Best of AmigaVision: the shooters—field notes from a visitor

I'm not a shmup person. I'm a hardware person who keeps wandering into their neighborhood—and AmigaVision, the curated Amiga setup running on my MiSTer, has 205 shooters in it. These are field notes from a visitor: one bee, five classics and oddballs, two brand-new arrivals, and the full list at the end so you can see how much coastline I didn't cover.

Last week I published a workshop post about updating AmigaVision that featured a harmless error message. It appears on almost every launch: Can't open AGS:Run/Problematic/Apidya (OCS)[en]. The launcher was probing for an override script that doesn't exist; the game runs fine. But after seeing that name scroll by a few dozen times, I did the obvious thing and actually launched Apidya—and remembered why it's one of the most interesting shooters on the platform. Then I kept launching things. This post is what happened.

Two disclaimers before the tour. First: I'm visiting. The shoot-'em-up world has its own scholars—the pattern-memorizers, the one-credit purists—and I make no claim to citizenship; I wrote about the PGM and Psikyo arcade boards from the same tourist's seat. Second: this is one genre, in one curated collection, on one core, on one small FPGA board. AmigaVision—built by David Lindecrantz and Alex Limi's team, who also make Neon68K for the Sharp X68000 and 0MHz for DOS—is museum-grade curation: hand-tuned settings for close to two thousand games, correct aspect ratios, per-title scaling, a launcher that even warns you “some sprite corruption on level 3” like a placard next to a painting. The Atari ST never got this treatment, for the record—over there we make do with big community hard-drive packs, a story for a future workshop post. And all of it, computers and consoles and the 158 arcade cores my release tracker watches, runs on a platform whose very name remembers where it started: MiSTer descends from Till Harbaum's MiST board, and MiST spells out its own etymology—a FPGA based aMIga and ST. The ecosystem that now covers practically everything is named after two home computers. This post is a walk through one shelf of one wing of that museum.

Curation as a placard: the launcher's own notes for Apidya Special Edition, sprite-corruption warning included.

Apidya—the bee that started this

Apidya is a 1992 horizontal shooter by Kaiko, a small German studio, and its premise alone disqualifies it from being “the same old shmup”: you are a man transformed by magic into a bee, avenging your poisoned wife across meadows and ponds drawn from actual insect books the artist kept on his desk. The team were R-Type and Gradius devotees who refused to make, in their words, the umpteenth space shooter—artist Frank Matzke described the goal as the insect shooter “a Japanese team might have done to shake things up.” A German team deliberately out-Japanning Japan: the title screen even renders the name in Japanese characters, and the logo says Apidya II—there is no Apidya I; programmer Peter Thierolf confirmed the numeral was a joke.

Apidya II—there is no Apidya I. The Japanese characters are the tell: a German team deliberately out-Japanning Japan.

It plays like its influences—Gradius power-up bar, an R-Type-style charge shot where the bee audibly hisses before firing a giant stinger—and it sounds like almost nothing else, because the soundtrack is Chris Hülsbeck, of Turrican fame, whose Apidya music has since been performed by full symphony orchestras. The version in AmigaVision is itself a small curation story: the launcher ships the 2018 Special Edition, a community enhancement by Amiga scene developer Earok that adds level select, extra lives, and in-game tips to a famously hard game. The collection chose the edition that welcomes visitors. I noticed. And the bee is having a moment—a modern remake, Apidya' Special, is slated from ININ Games, so this one's story is still being written.

Silkworm—the jeep is the point

Silkworm is a 1989 conversion of Tecmo's arcade game—a Sales Curve production, programmed by Random Access, distributed by Virgin Mastertronic, and I can vouch for those credits because the game itself displays them on my monitor. Its hook remains undefeated: two players at once, one flying the helicopter, one driving the jeep. The jeep is the character-building seat—earthbound, hopping over rockets, secretly the better ride.

