Xeno Crisis: a new game for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive, Dreamcast, Nintendo Switch and Steam
Created by Bitmap Bureau
Xeno Crisis is a new game for the Sega Genesis, Dreamcast, Nintendo Switch and Steam. It's a top-down arena shooter for up to 2 players that is best described as Smash TV meets Aliens! Run and gun your way through thousands of enemies spread over 6 areas as you attempt to discover the cause of the alien menace.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Latest update (Dec 2020)
almost 4 years ago
– Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 08:59:31 PM
Hi everyone, we’re back once again with an overdue Xeno Crisis update, but as you might expect we have plenty of news to share. It’s been a difficult few months for just about everyone really but luckily our progress hasn’t been too hampered by the Covid-19 pandemic - we did of course take some time out over the summer to have some kind of holiday with our families. As we mentioned in the previous update, all Mega Drive / Genesis and Dreamcast orders should now have shipped to all backers, but please get in touch if for some reason you still haven’t received your order yet.
As our responsibilities have increased and our operations have expanded over the past couple of years, we have started working with various contractors to help us out on several fronts, and we are also now renting a nearby warehouse in which to store stock and packaging, freeing up space in the office and giving us a dedicated area for cartridge assembly. It’s also where we’ve relocated our big red 4-slot to, although we still need to finish refurbishing it as it’s a little rough around the edges:
We’ve also got Mike’s Initial D 3 cab in here too which is now up and running although we haven’t got Xeno Crisis running on it yet. ;)
Neo Geo Latest - Physical
In the last update we spoke of some issues with the PCB we had that were causing the odd rare reset on some AES/MVS machines when it read some P ROM data incorrectly. Unfortunately the changes we made back then didn’t cure those issues totally; it actually became a bit of a needle in a haystack trying to find the issue to be able to resolve it. So we took the decision to contract a professional electrical engineer to take a look at the PCB.
We’re pleased to say we have now found the issue, we’ve been able to reproduce it consistently, we understand why it is happening and we now have a fix. We’re waiting on a sample of our revised PCB design to arrive next week. Assuming all is well and as we expect, we will then be placing the main PCB manufacturing order!
For those of you that would like a little more insight into what we had to track down and how we went about it, here is a brief overview of the main discoveries:
First phase; we had an issue with our Neo Geo Devkit for flashing the PCBs which was not allowing us to fully verify the P ROM when flashing but would for all other ROMs. So we couldn’t be 100% sure that all data had been written correctly, even if the PCB did generally run fine with just the odd reset and Unibios CRC failure.
This proved relatively easy to track down, there was a voltage level issue that was causing the Flash memory not to be read correctly by the devkit, fortunately write commands were being done correctly as we expected. Now that we could properly verify the P ROM is correct we could move on to attempt to find the issue with the PCB.
Second phase; an initial comparison of our signals vs an original PCB showed we needed a small tweak to the FPGA logic for the ROMOE behaviours (there was a slight signal glitch as you can see on D7). This made the PCB behaviour better but it still was reading the P ROM incorrectly at random points.
After weeks of numerous tests prodding and probing all aspects of the PCB, we realised we would have to find a way to reproduce the issue and pin-point the fault. We could prove it was a bad read by running the Unibios CRC check but the values would change and be inconsistent, and it would pass the CRC most times without any errors. So we decided to create a custom “CRC” BIOS for the NeoGeo, so we could try to control reading the P ROM in sections, detect read errors as soon as they occurred and hopefully all in a reproducible and reliable way.
In the end we read the P ROM in 128 byte chunks and compared each chunk against a known CRC state for that chunk and then repeated this through the whole ROM. We also were able to halt the moment a bad chunk was read - we could re-read this chunk to compare and see if we could spot a pattern.
This worked extremely well and we are able to capture bad reads in a reproducible and consistent manner, as you can see above a capture from a bad vs good read we’re getting some sort of interference to the signal at a 16Mhz rate. We also noticed it was always an 0xFFFF read that would randomly fail.
