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Technical Details
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In the shoot 'em up genre, Lethal Xcess was a real good game on the Commodore Amiga, but I think it's still the best shooter on the Atari ST(E) machine. Lethal Xcess looks for all kind of Hardware in your machine. Every possible advantage is taken to make it look as good as possible. To achieve this aim, the individual machine is tested for the build in hardware and specialized routines do their work to get the very best out of it. At least the ST version is completely identical to the Amiga version. |
Features
- Two player simultaneous game
- 35 different weapons
- Smooth scrolling
- Tons of sprites (>100 at the same time)
- Dual-Format (same disk runs on Amiga and ST)
- Full PAL-resolution on Amiga and ST
- Full usage of build in memory to preshift graphics
- Savable and printable hiscores
- 7 Voice Digital music (intro and end-sequence)
- Digital sound effects
- Digitized speech
Atari ST(E)
- Interrupts to gain more colors
- Sync-scrolling or STE-scrolling depending on machine
- Blitter support
- Stereo Sound on STE
Commodore Amiga
- Copper support for more colors
- Hardware scrolling
- Blitter support
- Hardware sprite support
- Stereo Sound
Technical Comparison with Wings of Death
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Wings of Death
(WOD) is a classic Shoot 'em up, which was coded by Marc Rosocha and has been released
by Thalion. Thalion
was a German software company, located in the city of Gütersloh, which employed
only the finest ST(E) demo coders. Lethal Xcess (LX) was developed by Claus Frein and Heinz Rudolf. It was published by Eclipse which is in fact on person: Marc Rosocha. Marc did a great job, on Wings of Death it had been the best shooter on the ST and we feel honored to be the coders of the follow up. The following table shows you the main technical information for the
ST(E)-versions of both games. We compare the Atari version here because both
games are Atari games in the first place. The unit px means pixel (picture
element) which refers to a single dot of a picture. |
| WOD | LXS | |||
| Screen width | 288 | px | 320 | px |
| Screen height | 200 | px | 256 | px |
| Panel height | 24 | px | 10 | px |
| Playfield width | 288 | px | 320 | px |
| Playfield height | 176 | px | 246 | px |
| Playfield size | 50,688 | px | 78,720 | px |
| Sprites | 95 | 150 (200) | ||
| FPS | 3 | 3 or 2 | ||
| Sync-Rate | 60/50 | Hz | 50 | Hz |
| Hardware support |
||||
| Minimum RAM | 512 | kb | 512 | kb |
| STE/Amiga colours | yes | yes | ||
| Rasters (TIB) | yes | yes | ||
| PAL-Screen | no | yes | ||
| Sync-Scrolling | no | yes | ||
| STE-Scrolling | no | yes | ||
| Preshifting | yes | yes | ||
| Blitter | yes | yes | ||
| PSG-Sound | yes | yes | ||
| STE-Sound | yes | yes | ||
| Centronics-Sound | yes | yes | ||
| Digital FX | yes | yes | ||
| Digital Speech | yes | yes | ||
| Dual Format | no | yes | ||
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As you can guess from the technical values above, Lethal Xcess uses an advanced technology compared to Wings of Death, but you wouldn't want it the
other way, didn't you? Time never stands still and technology evolves rapidly.
And don't forget Lethal Xcess was released 2 years after Wings of Death. There where new technologies available at this time. When Ilja of Level 16 (Andreas Franz) invented the overscan-screen to the Atari, it was a rather short way to develop a scrolling that uses the same technology to manipulate the video-address. The Cuddly Demo by TCB was the first Demo that used sync-scrolling. The main menu and the overscan scroller hit the Atari-scene like a hammer. TCB had done the impossible. Many overscan and sync-scrolling demos followed and Thalion released two games that used sync-scrolling (Enchanted Land and Leavin' Teramis) which where technically brilliant at this time. Nobody would have expected that the Atari ST was capable of doing a scrolling 50 FPS game. Sync-Scrolling in addition to other border-technology allowed Lethal Xcess to
increase the size of the playfield, which is equal to the scrolling part of the screen,
it measures 55
percent more than in Wings of Death. Of course you loose performance because you
have to restore the background when you draw sprites on it, but that's nothing
compared to drawing the whole screen from scratch.
In addition to the bigger playfield, Lethal Xcess allows 58 percent more
sprites at the same time and it's able to run in less frames than Wings of Death
(look for fast-mode on our cheats-page). This article will be continued... |
The picture shows the playfield area of Lethal Xcess (background) compared to Wings of
Death (red frame). Marc had left two 16 pixel
wide black stripes on the left and right border for performance reasons. The same
thing with the panel, which reduced the playfield size by 24
pixels. The panel is not shown.