One game, two seats: helicopter and jeep, and the jeep is secretly the better ride.

The port has a war story I love: graphics artist Ned Langman recreated the arcade visuals by watching the cabinet, because Tecmo supplied nothing. The reviews of the day treated the result as definitive—Amiga Computing gave it 96 percent, CU Amiga called it about the best shoot-'em-up on the Amiga. And the beloved title theme? Composer Barry Leitch—the on-screen credit says Imagitec Design, where he worked—has cheerfully admitted in interviews it was a rush job he never much liked. Sometimes the classics are accidents. Its quasi-sequel SWIV, by much of the same team, comes with a fun piece of trivia: the manual offers two different meanings for the name, and the producer later admitted he deliberately fed magazines conflicting explanations. The ambiguity was the marketing.

Xenon 2: Megablast—the swagger record

If the Amiga had a swagger olympics, Xenon 2: Megablast (1989) took gold and then charged you for the podium photo. Designed by the Bitmap Brothers—whose first-ever game was the original Xenon, a 1988 tank-versus-plane shooter that even got an arcade release—and programmed by The Assembly Line, published by Image Works, it welded a slow, mean, biomechanical vertical shooter to an actual chart record: Bomb the Bass's “Megablast (Hip Hop on Precinct 13),” arranged for the Amiga by David Whittaker, licensed because Tim Simenon turned out to be a gamer who liked the pitch. A pop record as a game soundtrack, in 1989, on a home computer.

The receipts are on the title screen: Bomb the Bass and Rhythm King—the record label—right there in the boot sequence. Swagger, documented.

Between stages you shop at Crispin's Swop Shop—the manual claims his alien name “loosely translates” to Crispin—selling back upgrades at half price to a shopkeeper with more charisma than most protagonists. Zzap! scored it 97 percent. Years later one magazine called it both the genre's high point and “the one that killed 'em”—the moment the style became a monument. Both readings feel right from the visitor's bench.

Agony—the beautiful one

Agony (1992) is the one I'd hang in a gallery. You are Alestes, an apprentice wizard transformed into a barn owl—the flight animation was based on the owl from the opening of the film Labyrinth—gliding over three layers of overlapping parallax that reportedly stunned even the Shadow of the Beast developers at a 1991 trade show; Psygnosis signed the studio the next day. The studio was Art & Magic, a Belgian team formerly known as Ordilogic, and they named the game “Agony” partly so it would sort to the top of alphabetical magazine listings. Curation-by-alphabet: respect.

The owl, the moon, the parallax that stunned the Shadow of the Beast team. Agony earns the gallery wall.

The famous piano title theme has its own saga. Artist Franck Sauer recorded a rough piano sketch on tape and mailed it to Psygnosis asking for “a composer capable of doing this on the Amiga”; Tim Wright answered with a new piece in that spirit—one note transposed an octave down because of a sample-rate limit—and it became one of the most loved pieces of Amiga music ever. Loved a little too much: in 1996, the keyboardist of Norwegian black-metal band Dimmu Borgir lifted it nearly wholesale for a track that was later dropped from the album's re-recording. An Amiga owl game, plagiarized by black metal—the platform contains multitudes. Honesty compels the visitor's footnote: the period press found it more beautiful than playable (“looks like a peacock but plays like a stoat,” said Amiga Format, at 60 percent, while CU Amiga gave it 85). From my chair, gliding the owl over that water is the point.

Mega Typhoon—the deep cut with a swagger problem

Mega Typhoon (1996) is the obscurity in this list, and I love it for its nerve. Its own title screen declares it “The fastest arcade action game ever made for the Amiga Computer”—a self-awarded record—and the remarkable thing is that the German press basically agreed: Amiga Joker stamped it RASANT and could only name Raiden and Silkworm as comparable adrenaline. On screen it makes the case—the frame fills with shots in a way Amiga games of its era simply didn't attempt.