From here we were able to analyse the PCB and find the issue that had been eluding us. Under the conditions of an 0xFFFF read, if the floating levels were in the wrong place the level translator was glitching and jumping between high and low states. After testing some modifications to our previous prototype, we now finally have what we believe are the necessary modifications to fix our PCB design!!!!
Obviously the PCB is just one part of the physical items we need, so we’ve been taking the time whilst it’s being fixed to prepare and ready all of the other physical items. Above are just a few of the various bits we needed that have been steadily making their way to the warehouse ready for assembly.
We’ve also decided to manufacture a US and JP style release for Neo Geo CD, as you can see in the preview above (we will contact you to confirm your preference). Also note that both NGCD versions like original games will come with spine cards. With more space in our new warehouse we have also taken the opportunity to order some more plastic shells and snap cases - we do have some excess stock at present so you can still pre-order your copy now.
Neo Geo Latest - Software
The last few months have seen a lot of refinement and fixes to the actual game code of Xeno Crisis, with some of the most notable points being:
The Z80 audio logic assembly code is now complete - we had to do nearly a full rewrite, but a huge thank you goes out to Blastar (https://blastar.citavia.de/) for all of his kind support.
The MVS, AES and NGCD integrations are also complete - one of the key things for us has been ensuring that our games behave and act just like original games on those platforms did. So we’re pleased to say that we’ve now implemented what we believe to be the correct behaviours when interacting with the bios in the various combinations of machine set-ups, supporting MVS/AES standard and also Unibios/NeoSD modified behaviours. This means that all of the standard features you expect like software dips, memory card support, backup memory, and book-keeping all behave as expected.
The remaining bits of software development are shrinking by the day, most focus at the moment is on Neo Geo specific polish, things like scaling sprites, extra frames, more palettes, better colour depth than the Mega Drive (like in the HQ above), more sprite details. We expect to go gold very soon, and we will let you know when we do!
We will also finally be confirming details with all collectors’ edition pre-orders, as we have to lock down hostage names to embed in the game (and serial numbers for production). Please expect an email in the next couple of weeks with details.
Everything Else Xeno Crisis
The game has now been physically released on the PlayStation Vita thanks to our friends at East Asia Soft, and it can also be obtained digitally through the PSN Store. If you happen to have a PSTV then you’ll be able to play Xeno Crisis in local co-op mode and it’s also a cross-buy title for anyone lucky enough to have both a PS4 and Vita. We hope you’ll agree that East Asia Soft did a great job with this release!
Many if not all backers should have either received or be about to receive their physical Switch and PlayStation 4 copies from the good people at Strictly Limited Games - we received our samples not long ago and have to say the overall package is really impressive!
And yes, we have yet another physical release to talk about, which is Xeno Crisis for the Evercade! It’s a fantastic and relatively inexpensive handheld console that was specifically produced for retro games, and it was great to see both Xeno Crisis and Matt Phillips’ Tanglewood released on the same cartridge. The Mega Drive emulation is particularly good on this device and we’ve tweaked the controls to take advantage of the Evercade’s diamond button configuration, so it’s a great way to play Xeno Crisis on the move, or even at home on an external display.
As you may know, Xeno Crisis has been available for all modern platforms since October 2019 including the Xbox One, and earlier this year we were honoured to be asked if we would like to bring Xeno Crisis to Gamepass for both the Xbox One and PC. So in case you missed it, you can now play Xeno Crisis for free if you happen to be signed up to Gamepass!
During the Kickstarter campaign we made a t-shirt exclusively available to backers which many of you snapped up, and since then we’ve been asked many times if we would release any other Xeno Crisis themed t-shirts. Well we came up with a few designs and eventually settled on these four:
These are now available to buy through our online store in a range of sizes here:
Last weekend we had a Black Friday 25% discount sale on everything in the shop (apart from Neo Geo pre-orders). We’ve had a number of people that missed out so here is a special discount code for 25% that is valid until the end of Monday 7th December: HERZOG25
Many of you are probably familiar with the excellent “Digital Foundry” channel which covers both modern and retro games in an impressive level of detail, and it was with no hesitation that we agreed to an interview with John Linneman regarding the development of Xeno Crisis, along with fellow Mega Drive developer Matt Phillips who also talks about his experience of developing Tanglewood.
