Jonathan Dunn
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Jonathan Dunn is a British former musician and programmer who was the main sound designer at Ocean Software.
His video game music career started back in 1987 when he worked for Ocean Software. He stayed after Infogrames bought Ocean in 1998 and then left in 2000. He worked at Electronic Arts after that before finally retiring from his video game music career. Dunn liked to compose music on the Commodore 64 because he made the Ocean Software drivers and it is the computer he began making music on. In the 90s, Dunn liked creating his music on the SNES. The soundtrack that Dunn composed that he likes best is Total Recall (C64). He is known for his outstanding work in Platoon (C64), Rambo III (C64), Jurassic Park (NES) and Robocop (CPC).
Contents
Music Composition
Amiga
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants (AMI) uses the Acoustic Bass (A. Bass) sample from a Korg M1. The other instruments sound like they were waveforms made from the Commodore 64. Dunn used OctaMED like the other composers at Ocean as well as other drivers.
Commodore 64
Dunn first used Martin Galway's driver, then Paul Hughes' driver, and finally his own driver written in 6502 assembly, entering his music as data statements and assembling them using the Ocean Dev System.
NES
Dunn wrote his own audio driver in 6502 assembly for the NES and named it Music Driver V1.0. He had this to say about his NES music composition:
While a great deal of the NES games he composed did not have credits, his name can be found in the driver portion of the ROM data, however, this isn't a guarantee that he composed the music, as other Ocean employees used the driver as well. The text reads:
MUSIC DRIVER V1.0 (C)JONATHAN DUNN & OCEAN SOFTWARE
SNES
Dunn wrote his own music driver and a converter, composed the majority using MIDI, converted it to data statements, and tweaked those.
Game Boy Color
Dunn uses MusyX sound tool by Factor 5.
Game Boy Advance
For Tiny Toon Adventures: Wacky Stackers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Dunn uses MusyX sound tool by Factor 5.
For Pinky and The Brain: The Master Plan, since he didn't have access to GAX sound engine by Shin'en Multimedia, Manfred Linzner programmed music and converted his samples to same engine.
For his later scores, Dunn uses Engine Software, a GBA sound driver developed by Jan-Lieuwe Koopmans.
For All-Star Baseball 2004, Dunn uses Software Creations' custom sound driver by Neil Millstone.
Gameography
Picture Gallery
Unknown source.
Unknown source.
Facebook profile picture.
Addams Family staff photo.
Links
- mobygames.com/developer/jonathan-dunn/credits/developerId,31702/ - MobyGames.
- twitter.com/ukjondunn - Twitter.
- atlantis-prophecy.org/recollection/?load=interviews&id_interview=92 - Interview from October 3, 2010.
- [1] - Interview from June 2, 2020.
