Xenon Amiga 1988 The Bitmap Brothers

Xenon Amiga 1988

The Bitmap Brothers released Xenon for Amiga and Atari ST in 1988. Xenon is a Xevious-like vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up.

The successor to 1988 Xenon is Xenon 2 Megablast 1989.

Xenon was designed and programmed by Steve Kelly. Xenon graphics were drawn by Mike Montgomery, and its audio was composed by David Whittaker. The digitized video of Captain Xod that announces the current sector is Eric Matthews of the Bitmap Brothers.

The ST version of Xenon has much weaker sound than the Amiga version, but looks and plays almost identically.

In Xenon players assume the role of Federation fighter, Darrian, as he battles the Xenites by ground and by air over four sectors consisting of four zones each. Via spacebar or joystick players can seemlessly transform their battletank into a fighter jet, and vice versa.

Xenon Weapons System acquired via Power Pills:

• Cannon, Twin-cannons, Homing Missile, Laser, Side Lasers, Side Cannons
• Armor, Fuel, Zapper, Movement Rate, Weapon Range, Rotating Balls (max 3)
• Spacebar or joystick "waggle" shifts between jet and tank

The scrolling playfield dimensions for each level are 208x4608 pixels. Due to thick screen-borders and a sidepanel the active drawspace is only 208x192.

Note that Xenon does not even begin to tap the Amiga's chipset. Still, there wasn't much to choose from in 1988.

Xenon manual: 14 pages.

Xenon IBM PC 1988

Lothlorien ported Xenon to IBM PC MS-DOS 2.0 in 1988. Xenon was one of the first great vertically-scrolling shoot 'em ups on IBM PC. The IBM PC version of Xenon was programmed by Ste Cork. Graphics by Lee Cawley. PC Xenon audio was converted by Paul Tonge and Tony Williams.

Xenon ran on i808x microprocessors and 384 kbytes RAM and displayed in 16-color EGA 320x200. However, it clearly does not take advantage of the EGA palette range.

Xenon was distributed on 1x 3.5" 720kB DD diskettes or 2x 5.25" 360kB DS DD floppy disks. Xenon installs to hard disk drive via "copy *.* c:\". The install size is 700 kbytes (28 files).

And yes, that is a CGA titlescreen and EGA in-game graphics.

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