Claus Frein

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Claus Frein (born 1969 in Germany) is a programmer who's most famous product is surely Lethal Xcess. Claus Frein started coding on the famous Commodore 64 and switched to the Atari ST and Amiga in the middle of the 80s. On those machines he developed several important development tools like the "Amiga on a wire" development system. Many of these tools were only available to a small circle of co-workers.

From 1990-1991 he teamed up with Heinz Rudolf to write the technically brilliant shoot'em up Lethal Xcess for Atari and Amiga. The game was published by Eclipse Software Design and was sold in Germany in 1991. Due to management failures it was never marketed outside Germany despite the fact that it got high rankings even from British and French game magazines. Lethal Xcess can be downloaded for free, from the official Lethal Xcess website.

Besides Lethal Xcess Claus Frein worked on lots of Atari ST demos for the demo crew X-Troll, where he was known under the nickname Sunnyboy. In 1993 he quit the gaming industry. Today he is working as a system administrator.

Even if Claus Frein wrote games and demos, his main focus were always applications. When questioned about his favourite game during an interview he answered "1st Word". He wrote several utilities for the Atari ST range of computers, most of them addressing mass storage devices. The most famous utilities were a copy program called "Turbobooster" and a Makro-Assembler which was supposed to replace Turbo-Assembler on the Atari ST. He also was involved with the development of two chipmusic Editors ("Medi" and "MV2000") and a special modified operating system for the Atari ST.

[edit] Released products

1989 Medi, a music editor to create very cpu friendly chipmusics on the Atari ST
1990 MV2000, a chipmusic editor which was able to produce newer effects like buzzer bass, etc.
1990 The Turbobooster, the fastest disk-copy-program for the Atari ST
1990 TOS 1.07, a modified version of the Atari ST operating System
1991 Amiga on a Wire Tools, a devkit which allows to program an Amiga from the Atari
1991 Lethal Xcess, a shooter for Atari ST(E) and Amiga
1993 MASM, a makro assembler which preassembled your code directly when typing it