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.
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This month, in 1983, Look-In magazine began publishing a Star Fleet comic, which ran for 32 weeks in the UK.
Can't, or won't? |  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.  The 1981 article on Star Fleet in Fantastic Films magazine, which is quite a nice article (especially given that it came over a year before the show arrived on television in the UK) has been re-scanned using the magazine mode that turned out useful in scanning the French comics.
My initial attempt was four years ago and the magazine has been sitting on a shelf since then and can now be filed away.
I'm not sure where I got the placeholder scans for the last 2 pages.
They were pretty good, if a little discoloured in places, but the new scans are a lot bigger and sharper.
A very small part of the big Dai-X illustration disappears into the spine of the magazine sadly.
I will try and scan it again next week, if I find time, to see if I can fix that, but the magazine may need the staples taking out and scanning as an individual page, which is not my first preference.  Another year, another book of the French Star Fleet comics scanned ...
I think they turned out fine.
The dimensions of the images are not all the same, as some of the illustrations stick out of the normal bounds of the images on the page.
All images have been given auto contrast and tone in photoshop, which didn't seem to add much.
Auto colour has been applied in cases where it made the image brighter or more colourful.
Otherwise, the effects were unhelpful.
The ones with de-screening applied have been re-done.
I will try and do volume 3 by the end of January.
The method of using the magazine mode, rather than photo (which delivers great results, but expects a smaller document) should make the scanning of the remaining instalments, plus other magazines that I have lying around that bit less time-consuming.  Well, the great Easter slug hunt that has taken all year is almost at an end, with only a few very hard-to-find slugs missing from our collection.
I saw someone on the stagnant demesne of reddit asking about an overview of what slugs were made by the original company that took up the license: Jakks Pacific.
I thought it wasn't a bad idea to make one so I put together all the product images from the archive pages of toywiz.com.
The first image covers waves 1-5 and there are separate images for waves 6 and 7, where the number of re-issues makes things a bit more complicated.  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.
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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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