X-Bomber the GameIntroduction »Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game: a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series: Star Fleet
It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions.
News »  I've been playing a bit of catch-up and have expanded Phil's folder with a lot of great artworks.
There are some Christmas themed ones, plus some new ones of the Alliance ships, which I think have come out really well.
At the same time, I'll be finishing off the scanning of second of the four French comic books this week.  I've been tidying up my 'New Folder' on my desktop where things live until I decide where things are going on the site or elsewhere.
Things have been added all-over the site, including some Star Fleet video files from Nitter so it's worth having a tour around the site to see if you can find anything new.
I was sent this great image by Dan H, which google and tineye can't seem to source.
It may be from the X Bomber exhibition catalogue, but in any case is a fantastic image of the effects team that worked on X Bomber.  I would like to congratulate Ben Page on finishing his review of each episode of Star Fleet and just in time for the next millenium new year.
This write-up is a great one as always, and particularly based. I have been doing quite a bit of work on the Krystal file area.
I have managed to make it look for and load (if present) some description files located in each folder, and it can also load specific banner images from folders.
Even getting it to do this on a Windows server, rather than a UNIX one took quite a bit of doing because of the differences in how the platforms handle file paths.
It has been a useful learning process, however.
This basic functionality is the first step along the way to making my Windows box more similar in functionality that of xbomber.co.uk's media subsystem, which was recently re-worked a bit internally to make it run on PHP 8.
The XAMPP deployment runs PHP 8 and, with the hassle that Krystal gave me this year, I like the idea of making this website ready to fall back to being hosted on a home server, if it becomes absolutely necessary.
You may have seen lately that certain memory vendors are no longer providing memory to the consumer market and an enormous percentage of memory wafers are going to be committed to expanding 'AI' infrastructure.
A similar situation is developing regarding supplies of CPUs, storage devices and graphics adapters.
It would not surprise me enormously, if, by the time our hosting renewal arrives in February, our hosting company had hiked the prices up substantially to address increasing costs of maintaining their infrastructure.
Some of these deals are set to last until 2030 so we have to proceed on the basis that this will be a long-term problem.
My current plan is to renew our current business hosting arrangement for a further 2 years and use that time to see to what extent we can offload some things onto my home server.
It would be nice to streamline the two services into a single solution, but at the same time, I like the idea of not keeping all our eggs in one basket.
What might be the best thing is to have essentially feature parity between the site running on xbomber.co.uk and the one on my old box Krystal, to make the cutover between the services as seamless as possible.  Published Feb 1980, Televi-kun
Illustration Size B3
Artist Masami Watanabe
Source Katayama Kotoku (Nitter) This board game was published in a 1980 edition of TV-Kun.
I think there must be a mistake at the source, since TV-Kun started doing X Bomber features in November 1980 and X Bomber was first broadcast in October.
It looks that it was folded down to quarter-size and included in one of the books.
I have all six TV-Kuns that had X Bomber features, but none of them came with this included.  We've managed to reach the shortest day of the year already.
It's not long until Christmas now.
I want to wish all Star Fleeters and all visitors who come our way, a wonderful, merry and peaceful Christmas.  MDK 2 is a game that I hadn't played in absolutely donkey's years.
I originally played it at school from a Russian copy of the disk that a friend gave me.
The characters and setting of the game are terrific.
It has a tongue-in-cheek, Sam and Max style comedy that it blends with some great action and combat against the aliens.
MDK 2 improves over the original game, in that it allows you to play as all three protagonists: (Max, Doc and Kurt), rather than just as Kurt.
Max, the six-legged robot dog is great fun to play as because he has great firepower and his levels require very little finesse: except where you're called to use the jet pack.
Doc Hawkins' levels that frequently involve defusing bombs and jumping around can become a little tiresome in places.
Gift of Game have an updated version of the game that runs natively on Windows 11.
I tried to install the original build of the game from 2000 and it did not want to run.
I initially had a little bit of difficulty with the GOG build, but that problem was my fault.
With these new laptops, you can't change the power setting via Windows.
It's often locked out in by the BIOS and I have the machine turned down to its lowest performance setting to keep it nice and quiet.
MDK 2's launcher has a nice "Get Info" button, which showed that, as a result, Windows was forcing it to use the Intel Iris graphics, rather than the GeForce card in the machine.
As a result, I was getting some weird graphical glitches that were also having an impact on gameplay.
Camera shake was wildly exaggerated. Distant objects would suddenly appear out of nowhere, including enemies and their projectiles and skyboxes, cloaked enemies and other textures would get slightly messed up.
You can force Windows in Settings to use the 'proper' graphics card on specific apps and if you force it to use the GeForce card on the launcher and main game executable, it works perfectly.  The topic of the French comics came up the other day, which led onto the subject of how I long ago said that I would scan the second of the four books.
I'm about half-way through scanning the second book and I'll start to process that batch in photoshop.
The .co.uk domain has been renewed, as it does often come in useful for allowing people to connect to the server.
The lengths I had to go to, to get into the accounts area, were remarkable.
They've made it so secure now that nobody can get in, including the customers.
I have uploaded a new version of Suzy Jones' Star Fleet Trinity story.
I read the original and I couldn't find a problem with it, but this version is even better.
You can find it in the Fan Stories section.
At the same time, I finally got all the extensions needed to continue to work on X-Bomber the Game.
I've been quietly chipping away at the internal trains for the space fortress.
There are a lot of sprites for the different sorts of trains and their various segments, and getting the sprites to look right is taking some time.  At the antiques shop in Powburn, they quite often have some interesting Gerry Anderson items.
I scanned these nice postcards from 2011, of which there are six.
The other two: Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, I'll scan when I have some time with my scanner.  Congratulations to the Star Fleet facebook group!
They have racked up 1,600 members as of the other day, and I understand that the number has since gone up again to 1,700.
I think it's great that they're creating such interest in a show that's 45 years old and is streamed and televised nowhere.
Well, you can stream it from here.
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Merry Festivities and Fixes!
Merry Festivities and Fixes!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
An actual Star Fleet video from me, it's been a minute!
Perhaps a Mac port
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