News

New SFA/XB1 Super Pack

I have been finishing the consolidation of the erstwhile 'large file area' with the Game section of the site.

All game installers and executables are available together in the Releases folder.
The source code files have been archived together to help the downloads page to keep track of the files. 
This has led to a bit of a reduction of the footprint on the server.
The earlier Multimedia Fusion files compress quite well, but with the later MFA files, 7-Zip doesn't manage as good a compression ratio.
There may be a certain amount of compression inside the MFA files as it is, which leaves 7zip with little to do.
They have all been archived as .zip, since 7-Zip's zip compression method is so good anyway that there wasn't a big enough benefit in archiving them as .7z.

As part of tidying up the Releases folder, I made a new Super Pack for Star Fleet Arcade and XB1, which now includes the contents of the original installer packages as well as the extracted binaries.
This might be fun if you wanted to see where X-Bomber the Game started out, way back in 2002.
The Super Pack has been around for many, many years, but the new one is even more comprehensive.

It has now been over a year since the last release of X-Bomber the Game.
Once I've had a bit of a rest over the coming weeks, I'm looking forward to bringing the fight back to the Alliance and getting X-Bomber v0.84n finished and released.

2026.07.09

297

Robot Wars

Due to a lack of anything new worth watching, I started watching the 'new' 2016-2018 Robot Wars.

One thing you notice is how much faster, more deliberate and more destructive the robots were, 13 years on from the end of the original 1997-2003 Robot Wars.

That being said, the new show is strangely charmless compared to the original.
The lighting is terrible. A lot of the interesting challenges like the gauntlet are completely gone. The presenters are awkward compared to Craig Charles and Philippa Forester.

In the current, American Battlebots incarnation of Robot Wars, you may be struck by the sheer scale of corporate sponsorship and enormity of the resources that go into most of the new robots. One machine even had AMD sponsorship.
The charm of the original Robot Wars by contrast was how many of the robots were built in garages by hobbyists with donated or salvaged parts and materials.

There is a colossal playlist on youtube with all episodes of the original show.

The other thing that sets the new and original shows apart is that the original show has some good music that really sets the pace. I particularly like Road to Armageddon and the Battle Theme.

2026.07.07

318

X-Bomber Trailer

I found an early trailer for X Bomber on nitter.

As noted in the comments, the 17-second clip seems to be made up mostly of footage from the 'preview show' and looks to pre-date the airing of the show by quite a bit.

The voice-over is apparently done by Yuji Mitsuya, who played PPA in the original Japanese version of the show.

I have added the video file to the Star Fleet Â» Videos folder for safe keeping.

At the same time, we have a nice, in-depth conversation going on about the show on the forum.
It's good to see that getting quite a bit of use.
It's an honour to host the forum, which I inherited from Andy at SFXB.
Its continued availability is in no way contingent on its activity, but at the same time it's gratifying to see it not acting like a read-only resource.

2026.07.01

242

SFXB Forum Updated

The Forum has been updated to the newest build.
There is a nasty security hole in any prior version.

That means we can happily carry on with our Star Fleet re-watch.

The developers at phpBB have done a great job of patching this and the upgrade mechanism is excellent these days.
phpBB gives you lots of good tools and diagnostics to help get the job done.

I added some nice new images from Paul Wilson of another X-Bomber created in No Man's Sky, which can create ships for the player in a quasi-AI, procedurally-generated way.
The resulting ships normally look as though they're designed by committee but I like to add these to the site all-the-same, because the modular style matches the EDF design ethos.
You might see a ship like these if EDF later decided to build a mass-produced ship based on X-Bomber.

2026.06.25

297

TwistedPinnacle3D

I came across this interesting find on Etsy.

I really like how these figures have different poses and carry different weapons that look authentic to the show.

On a separate subject, the linking between the media and news parts of the site wasn't made to work across two domains.
At the end of July, I will migrate the whole site across to the home server so that everything sits on the same domain.

Here are some great miniatures of the termoid soldiers, as well as Captain Orion, done by TwistedPinnacle3D.
Amazingly, each of the figures have a different pose and carry different weapons: many of which at least look to be very accurate to what I remember from the show.

