Jan Harries (Rambones)

Danish demo-scener, C64 music ripper and composer (born 1969-01-12 in Nyborg): a founder of the demo group The Supply Team (1985–89), author of the Ripped-Off (C64, 1987–88) and Ripp Off (PlaySID, 1991–95) rip series, and a co-author of the hvsc from its start in 1996 — some 5000 tunes ripped by 2004. As "Rambones" he wrote soundmonitor tunes for TST's demos, filed in HVSC under /VARIOUS/M-R/Rambones/ (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview).

Facts#

• The Supply Team: formed after he and TSN learned BASIC in 1985 and met the assembler coder Kaze ("Kaze Demo #2"); Wizz and the Koala-Painter artist Hagar joined; first widely spread demos in the second half of 1986; Kaze and Wizz left in 1987 (Wizax 2004, Zetrex 2005), the "Federation Against Supply Team" feud followed and ended in the joint demos "Mip Mip Police!" and "No System". "TST was never a cracking group, we were one of the first real demogroups in Denmark"; heroes: Sodan, 1001 Crew, The Judges, Dutch-USA Team. 1988–89 the group made Amiga demos for about a year before its members went into higher education (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview).
• Ripping: from 1986 (TMC's "Game Music #1–9" first), with a SpeedDOS opcode monitor and a "Handic" cartridge, finding note data by its PETSCII pattern and the player "usually in front of the data"; "Ripped-Off #1–2xx", about 200 releases from early 1987 to late 1988; eight disks of rips by 1989; his only peer was Omega Supreme (Olav Mørkrid) of The Shadows, met at the Danish Gold party in 1988, who had ripped Cauldron II — which Harries never managed (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview).
• HVSC: after PlaySID (1991, about 300 tunes) his friends' pack "Addition" (189 of his tunes on PlaySID 2.0b) was the first outside contribution; he released "Ripp Off #1–8" 1991–95; Nemesis1's NemeSIDs merged all packs; in 1996 he exchanged collections with Michael Schwendt (SIDPLAY for PC), added his 1364 rips to The Shark's (David Greiman, INC) PC collection and became co-author of the High Voltage SID Collection with BOD/Talent and Schwendt. Estimated 10,000 rippable tunes in 1993; "Today we have more then 25000!" (2004). He still takes rips, fixes and credits (hvsc@c64.org) and offers to teach ripping (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview).
• Method (his advice for new rippers): a machine-code monitor (Action Replay 6), start from a one-tune demo, find the IRQ vector writes ($0314/$0315, $FFFE/$FFFF), follow the subroutines to the STA $D400,X / STA $D418 code, separate init from play, then test in a raster-IRQ harness that colours the border around the play call to show the rastertime — printed in the interview (sid-player-routine; source: s-sidin06-harries-interview).
• Tools and taste: JCH's editor and SID Duzz It (SHAPE) "are the best ones I've seen, and I now only use SDI"; Cybertracker (NoName) for beginners; real machine for listening, emulators (a monitor at one keystroke) for ripping; 6581 by habit; favourite composers Hubbard, Galway, Daglish, Whittaker, Fred Gray, Cooksey, Tel, Deenen, Drax, JCH, Laxity, Banana/TEK (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview; chordian, rob-hubbard, martin-galway, jeroen-tel, laxity).
• After the C64: A500, A1200, PC from 1996; MOD, XM and MP3 music since 1988 on janharries.com — "I proved to be a much better composer on the PC/Amiga than on the C64! This was due to the fact that the TRACKER was invented by Karsten Obarski in 1987" (tracker); an IT technician and programmer by trade (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview).

Related#

hvsc · sid-player-routine · soundmonitor · sidin · tracker-scene-history · chordian · sid-format

Sources#

s-sidin06-harries-interview