Reimagining Xenon II (a 1989 classic game) using Fable and Ghidra [video]

In the short window Fable was available I decided to finish off one of my background projects and was pretty blown away with the combination of Ghidra and Fable working together.

Xenon II - Megablast by the Bitmap Brothers was one of my favorite games growing up. The style and music (Bomb The Bass!!) was groundbreaking for the time IMHO.

The gold standard version of Xenon II was for the Amiga but I wasn't cool enough to have one, so I had to make do the with (also amazing) PC port from the Assembly Line.

I've always want to make the PC port the best version and show those Amiga guys the true way of DOS.

I've been working on reverse engineering the PC version into Typescript and making some updates. I'd got a bunch of the core work done using Opus etc but wanted to see if the Fable reverse engineer hype was true.

Using Ghidra for a decompilation pre-pass / spot decompilation and Fable was amazing. I got more done in two days than I'd got done in 6 or 7 weekends before that.

I ended up with

* A Jos Stam style GPU accelerated fluid simulation for the play field * A modular FM synth with impulse response audio system * Rock solid 60 fps * Fully updated collision, projectile and shield rendering

The gameplay is authentic to the original, but the FX, audio and rendering is fully updated.

Fully credit of course goes to the Bitmap Brothers / Assembly line.