Lethal Xcess XL
Preview
Let's take a look at a project which was resurrected 4 years ago. As you can
easily learn from the project pages of the Lethal Xcess website, several new
enemies have been pixeled and a whole new level has been started. There were
lots of open questions, since most of the source code isn't commented and some
important files were missing. Also the way how to generate the game disk was
long forgotten and not documented anywhere. Most of the problems are solved now
and it's even possible to generate a new game disk. The master copies of Lethal
Xcess were originally written with a lame Amiga generated disk protection since
the processing laboratory experienced difficulties with Sunnyboys own copy
protection which was created with a modified SF 314 drive. However now we can
write a working disk with a plain ST, leaving out the copy protection.
Beside this general advance the project is on hold atm. While designing a new
level it was discovered that the custom file system used on Lethal Xcess is only
supporting a very limited amount of files. In fact it was modified that way to
use less memory since the file allocation table for both disks is always kept in
memory. Currently the author is quite demotivated to continue, since coding
floppy routines was never his favourite task. Floppy routines were Sunnyboys
domain, who spent several months if not years working on them for several demos
and his copy program (Turbo-Booster). Despite that fact we are not sure if
Lethal Xcess should support Gemdos loading as it will kill the possibility to
run it on 512k machines. This issue occurs due to the current memory position of
the main program, residing at $1000, it won't be possible to get away from that
address without causing memory and perhaps performance problems on small
machines.
What else can be said? Once motivation comes back and the ST(E) version is
finished it will also be a lot of work to port the game to Falcon and other
machines.
Cyclone/X-Troll for Alive 2004-08-11
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Game Title: Lethal Xcess XL
Genre: Shoot'em up
Supported Machines: [x] ST [x] STE [x] Amiga (OCS) [ ] TT [?] Falcon [?] CT60
Minimum Memory: [x] 512 kb [ ] 1 MB [ ] 2MB [ ] 4 MB [ ] more
HDD Installable: [ ] yes [x] no
Coding Language: M68k
Description: Improved and extended version of the classic shoot'em up
Game Design: Cyclone/X-Troll
Coding: Cyclone/X-Troll, Sunnyboy/X-Troll
Artwork: Cyclone/X-Troll, Tanis/TCB
Sound: Mad Max/TEX, TAO/Cream
Current State: Paused due to lack of motivation and support
Planned Release: Not known
Website: http://lethalxcess.atari.org/
Contact: cxt(at)atari(dot)org
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