Xevious for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive

Xevious — Namco's 1982 classic that defined the vertical shooter — takes off again, now running natively on Sega 16-bit hardware. Strap into the Solvalou and sweep across the alien world of Xevious: gun down airborne threats with your Zapper, drop the Blaster on ground targets, and uncover the secrets hidden beneath the landscape.

This isn't a remake — it's the real arcade game, transcoded line-by-line from the original coin-op code. The gameplay, the enemy patterns and that famously serene-yet-tense atmosphere are all faithful to the original, beating away on your Genesis / Mega Drive.

Features

• Faithful arcade gameplay — the original logic, enemy AI and pseudo-random terrain
• Dual weapons: the air-to-air Zapper and the air-to-ground Blaster
• All the icons — Toroids, the spinning Bacura, the Sol citadels buried underground, and the mighty Andor Genesis fortress
• 4-channel PCM music and sound effects
• 1 or 2 players, hi-score table, and high scores saved to battery backup
• Runs on real hardware and every major emulator (BlastEm, Genesis Plus GX, Kega Fusion, PicoDrive)

Controls (3-button pad)

• D-pad — move the Solvalou
• B — Zapper (air targets)
• A — Blaster / bomb (ground targets)
• C — insert coin
• Start — start game / pause

Heads-up

This is a free, fan-made port in active development (alpha). A few rough edges are to be expected — feedback is very welcome!

Credits

• Namco — original Xevious (1982)
• Mark McDougall (tcdev) — reverse-engineering, the platform-agnostic 68000 core, and the Neo Geo version
• Jean-François Fabre (jotd) — the Amiga version, which this port is built on
• no9 (music), phx (replay code) and DanyPPC (icon) — Amiga contributions
• Paulo Manrique — the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive port

The Mega Drive port layer was developed with AI assistance (Anthropic's Claude). The game core and the original ports are the work of the authors above. Xevious and its trademarks belong to Namco / Bandai Namco — this is a non-commercial fan project.

Source code

Open source on GitHub: github.com/paulomanrique/xevious