It
makes me Shake
by the Spiceboys.
It's nice to know that some fake crews are still out there, even after the
Reservoir Frogs have croaked their last, and the Senior Dads have slumped
back in their pee-stained recliners for good. It is with a hearty Swedish
styled "HALLOOOO THERE!!"that we welcome back the Spice Boys for an overdue
revival.
The truth is perhaps a little more complicated than a simple fake-group
revival. As it turns out, a certain Swedish coding god was sufficiently
annoyed by Moredhelclaiming it was not possible for a "total fullscreen
with dual playfields and wiztom quality replay", to be coded by this Swedish
coding god on an STe.
So he made this little intro, and bunged it under the Spiceboys label as it
was not meant to be a serious production, and in fact was meant as a
'tribute' to Moredhel.
What you get is what you will mostly see in the upcoming screenshot. There
are some important points to remember. The screengrab has been coaxed down
to the standard ST resolution of 320 x 200 pixels, but in real life, it is
using overscan rather nicely to a resolution of 384 x 268 pixels, which is
quite an improvement. The other thing which you won't get any impression of
from the screenshot, is the fact that you are only seeing the top third of
the babe. In the demo, she is a very large sprite which bounces up and down
the screen. In fact there is quite a lot of movement all going on at the
same time which you won't see in a static screengrab either.
So we start with a plain credits screen with 'Asn'claiming responsibility
for code and graphics, further graphics from 'Mojangen', and the tune from
'Kuckeliku'. Dabbing a key starts the intro properly and a large and chunky
(but nicely shaded Spice Boys logo drifts from right to left across the
screen using the STe hardscroll, a YM-generated crescendo of sound builds up
and fades down again. and then we are into the main part of the demo. Time
for that screengrab...
Let's separate out the individual parts of this rather busy screen. In the
background, we have the ULM-style dual playfield patterns wobbling and
distorting. The rather nice 16 colour lady is moving up and down the screen
constantly, in all her expensively scanty underthing-clad glory. The lower
third of the screen is dominated by a bar going across the screen displaying
the name of the makers of this intro, and a shaded cube spinning around in
the centre. Immediately below that is a small infotext scroller which
displays the usual greets and credits type stuff.
There is music. The 'Wiztom quality replay'refers to a short sample
constantly replayed through the STe DMA hardware at 25khz, in a manner very
similar to that used in the Brain-Damage demo, one would imagine.
For a release under a fake label, it is rather better than you would expect,
and only suffers from being too short and over too quickly. Most
interestingly, the Swedish coding god discussed earlier in the article
reckons that there is still about 50% of the cpu time left unused! This adds
to my long-term view that the STe hardware features, out of the whole
ST/Falcon family remain the least understood, exploited, and stretched.
In fact I'm left wondering if the next major release from some deceased
hackers might be aimed at kicking the STe hardware in a manner not seen for
a long time?!
Positives..
Welcome return of old fake crew.
Pretty kick-ass in an enhanced oldschool style.
Looks like a proper STe screen.
And this is still only 50% of the STe!
Left wanting more..
Negatives..
Left wanting more.
But otherwise, nope..
CiH,for Alive Mag,April '07.
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