Jochen Hippel (born October 14, 1971 in Frankfurt am Main ) is a German musician who arranged and composed music for computer games and demos during the 16-bit computer era .
During his school days, Hippel experimented with the C64 . He later belonged to the group The Exceptions (short: TEX) under the pseudonym Mad Max , which developed demos for the Atari ST .
Hippel's music was often based on classics of the C64 music by other composers and was rearranged by him for the ST sound chip YM2149 . Hippel was able to exhaust the YM2149 very far through his own programming, so that, for example, sounds similar to the SID used in the C64 were achieved, which seemed not possible with the sound chip of the Atari ST.
Hippel's client for the implementation of the background music for commercial game titles from other platforms as well as for original compositions for games was mainly Thalion Software . Hippel published remixes of these works on the CD album Give it a try .
As a member of TEX, like the entire group, he was well known in the Atari ST demo scene . Publications by TEX, such as LCD (Little Color Demo) or BIG-Demo (Best In Galaxy) , show the Atari ST's undreamt-of potential through technical tricks. B. using display list interrupts to display the entire color palette of an ST on the screen at the same time, although this was not intended by the hardware developers.
The demo group TEX later joined the alliance The Union and made a contribution to The Union Demo .
Hippel is currently active in the logistics industry.