Exile Tribute: Did you know...?

Listed here are some facts relating to the Exile game of which you may be suprised or interested to learn. You may know more and therefore may like to contact me about adding this fact or piece of trivia.

1.  A  special  'Exile'  emulator  was  written...

In 1995 an emulator was released which was specifically intended to run Exile, thereby allowing owners of 32-bit Acorn machines to play the 8-bit game. This has since been removed from BBC Micro archive sites owing to copyright legalities. Quoting the poster of the software:-

Well, here it is the holy grail of all newsgroup postings. After literaly years of dedication and mind bending toil I've got together a version of exile and emulator that works (yes I know you're not even remotly worthy) and it's been sitting around in the dark recesses of my hard drive so long I've decided to do something with it. I know I shouldn't really post 80 odd kbytes to a newsgroup, but I can't upload it anywhere because it has to include a full copy of the game which probably isn't legal, although I'm sure nobody gives a damn.

I understand this was a modified version of Acorn's !65Host BBC Emulator but nonetheless the release was noteworthy in that !65Host could not deal with many commercial games, particuarly Exile.

2.  Triax  has  two  patterns  of  behaviour

In the game, Triax, the captor and murderer of the Pericle's crew behaves in two ways - cowardly and curageous. Is this a clever way of implying Triax's instability, a split-personality or could there be two figures present on the lanet Phoebus as the authors of the solution propose?

I recall no mention of a second Triax in the novella but given his cloning exploits, this features could also suggest he has succeeded in duplicating himself.

3.  There  is  an  earthquake...

For the BBC version at least, an earthquake is visible after the player commits an act of destruction towards the end of the game!

4.  Hidden  extras  for  the  later  versions...

Earlier Amiga versions contained certain extra objects not found within the BBC Micro version and associated help messages in a cryptic form which were apparently not used in the game unless a hack was applied. To see the messages click here.

5.  3D  Exile

T.R.Schmidt has envisaged, as Peter Irvin before him, a 3D version of Exile. I personally thought this would detract from the gameplay but looking at his idea I'm not so sure. I got the impression that Peter Irvin was similarly impressed. For convenience it's included below.

Superior I am told ran a competition at the time of release of Exile where the first person to complete the game won a certificate and a prize of 150 pounds sterling!

7.  Foreign  versions

The market for the Amiga versions was such that the game was I'm told was modified appropriately for each territory. I have personally seen a German Amiga OCS version with German help messages.

8.  Real-time  updates

Looking through the map as generated by the mapper program (James Bonfield), there are certain differences to what the player actually encounters during the game. This indicates that the game modifies the map itself as it runs. Also not all objects appear on the map in the mapper program presumably to avoid unnecessary time spend updating them when they have no bearing on the gameplay unless the player is in the vicinity. However the starting positions of Triax's four robots for example are plotted indicating that their positions are monitored throughout the game and some trigger causes them to start teleporting or at least start teleporting at a greater frequency during the game thus explaining why they are rarely seen in the initial stages.