Mr Joe
PS I'd love to play it!
PPS be happy to test it as well
Perhaps a Mac port
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Crash
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Thanks for that question!
Back-in-the-day, the game worked on Wine, but the runtime has changed many times since then and the project uses a lot of extensions that it didn't back then.
At the moment, it's a bit difficult to find a lot of time to work on the game.
I was planning on getting back to the game this weekend, but that hasn't quite worked out so far.
Porting the game to different OSes has never been a massive focus for me in the past.
People have often wanted it ported to android and various other things.
One thing I can do right now is to let you have the source code and current file structure to go with it.
https://xbomber.co.uk/Build.zip
If you have a copy of Clickteam Fusion, which I doubt is likely to be that expensive these days, and is a very versatile and interesting application, then you can run the Mac OS compiler and see how far that gets.
It also has a very good and supportive forum that has helped me many times in the past.
There are quite a few extensions on it that may block the conversion process, if they aren't supported for the Mac OS runtime.
Failing that, I would get an old Windows laptop from somewhere - even a Windows XP laptop should run it, since it's only DirectX 9.
The game always gets a bit more development time in the colder months, so I can have a look into converting it then.
Moving it to Mac OS X is a lot more feasible in my view than moving it to Android, because how would you control the ship other than tapping on a little screen?
I've played shooters like Tyrian on android phones and it wasn't exactly a great experience.
Back-in-the-day, the game worked on Wine, but the runtime has changed many times since then and the project uses a lot of extensions that it didn't back then.
At the moment, it's a bit difficult to find a lot of time to work on the game.
I was planning on getting back to the game this weekend, but that hasn't quite worked out so far.
Porting the game to different OSes has never been a massive focus for me in the past.
People have often wanted it ported to android and various other things.
One thing I can do right now is to let you have the source code and current file structure to go with it.
https://xbomber.co.uk/Build.zip
If you have a copy of Clickteam Fusion, which I doubt is likely to be that expensive these days, and is a very versatile and interesting application, then you can run the Mac OS compiler and see how far that gets.
It also has a very good and supportive forum that has helped me many times in the past.
There are quite a few extensions on it that may block the conversion process, if they aren't supported for the Mac OS runtime.
Failing that, I would get an old Windows laptop from somewhere - even a Windows XP laptop should run it, since it's only DirectX 9.
The game always gets a bit more development time in the colder months, so I can have a look into converting it then.
Moving it to Mac OS X is a lot more feasible in my view than moving it to Android, because how would you control the ship other than tapping on a little screen?
I've played shooters like Tyrian on android phones and it wasn't exactly a great experience.
Dream big and bold and daring.
You can get controllers that plug into an android phone to turn it into a mini gaming console. Or alternatively run the game in 4:3 with virtual controls on the sides. Though I'm not sure that should be a particularly high priority for you.
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Crash
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That's very true. I've used android machines with all kinds of peripherals. That's a good point.
When people were asking for an android port in the past, they seemed to just want to distil it down to run on their phone with just the touchscreen.
I've played Tyrian on an android many moons ago. I never use a phone for gaming because running any game on such a small screen and with limited means of input just seems lame from my perspective.
With that game, you just used your finger to move the ship around the screen and it worked just like the ship mouse control that X-Bomber used to have when I started over with the game in 2004.
The guns would fire in Tyrian for android when you tapped or held your finger on the screen, so you wouldn't really see your player ship because your finger would be over it and, if you wanted to move to the top of the screen, your hand would hide a whole lot of what was going on.
You could very definitely add some touchscreen controls like a Game Gear layout either side of the 4:3 game screen.
Some of the extensions that are already used let you simulate input from the physical controls so it might be pretty straightforward to do, one day.
Having a vertical shooter wider than 4:3 is weird because it feels like you have no range of forward view compared to your field of view to either side, so it feels like you have no time to destroy enemy ships before they make their way down the screen and are on top of you.
At the moment, I need to get my trains finished for the inside of the Alliance fortress.
I have quite a few designs where I need to finish the sprites and then I have the fun of making all the train segments behaving properly together.
I'd heard that apple had scrapped 32-bit interoperability but I promptly forgot because it didn't impact me at all.
When people were asking for an android port in the past, they seemed to just want to distil it down to run on their phone with just the touchscreen.
I've played Tyrian on an android many moons ago. I never use a phone for gaming because running any game on such a small screen and with limited means of input just seems lame from my perspective.
With that game, you just used your finger to move the ship around the screen and it worked just like the ship mouse control that X-Bomber used to have when I started over with the game in 2004.
The guns would fire in Tyrian for android when you tapped or held your finger on the screen, so you wouldn't really see your player ship because your finger would be over it and, if you wanted to move to the top of the screen, your hand would hide a whole lot of what was going on.
You could very definitely add some touchscreen controls like a Game Gear layout either side of the 4:3 game screen.
Some of the extensions that are already used let you simulate input from the physical controls so it might be pretty straightforward to do, one day.
Having a vertical shooter wider than 4:3 is weird because it feels like you have no range of forward view compared to your field of view to either side, so it feels like you have no time to destroy enemy ships before they make their way down the screen and are on top of you.
At the moment, I need to get my trains finished for the inside of the Alliance fortress.
I have quite a few designs where I need to finish the sprites and then I have the fun of making all the train segments behaving properly together.
I'd heard that apple had scrapped 32-bit interoperability but I promptly forgot because it didn't impact me at all.
Dream big and bold and daring.
Yeah, it might work better in portrait mode! With space for controls at the bottom. I don't know if there are physical controllers that would support that orientation, though - the one I've used was strictly landscape.
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Crash
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That's another idea - to make it an original gameboy layout.
I think the original idea is the best because you want to have the top edge of the game's window along the longest edge of the display, to make the viewport as big as it can be.
I've seen some of the newer android devices with some very weird display ratios.
My old Nokia 9 has a 2:1 ratio and the Sony 10 III that I slapped sailfish on has 21:9, which, I imagine, is good for infinite scrolling, and it feels nice in the hand with it being narrow, but for viewing your own camera images, it was a bit irritating.
I think the original idea is the best because you want to have the top edge of the game's window along the longest edge of the display, to make the viewport as big as it can be.
I've seen some of the newer android devices with some very weird display ratios.
My old Nokia 9 has a 2:1 ratio and the Sony 10 III that I slapped sailfish on has 21:9, which, I imagine, is good for infinite scrolling, and it feels nice in the hand with it being narrow, but for viewing your own camera images, it was a bit irritating.
Dream big and bold and daring.