Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!unix.cis.pitt.edu!gvlv2!faatcrl!jimb
From: jimb@faatcrl.UUCP (Jim Burwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Want Shadow of the Beast II info
Keywords: Help!
Message-ID: <108@faatcrl.UUCP>
Date: 31 Aug 90 11:24:08 GMT
References: <1990Aug28.002121.10666@contact.uucp> <7628@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Organization: FAA Technical Center, Atlantic City NJ
Lines: 43

kuan@iris.ucdavis.edu (Frank [Who me?] Kuan) writes:


>I was just about to order it, but I remembered that SBII was made by
>the people who made the unfriendliest dos in the known universe.

Being a bit more adventurous, I actually bought the game at a retail
store.  I figured Psygnosis probably figured out how to write games that
work on a 68010 by now, and even if they didn't, I could just chalk it up as
an expensive T-shirt :-).

Anyway, to my mild suprise, the thing actually booted up and ran on my
Amiga 500 equiped with a Fatter Agnus with the 1MB CHIP RAM
enabled, 68010 uP, GVP Hard Drive w/ 3MB of FAST RAM.  It didn't even lock
up until I got killed (about 3 seconds after the game started :-) and
it tried to load up the groovy "end-of-game sequence".  Pretty impressive
for the average peice of software coming out of the Europe.  Even more
impressive considering it's from Psygnosis.  And you can actually see
the "end-of-game sequence" if you boot up with the "NTSC 512K CHIP w/ FAST 
RAM" option from the Palboot disk I got from abcfd20.larc.nasa.gov
(boy.  That really needs an alias!).  But even using that, you can only
see the end-sequence once.  The next time it tries to load the sequnce, the 
machine locks up.  So I usually turn off the end-sequence before starting
the game.  

Of course, if it wasn't from Psygnosis, I'd expect it to do reasonable
things like use both disk drives, take full advantage of the machine's
resources (ie: load as much of the data into RAM as possible, minimizing
repeated disk access.  Detect whether the machine is running in NTSC or
PAL instead of hard-coding it [which would make distribution easier too]), 
the ability to save the current position of the game to make playing the game 
practical for all us poor unfortunate people who don't have the time to 
complete the game in one sitting, etc.  But that's probably asking for too
much :-).  I should be happy it even runs on a non-vanilla machine.

C'ya,
Jim

-- 
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