X-Bomber the Game

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.

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I managed to ditch the Apache autoindexing on my home server for the 'large file area' (which really needs a better name). It was fine, but what I really wanted was to get the media subsystem from xbomber.co.uk running on the server. I tried to get SLIR running on it as well but I ran into trouble with that. It feels a bit like there might be something funny about PHP's GD extension in my XAMPP installation, but that needs more investigation. It doesn't matter at the moment because that server is only being used for file listings and videos, rather than images. I had a cut-down version of xbomber.co.uk's code that runs from the filesystem and PHP and has no database dependency that was used for another project long ago. It was much easier (infact it was surprisingly easy) to adapt it to run on the home server. I managed to make some optimisations while I was busy with it. The PHP is a bit less convoluted in places, which is something that can be implemented into the main site when I have a moment.

Space Magazine Uchusen Yearbook 2013

I remember picking this up at around the same time as the Tokyo exhibition was on in 2022.
This magazine dates back to 2013 but the copy that I got from FronJapan is in really terrific condition.

I wasn't too sure what to expect in here: other than it had some Star Fleet material.
I scanned the cover and the poster, which is inside the front cover.

Later on in the magazine, there are some more interesting features about Star Fleet ...
There are some good photographs of the toys that date back to when the show was on the air in Japan.
There are some really good reproductions of Japanese fan artwork based on the show.
There are some really good stills from the series, as well as some photographs of what happened to the Dai-X and X-Bomber models after the show.
There are some photographs of their modified appearance on the site already, but these photos in the magazine are different.

I will try and get those scanned sooner than next week, but given that I'm travelling around a bit, it may well have to wait until then.
This magazine is unusually tall and so I decided just to photomerge each page to give Photoshop more data to work from.

I scanned the cover and Star Fleet bits from the Starlog magazine that I found in my office the other day. I have another copy of this one, plus the December one at FromJapan. I'm going to use up my 60 days of storage before I ship them across to here. I decided to scan and photomerge the 4-page-size poster from the instalment that I have. It was never a high priority because we already had a fantastic scan of it from Vanessa, who was a terrific forum member of ours. This new scan is made up of about 8 different scans, photomerged in various stages and has turned out quite well. When the December 1980 instalment arrives, I'll do the same thing with that one. I noticed an interesting image from Star Fleet on page 24 of this one. This copy opens at a jaunty angle, so getting a straight scan of the double-page spread on which it features has proven a little difficult today, but I will upload it when it is ready.

There we go, that didn't take too long, doing it the current way ... I saw on ebay.fr that there are quite a few volume 4s for sale in much better condition than the one I found years ago. Looking around my office, I found that I already have one of the Starlog magazines that I just bought on FromJapan. Aside from the poster with the characters, there is basically nothing about Star Fleet in that instalment. There is a small image from the show in a list of sci-fi and effects shows that were airing at the time. I also found some magazines featuring info about Star Fleet, from around the time when the exhibition appeared in Tokyo. I'll try and get something done with scanning what there is in the Starlog magazine on Friday.

I made a perfunctory start at scanning volume 4 of the French comics. The fourth instalment was almost nowhere to be found in my office until I searched a drawer much higher up in the huge wardrobe where my Star Fleet collection of tapes, books and DVDs, Laserdiscs and all sorts of other things lives. When I found it, I was reminded that the copy of volume 4 that I have is not in such terrific condition and quite a few of the inside pages are creased. I don't know what I did in Photoshop to make the scan of the cover look as good as it does by comparison. In reality, it is in rough shape. That fourth one was quite hard to find when I went looking for those books and this one that I had to track down on rakuten.fr was the only one I could get. So I decided to scan the contents from the second "album" compilation, which looks exactly the same but the pages are in much better condition. Oddly enough, in Album 2, the fourth story is printed first, and the third one is printed last, which was a bit confusing, but it means that the page numbers line up exactly, as though I was scanning it from the original (damaged) book. While that's getting done, here's a picture of a great present that I received at Christmas, which is a colour-changing light with a little Enterprise inside a shiny block of resin. It powers itself from a USB cable with a built-in switch and has a little remote to change the way it lights up.