Moving on to something completely different now, and that’s to say thanks to the amazing (and generous) Morten Lassen who sent us this superb sculpture of the female marine from Xeno Crisis (Sarah Ridley):
We were blown away to receive something like that out of the blue, and it now sits proudly on the office mantle piece for all to see! If you’d like to check out more of Morten’s excellent work then you can do so here: https://www.instagram.com/fnuksculpt/
There aren’t too many gaming magazines around these days, but a recent contender is “Retro Format” magazine which was successfully Kickstarted by John Kavanagh in 2019. He was kind enough to approach us about reviewing Xeno Crisis in their launch issue, and it was very cool to feature on their front cover!
For those of you that may have missed it, Battle Axe is the latest project that Mike is working on with the Xeno Crisis artist Henk Nieborg - it’s a fantasy themed hack ‘n’ slash arcade title along the lines of Gauntlet, Golden Axe and The Chaos Engine. It’s actually a concept that Henk came up with a few years ago and we thought it would be great to make it a reality! It’s being published physically by Numskull Games on Switch and PS4 and will of course be coming to Xbox as well as PC, Mac and Linux via Steam too.
Congratulations to Cameron on recently completing a marathon for charity under national lockdown! Aside from training hard for the big day, he’s been busy finishing all the artwork and printed assets for the Neo Geo release so they’re ready for when the PCBs arrive.
Big thanks!
A big thank you for all your continued support and kind comments! We really appreciate how patient everyone has been in waiting for the Neo Geo version, please bear with us now as we get ever closer to shipping!
Belated update (May 2020)
over 4 years ago
– Wed, May 20, 2020 at 06:39:32 AM
Hey everyone, we hope you’re all doing ok in these difficult times, and that your health and livelihoods haven’t been affected significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re fortunate enough to be part of an industry that hasn’t taken too much of an impact, as people will always want something to entertain themselves whilst in lockdown. We have however had to spend some time restructuring the way we do things, relocating much of our setups to our respective homes so that we’ve been able to continue work on Xeno Crisis, but aside from that it’s business as usual for us!
Dreamcast version has gone gold!
We’re sorry that this update has been delayed several times, but these updates often take a few days to put together and we thought we’d push on whilst the development of the Dreamcast version was going well, and the good news is that it has gone gold and has been sent for manufacturing! We’ve tested the gold build thoroughly on all of the Dreamcast variations we have, using a range of controllers and peripherals, and everything seems extremely solid - thanks in particular to Tom Charnock and Mike Phelan of The Dreamcast Junkyard for supplying us with various bits for testing. I’m sure many of you are keen to know how the game plays with the Dreamcast’s legendary HKT-7500 twin stick controller, so here’s a quick video that Mike shot at home on his Sony PVM 20L4:
As mentioned in the video, the intro sequence now has a voice over recorded by George Exley who handled the other male voices in the game, and we’ve also made a slight tweak to the controls particularly for the benefit of twin stick users, which is that you can now roll whilst shooting - previously your roll would be cancelled if you tried shooting during a roll. A few people mentioned this after playing the Mega Drive / Genesis version and it felt like a change that we should make on the Dreamcast version where the 6-button control scheme is the standard. We’ve also been able to show the score and high-score in-game now, something that was only possible in the Mega Drive version when playing Infinite Mode due to tile limitations, although this feature can be toggled on / off:
Another nice feature is that the VMU displays your health throughout the game:
You’ll also be pleased to know that Xeno Crisis works great on VGA monitors too:
Next up we have the designs for the covers / manual and discs - as you can see, each region has its own design, which we felt was an important touch for Dreamcast collectors who collect for a particular region:
As with all of our products, we’ve tried to be as thorough with our Dreamcast implementation as we can be, implementing all the little details and then testing on a wide range of devices, controllers and third party products. Here is Xeno Crisis running on a GDEMU for example:
We will be providing GDI, CHD and CDI file ROM download options at release; these will be made available at the same time as we start shipping the physical CDs. If you have ordered a physical copy and need to update your address for delivery please contact us ASAP as we anticipate the manufactured CDs will get to us in about 3 weeks time.
