The reality is, if I didn't actually have to have a game in there yeah, I could have had the nicely pre-computed scrolling doing it's thing, looking like the Amiga version ( I already had this for first prototype ). Although of course, doing this reduced the overall CPU time available but was necessary to get the additional colors to get it looking half-way decent. There were similar compromises for the tree-sections ( the 11 layers of parallax sections ), I wrote a copper emulator on Timer B that heavily modified the palette to get all the colors needed, the large trees were all sprites pre-computed. I had custom sprite routines for odd and even boundries for speed (versions that used movep and versions that were just straight movem). For sprites, due to memory constraints, again I couldn't pre-shift those for speed ( as always the fastest way draw was movem.l ), so I used another trick which was movep.l, which allowed you to write the graphics data on odd boundries across the ST interleaved screen. Although I still precomputed the shifted blocks, by carefully arranging the palette so that the odd and even colors were the same for the first 8 colors in the palette it meant that I could draw anything into the first bit-plane and it wouldn't affect the front layer. In the end the version that was used for the underground sections used 1 bit plane for the background layer of parallax and 2 bit planes for the front layer, this allowed each layer to be independently drawn to the screen as fast as possible without having to have a huge pre-compute buffer.
The reality is thought that this wasn't reasonable ( it would have been a 1meg only game versus 512k ).Īfter several iterations/tickes, it was decided that this version would be launched either as 1 meg only or on the STE (and of course then we could use the HW scrolling too). The first version of the game I did used all the same art as the Amiga running at 60/50fps, however, it required an ungodly amount of memory since the most obvious tricks were pre-computing the parallax scrolling ( for the underground section, which was only 2 layers ), then, simply movem.l the tiles to the screen as needed. I know some ST demo scene guys thought it could have been done better and in reality there are areas where it could have been better, however, game development is about compromise and this was the case here. As far as the details, happy to share them. Good questions, Shadow of the Beast did very well on the ST (it was no.1 two years in a row in the sales charts). I now fantasize about including the ST mode in Legacy: ) Has anyone ever completed this game fairly? Seriously! Hell - it's almost impossible even while spamming savestates! The jetpack section is ridiculous, as enemies rush you at speeds impossible to react to, while your gun is limited to firing only three bullets at a time. I now take it as a personal challenge to learn to beat it: ) - proven scientifically fucking impossible! The combination of super-rough collision, broken powerup spawning, overuse of random ground-spike enemies, choppy movement and constant drastic speed fluctuation makes this game absolutely impossible to complete without cheating.
#Ultionus running slow cracked
Some quality programming too - every now and then a potion will be rendered impossible to collect, or a chest wouldn't spawn, and sometimes the skeleton boss would just stop its advance and will sit there like a dolt.Īnd yet - the difficulty has been cracked up to 11! Moreover - it's missing most enemies and even large chunks of the environment. I have recently tried playing the Atari ST version of the game - good god is it freaking terrible! Slow, choppy, no music, bad sound effects, most art has been simplified to the point of being unrecognizable.
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