The self-declared fastest game on the Amiga, making its case. The German press stamped it RASANT and didn't argue.

It was a two-man core team—Bernhard Braun on code, Guido Kehrle on graphics—published by Nordlicht, a small German shareware outfit for which this was the first full-price product. The scrappiness shows in ways I find endearing rather than damning: the box claimed compatibility the game didn't have (a reviewer found it wouldn't boot on Kickstart 1.3) and advertised a two-player mode that doesn't exist. Reviews landed mid-seventies. It was never re-released. It sits in AmigaVision anyway, one keypress from Xenon 2, preserved next to the games that outsold it a thousand to one. That's what curation is for.

Still growing: Xevious (2023) and Gyruss (2025)

The list isn't a museum piece—it's still accreting. Two of the newest entries are arcade conversions the Amiga never got in period, built by the French developer Jean-François Fabre, known as JOTD, whose itch.io page holds a small arcade's worth of these. The method is the fascinating part: the original arcade ROMs are disassembled, reverse-engineered, and transcoded line-by-line into 68000 assembly—for Xevious, working from Mark McDougall's reverse-engineering of Namco's original; for Gyruss, JOTD's own work converting both the Z80 game code and the M6809 co-processor Konami dedicated entirely to computing the game's circular flight math. The Amiga Gyruss even adds things the 1983 cabinet lacked, like more simultaneous sound effects. And yes—Gyruss still runs its uptempo arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

New arrivals: Xevious (2023) and Gyruss (2025), arcade ROMs transcoded to 68000 assembly, free on itch.io.

Both are free downloads. A fair warning from the developer himself: Gyruss is reportedly too slow on a stock Amiga 500—it wants a 68020 and fast RAM, which happens to be exactly what AmigaVision's MiSTer configuration provides. Forty-year-old arcade games, ported to a thirty-eight-year-old computer, running best on an FPGA—the timeline folds up neatly if you don't look directly at it.

The whole coastline

Here is every shooter in AmigaVision—205 unique titles, pulled from the project's own database. One caveat from the curators' own filing system: run-and-gun hybrids live elsewhere (the Turrican family is shelved under Platform), so this is the launcher's own definition of the genre. I visited seven harbors. Look at the size of this coastline—and then remember it's one genre, in one collection, on one core.

Where this series goes

Next visits: the platformers, the puzzlers, and eventually the other wings—Neon68K's X68000 arcades and 0MHz's DOS library are curated by the same team and sitting on the same shelf. If the “how is all this on one little board” question is nagging you, my MiSTer explainer covers it, and the workshop post on updating AmigaVision—the one with the error message that started all this—covers the caretaking. Only visiting, but I keep coming back.

The visitor left his initials. Xenon 2's high-score table, amended.

Further reading

• AmigaVision, by David Lindecrantz (creator) and Alex Limi (project lead): https://amiga.vision
• My Bench Notes companion—updating AmigaVision on the MiSTer (and the crash that taught me to hash everything): https://chicagolandretrotech.com/blogs/news/amigavision-update-mister-error-0000-000b
• What is MiSTer? The FPGA that plays every Atari I don't own: https://chicagolandretrotech.com/blogs/news/what-is-mister-the-fpga-that-plays-every-atari-i-dont-own-and-some-i-do
• MIST—“a FPGA based aMIga and ST,” where the name comes from: http://harbaum.org/till/mist/
• JOTD's Amiga arcade ports, free on itch.io: https://jotd666.itch.io
• The Ronald Pieket Weeserik interview (Silkworm, SWIV, and the name game): https://codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/ronald-pieket-weeserik/
• Hardcore Gaming 101 on Agony: https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/agony/
• The shmup-board tourist's earlier stops—PGM: https://chicagolandretrotech.com/blogs/attract-mode/pgm-polygamemaster-igs and Psikyo: https://chicagolandretrotech.com/blogs/attract-mode/psikyo-sh2-shmup-board