Neo Geo versions nears completion!
The Neo Geo versions continue to make steady progress - we had to jump on the Dreamcast heavily this last month or so to finalise it, but now it’s complete we can focus all of our efforts on the Neo Geo. Fortunately our codebase shares a lot of common code and a number of the features and changes from the Mega Drive we implemented for Dreamcast also benefit the Neo Geo.
As with the Dreamcast version we’re making sure all of the extra details and features that are unique to Neo Geo games are in place and implemented properly. Little details like for example on the Neo Geo CD, we’ve implemented our own animated loading sequence, and the logo for the newer bios as found in the CD-Z and UniBios:
As we’ve mentioned before we try to carry out extremely thorough testing where we can. For Neo Geo we’ve been actively buying one of every model AES, MVS and CD. We actually have 30 unique MVS model revisions now, although if you’ve got a spare MV1B-CHX we’d like to buy it to complete our set!
We had at this point hoped to have ordered the PCBs, however in the final stages of testing our prototype with some continued soak testing we found a rare reset issue that would only occur on some models. We’re currently waiting for a prototype PCB revision to arrive, which we anticipate will solve the issue, and after some more testing we will then proceed with ordering all of the PCBs.
For those of you that have ordered a Collector’s Edition for Neo Geo, we need to finalise hostage names and confirm your serial number. We will get an email to you soon, confirming what we have on record and giving you the opportunity to make any changes. Please look out for updates on social media confirming when this has been sent.
We’re also pleased to say we will be getting 2 versions of the Neo Geo CD manufactured one with JP and the other with US/EU release styling. We will also be in contact with those of you that placed a pre-order to confirm your preference.
Do get in touch with him through his website (https://aergan.wordpress.com/) if you have any retro hardware that needs some attention!
Other
We are proud to say we recently joined UKIE (the association for UK Interactive Entertainment), which will benefit us in a multitude of ways moving forward as we constantly aim to improve our operations.
Those of you that have been following our updates over the last couple of years will know that Matt suffered a serious head injury back in June 2018, which left him suffering regular severe hemiplegic migraine attacks, leaving him unable to speak or walk properly. Whilst he is still not fully recovered he has been able to manage his condition much better in recent months. This has been made possible by the amazing work of the doctors at the National Migraine Centre: https://www.nationalmigrainecentre.org.uk
To help support the National Migraine Centre we will be launching an auction of a Mega Drive copy of Xeno Crisis signed by Henk, Matt and Mike, plus a bunch of other goodies thrown in. We will match the highest bid and all money will go to the National Migraine Centre. Please look out for the launch of the auction on social media soon!
Thanks!
Well I think that’s about it for this update - thank you all for your continued patience and support! Anyone wanting to order for Mega Drive or pre-order for Dreamcast/NeoGeo can do so through our online store here:
Progress update (January 2020)
almost 5 years ago
– Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 02:13:49 AM
Sorry for the lack of a recent update, but we were further inundated with orders leading up to and over the Christmas period, which meant needing to spend a good few weeks getting new orders manufactured, packed and shipped!
Shipping update
We recently caught up with all outstanding orders, so everyone should have received theirs especially Kickstarter backers which finished shipping back in November. We’ve had a few orders returned to us because of incorrect addresses, plus some reports of damaged cases, missing items etc... If you’ve had any problems with your copy then do get in touch.
Thank you for all of the great feedback and support from everyone who’s received their copies - it’s been really encouraging to hear the love for the game, and we certainly look forward to making another Mega Drive game one day!
Dreamcast and Neo Geo
The last couple of months it’s been tough trying to balance finishing the last bits of the Dreamcast and Neo Geo versions alongside the manufacturing and shipping of the Mega Drive / Genesis orders! So to speed things up, we brought in Steve Longhurst from “DO Games” to help finish off the Dreamcast version, leaving Matt’s time focused on the Neo Geo version so we can finish them both in parallel.