2026.06.25

250

Evolution Dai-X Instructions

I had a request come in from Dan at the SFFB to see if I could get a scan of the instructions for the 2014 Evolution Toys Dai-X figure.

This is a very clever idea because it clearly should be on the site, but it had never dawned on me to scan it.

This is a new, straighter version from just after the scanner plate got a good clean.

2026.06.06

228

Daft Ideas

I received some very interesting information from Daft_Ideas (aka. Grey Area) about the history of the available X-Bomber 3D models, and the people that were involved in making them:

Daft_Ideas created the model that Dan used as his template and which Nick Cass took further and developed as well.

I've summarised part of one of Daft's emails:

It was nice of Dan to credit me, and I feel proud that my simple model (I am in no way a designer!) started off this craze...well - there were two predecessors, on opposite ends of the scale; one by Dorian Sherratt who I fear may have passed away (his model was beautiful), and the simpler "benheu" version.

I found some links and now that I have a much better printer (my first prints were on an ANet A8!) I've decided to spend some time on it again; but since I can't go "Better" than Gary or Dan's version, I have only one choice.

I'm going bigger.
I hope to joint the body into as many parts as possible (currently looking at 16), and I think on my printer I can get a 75cm model (I was hoping for a round metre I'll be honest, but the biggest jointed part would be the neck at just over 40 cm, and my printer tops out at 35.

I included here on the site some screengrabs of Daft's current work on X-Bomber and Dai-X.
Hopefully, we'll be seeing some more.

2026.06.04

245

AnubisBB

I did quite a bit of testing over the last couple of days.
I set up a test phpBB on XAMPP and enabled the sodium PHP extension, so that I could test out AnubisBB, which is an anti-DDoS extension for the SFXB Forum.

After the tests there were nice and successful, I've applied the extension to the SFXB Forum.
The number of bots went from about 700/800 down to zero.
The original number of bots would've been much higher if not for a huge .htaccess file that was blocking entire provider networks and countries.

Anyone that's not logged into the forum already will see a yellow screen for a few seconds with a little anime character, where it runs some calculations in javascript and returns the results to the server to filter out "headless browsers", before they get forwarded onto the forum.
The solution needs javascript enabled to work, but this way, the forum will stay up reliably, and not be writing GBs of entries into the database sessions table and the server logs.

2026.06.03

224

Small Site Updates

The comments area for news items has been tweaked a bit.
I'd wanted to make it more imaginative for a while, and make it look like a physical device.

The idea will have stemmed from my fondness of Y2K PDAs and handhelds, but also from the recent Earth Final Conflict website, where the content loads inside a graphic of the sliding 'global' communicator.

I wanted it to be something like the Ericsson concept phone from the 2001 Tomb Raider movie.
When I saw that at the cinema, that always struck me as the perfect PDA phone.
The big-enough touch display and physical navigation buttons would make it very usable.
Meanwhile, the sharkfin antenna that came on the Ericsson T28s and the ergonomic, ruggedised body gave it a lot of practical charm.

This phone was a shrunk-down concept based on Ericsson's Diana prototype:
	PDA-phone â€˜Pamelaâ€™ & â€˜Dianaâ€™ | First Communicator Platform â€“ Ericssoners
Ericsson knew where the market was going. A lot of Pocket-PC phones vaguely similar to this were made later by different manufacturers.
But the market wasn't ready in 2000/2001, immediately after which, Ericsson became Sony Ericsson, which immediately torpedoed its Scandinavian design ethos.

Anyway, the bezel surrounding the display of the Tomb Raider phone is too big and the comment field would have to be made too small, if I were to use that as a template.
I remembered that the game 2007 STALKER has a PDA where you manage your mission objectives.
This thing looks nice and rugged and in-line with what Star Fleet would have.

In other news ...
The botnets are keeping the forum nice and busy.
There is a new extension in development called AnubisBB, which does look to be actively supported.
People who have tried it reported that it works outright, which is more than can be said for cloudflare.
With cloudflare, they seem to want users to stay hooked on their service, so it seems to help 'manage' the symptoms but not actually cure the problem.

2026.06.01

227