A while ago, the site had a few tweaks to its meta tags to try and clear the below behaviour with mobile browsers: html - On mobile, font size is different depending on the number of paragraphs - Stack Overflow I only very seldom access the site on a mobile browser other than Windows Mobile Edge. For all its faults that are especially apparent today, its browser has always rendered this site really well. I was playing with various browsers available in Android a while ago, and noticed that the way the page was rendered was inconsistent. Since the change, the site was rendering much better in Chrome, Firefox and Brave on Android. I've never found browsing on anything smaller than a notebook very fulfilling, but a lot of people use phones as their sole means to access the internet and that problem needed fixing. More recently, the theme selector was updated, so that the colour selector bar indicates better which colour is chosen. I also wanted to create a 'frutiger aero' style orb as a graphic for the theme selector page, which I think turned out alright.

I would like to share with you, what I thought was, an interesting video on youtube, about Star Trek Deep Space 9. The delivery of the information is undermined by the bad language of the presenters. Do not watch it with children in the room. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season One (part 1) - re:View This video was released at the same time as premiere of Star Trek Academy and completely devastated it in terms of number of views and like/dislike response. With nutrek fatigue finally reaching an advanced stage, it may be that Paramount finally relents and gives us an HD release of DS9, and this video gives an idea of how this could surpass the TNG blu-rays: being presented in 16:9 without any cropping.

This would've been done last night, but I'd managed not to scan page 10. With some of the pages, 'auto colour' had a positive effect, so there are some pages that are presented with and without photoslop's auto-colour enabled. This is the first time that I'd looked at this instalment closely and it's interesting to see which parts of comic mirrored the TV series and where certain alterations were made...

The scanning of volume 3 of the French comics is complete. I have to go through and process them. It would probably have been done by now, but I've been doing a playthrough of Descent 3, trying to explore all the levels. Moon's Descendarium was very helpful for speeding up the process. At the same time, Sectorgame hosts some great resources for Descent. I got my Sidewinder force feedback controller set up on my desk upstairs next to the scanner for the first time in ages. The two Starlog magazines have arrived at FromJapan's warehouse, but I have 60 days of storage there, so I might try and pick up one or two other items to consolidate with them for shipping. I saw on youtube today that, last year, they'd found the models of two main missing characters from Tugs and brought them all together for display: They found Top Hat! TUGS props reunited - YouTube

The web interface on my downstairs server got a refresh the other week and I decided that the next step should be to get it SSL-secured since a lot of browsers create an enormous pandemonium now if a site lacks a CA-signed certificate. I got a 1-year certificate as a test from dynu.com. To me, the whole business of CA-signed certificates, which is what pacifies modern browsers, is a performative nonsense. There's any number of ways in which someone might get their hands on those certificates and install them on their own server. Changing the domain name to point to another server in the first place would be far more difficult in my view. The process really emphasised to me how these practices are thrown around now and complicate matters, yet offer nothing more than a placebo level of security. Anyhow, this procedure here for adding the certificate into XAMPP was a great walkthrough that worked for me right away: XAMPP SSL Configuration and Installation Guide for Windows One thing I do not recommend is following this article, which google gave me, and has all the hallmarks of being an AI product: How to Install an SSL Certificate on XAMPP - DEV Community Once I followed this, step-by-step, the Apache service wouldn't start afterwards, so I had to undo all the changes to the configuration files in notepad. Well, now it works, but I'll keep the default link on the site set to HTTP for a week just to test it a little further. The reason that I'm doing this is to put my ducks in a row. I have a feeling that independent websites are going to face even more fun and games this year. We've already had DDOS attacks aimed at all message boards, legislative changes to gatekeep online content, and enormous increases in hardware and energy costs. I'm not sure what comes after that, but I'm sure there'll be something. Starlog At the same time, I've had a little bidding war to get copies of the Japanese Starlog magazines that contain some features on X Bomber. We already have a really great scan of the poster featuring the characters from one issue, done by Vanessa: one of our forum veterans. I seriously doubt that I'll be able to improve on that. I think the document was sent off to be scanned professionally. In any case, I'll be able to see if there's anything else in the magazine about X Bomber, and I can get a better scan of the white-on-black Dai-X cutaway that's in the other issue, which is really just a larger variation of the one in the UK Fantastic Films magazine.

X-Bomber the Game

Introduction »

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Space Magazine Uchusen Yearbook 2013

Starlog Poster Scan

France Star Fleet Comics - Volume 4

(Slow) Progress

Site Tweaks

DS9 Review/Documentary

French Comics - Volume 3

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SSL for Krystal File Area

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