Steve’s already got to grips with the Dreamcast codebase and is ramping up quickly with implementing extended features like vibration, twin stick and VMU support. We’re also extremely grateful for the recent advice and help from Ste at HD Retrovision, as we look to ensure the Dreamcast version is of the highest quality in all regions and the various video output types / modes.
Matt’s made really good progress with the Neo Geo version, implementing all the specific Neo Geo features like Hard / Soft DIP switch support, attract sequences, coin / credit behaviours, backup memory, memory cards and so on. Now that we’re nearing the end of development, we’re ramping up our game testing on as many AES and MVS hardware revisions as we can just like we did on the Mega Drive version.
We’re pleased to say that all the Neo Geo AES / MVS plastics arrived just before Christmas and we’re really happy - the quality is excellent and we hope that you will be equally pleased with them, as they’re as close to the originals as we could hope for. Here are a few pictures of them for you to take a look at:
Strictly Limited Games
We are very pleased to announce that the physical boxed versions of Xeno Crisis for PS4 and Nintendo Switch will be available for pre-order from Strictly Limited Games on the 26th of January - both a standard edition and a special Collector’s Edition will be available. If you selected to wait for a physical version instead of a Switch digital code from us previously then we will be in touch with details on how to place your order. SLG will be announcing more details tomorrow ahead of the pre-order opening on the 26th.
We were also fortunate enough to appear in Retro Gamer magazine’s 200th issue, which is a highly recommended read if you’re into retro gaming:
Other bits
Before they were sent out to their new owners, we managed to take a group photo of the Xeno Crisis customised Mega Drives, so here they are in all their glory:
Since Mike’s work on Xeno Crisis is now done, he has moved on to collaborating with Henk Nieborg, who has been working on a secret project of his own. Hopefully Henk will share his creation with the world soon!
Finally, if you’re playing the Mega Drive version and still having trouble reaching Dr.Herzog without using an elixir, then you might find this cheat useful:
To all of you who have completed the game, we salute you! Oh yes, if anyone playing on one of the modern platforms who has five minutes to spare, it would really help us out if you could leave us a Steam review, unless you absolutely hated it of course! ;)
Mega Drive Release! (October 2019)
about 5 years ago
– Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 02:40:21 AM
Release day!
It’s been a manic couple of years but we’ve finally reached the day of release for Xeno Crisis on modern platforms, and as some of you may have noticed, we’ve also begun shipping the physical Mega Drive / Genesis versions. We annoyingly had a bit of a delay with our shipping agent but everything’s in place now and we’re shipping in batches, some of which have already been sent out - we’ll be steadily updating your orders with shipping / tracking information where appropriate as soon as we receive it and can pass it on.
Manufacturing the physical copies has been an arduous task for such a small team - Matt even got his dad and wife to help out! The number of variants has caused us a few headaches (eg. Japanese / US / PAL, retro / modern, Kickstarter / Collector’s / standard etc) but hopefully it’ll all be worth the effort! Here’s some photos showing what we’ve been going through at home and in the office to get everything ready over the past few weeks:
Whilst we’re on the subject of all things physical, here’s some shots of the manual and OST CD, as I don’t believe they’ve been shown anywhere yet:
And here are some of the Collector’s and Kickstarter Editions boxed up and ready to go:
Digital downloads
Anyone who pledged for a digital download of any description such as the Mega Drive / Genesis ROM, a Switch or Steam code, or indeed the OST, should have received or will shortly receive an email with instructions on how to redeem their order. (We’ve had a slight delay in sorting codes being sent out to Shopify orders).
Dreamcast / Neo Geo
We’ve not forgotten the Dreamcast and Neo Geo versions - we’re really excited to start full-on development for these once the bulk of the MD orders have shipped later this week. We’ll be back soon with a more normal development update for everyone.
Xeno Crisis
Anyway, thanks for all of the kind words and support, we really hope you enjoy playing Xeno Crisis. As always you can order any of the retro physical editions and the OST CD / vinyl direct from our store here:
Progress Update (August/September 2019)
about 5 years ago
– Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 12:54:47 AM
Good news!
