?-??	Rally Cross: Codemasters (C64)
1989-05-??	Rock Star Ate My Hamster (C64)
1989-10-??	Pro Tennis Simulator (C64)
1989-??-??	4 Soccer Simulators (CPC)
1990-??-??	The Ultimate Stuntman (NES)
1991-??-??	Big Nose the Caveman (NES)	Sound Driver
1991-??-??	Firehawk (NES)
1991-??-??	Micro Machines: The Original Scale Miniatures (NES)	Sound Driver
1991-??-??	Quattro Adventure (NES)
1991-??-??	Quattro Sports (NES)
1992-??-??	Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade (NES)	Sound Driver
1992-??-??	Bee 52 (NES)
1992-??-??	Big Nose Freaks Out (NES)	Sound Driver
1992-??-??	MiG-29 Soviet Fighter (NES)	Composer?/Sound Driver
1992-??-??	Quattro Arcade (NES)
1992-??-??	Stunt Kids (NES)
1993-??-??	Dizzy the Adventurer (NES)	Sound Driver
1993-??-??	The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy (NES)	Composer?/Sound Driver
Unreleased	Dreamworld Pogie (NES)
Unknown	Hunter (NES)	Uses Raeburn's sound driver. Bootleg port of Ice Hunter (C64)
Unknown	Magician (NES)	Uses Raeburn's sound driver. Bootleg port of Magic Madness (C64)
Unknown	Shoot The Goof (NES)	Uses Raeburn's sound driver. Bootleg light gun game.