Hello everyone, and apologies for the later than normal update - it’s been a busy summer with family holidays breaking things up a bit. But as always we’ve been feverishly working away on the Mega Drive version and fixing those final bugs (we found about 50 more in the process of extended testing!), the result of which is that we can now tell you that the Mega Drive version has finally gone gold!
We have now jumped straight into the manufacturing phase, which entails putting together the PCB and shell casings, burning the game’s ROM image on to the carts and then getting them labelled, boxed and packaged up ready to be shipped. Here’s a photo of our parallel UMD rig in action, successfully writing 8 copies of the game in a test run:
A big thanks to Matt’s dad who not only helped with the parallel rig app for controlling the flashing but also helped us move all the Mega Drive cases and shells out of storage ready for manufacturing.
Shipping
If your address details have changed since you ordered - now is the time to update them. If you placed an order on Kickstarter / BackerKit please go here: https://xenocrisis.backerkit.com and if you ordered via Shopify please contact us. (Please note that some BackerKit orders / add-ons were not yet charged and we will be locking those orders down this coming week).
Shipping will most likely be handled in batches with Kickstarter backer orders going out first; when we start shipping we will keep everyone updated via email and social media.
Modern Platform Releases
Next up are the modern releases, which have been slated for release on October 28th for the Nintendo Switch, Sony PS4, and Xbox One (October 30th). We’re also releasing PC, Mac and Linux versions across both Steam and GOG. We will of course be in touch with anyone who backed or pre-ordered any of these versions with a code to redeem your copy.
Don’t worry we’ve not forgotten the physical Nintendo Switch and Sony PS4 releases! We’ll be announcing more details about those with Strictly Limited Games very soon!
Dreamcast
It’s been a while since we covered the Dreamcast, but we’re pleased to say that the Dreamcast version is progressing very nicely. As the Mega Drive build stabilized it hasn’t taken long to port the rendering side of things over to the Dreamcast. The build is already about 95% there - just a few bits to sort like horizontal line scroll rendering, PuruPuru vibration pack, twin stick and VMU support, but the core game is working great as you can see in this video:
Mike isn’t too great with the Dreamcast pad though - he’s been playing the Mega Drive version too much!
Neo Geo
Just like the Dreamcast version the Neo Geo version is already working great from the Mega Drive codebase. Now that the Mega Drive version is complete we’ll be ramping up development heavily - focusing on integrating the Neo Geo extras like scaling support, MVS arcade behaviours for coin insert, attract sequences and so on.
Neo Geo plastic parts continue to progress very nicely - we’ve actually now got the potential for some transparent MVS shells as well as black. AES snap cases are also currently in the final stages of production which you can see in the sample photos below. We’re expecting to receive all the plastics in around 30 - 40 days.
Back in August we finally took delivery of our “Big Red” Neo Geo MVS cab, which had been shipped over from the US in a container and thankfully survived the journey intact! We knew it was a big, heavy cab, but we were quite shocked when it was delivered to the office and we quickly concluded that there was no way that it was going to make it up the staircase into our office without chopping it in half.
So for now it’s living in our storage facility down the road (not the shipping container in the photo, we wish!), so we’re going to try and grab some footage of Xeno Crisis running on it for our next update!
In case you missed it, please make sure to check out the great article Determining the Build Quality of a Game Cartridge on RetroRGB by René. Where you can see more details on the Xeno Crisis cartridge shells and PCBs, and how they compare to other games.
Over the summer we were lucky enough to receive our Mega SD from Terraonion, and we’re pleased to say that Xeno Crisis runs great on it! For those that don’t know, the Mega SD is an amazing cartridge that not only acts as a powerful Mega Drive ROM cartridge but also recreates the hardware of a Mega CD via FPGA! We’re really excited about the Mega SD and the potential it has for future indie Mega CD game development. Click here for more info:
Now that launch day is finally upon us, we thought it would be a good time to put out an updated trailer, which has been produced by our talented friends over at Broken Bricks who we’ve worked with previously. We think they’ve done a great job, and we hope you all enjoy it!
That’s it for this update - please look out for manufacturing and shipping updates on our social media pages, and it would be great if you could give us a follow too:
