About The Game
The basic concept mirrors the classic 'Galagaish' shoot'em up formula: pilot your ship at the bottom of the screen, repel waves of descending aliens, survive the bosses. Where most Galaga clones stop, Deluxe Galaga keeps going.
Worked into the gameplay are powerups - from enhanced firepower to speed upgrades to protective armour - plus the ability to capture alien ships and make them fight for you. A full in-game economy lets you spend money at the shop every five waves or so. And then there are the two mini-games: the Meteor Storm and the Memory Station.
With 75 levels of increasingly punishing action, random events, hidden secrets, and two-player co-op that remains one of the best ever implemented in a shoot'em up - this game does not let you go easily.
History
03/09/95 … 47,865 lines of Devpac v3.04 assembler code. Assembly time: 32.44 seconds on an A1200/030/33MHz with 6MB RAM.
That is the specification of the final build (V2.6) of Deluxe Galaga - one of the all-time best games for the Amiga, and one of the finest shoot'em ups ever created. It premiered with V1.0 on October 20, 1993.
The game was voted into the Top 100 Games of All Time for the Amiga, reaching #19. Every other title on the list was a commercial release - except one other: Deluxe PacMan, also by Edgar.
Deluxe Galaga is based on the game StarBattle on the old VIC-20. That was one excellent game that I had a lot of fun with. My version is a simple (?) shoot'em up with good game play, but not so much fancy graphics. What I want from a game is some relaxation for a couple of minutes, and then be able to quit and do some more work. - Edgar M. Vigdal, Official Deluxe Galaga Documentation
Note: You can change what mode you're in by hitting G inside the game and choosing it from the blue "first boot" screen.
A pure preservation effort. Its purpose is to allow new generations to experience this masterpiece natively, without having to wrestle with Amiga emulators, ROMs or floppy images. It can be played in the browser - nothing to install, nothing to configure. In addition, native builds for Windows, Mac and Linux (including Steam Hardware) were created.
It is a faithful, algorithm-by-algorithm reverse-engineering into Jet64 C, directly from the original Edgar M. Vigdal Deluxe Galaga v2.6C AGA (June 1995) binary assembly. The goal is 1:1 parity with the original AGA release (Preservation Mode), with only a few deliberate quality-of-life adjustments (Restoration Mode) where Edgar's design intent was clear:
- Sound Channel Priority. Edgar's 68k assembly contained an allocation mask bug that prevented his priority queue from functioning as designed. This has been restored to what the code intended.
- Text Clipping. Shaved glyphs on right-hand screen boundaries (such as the trailing 'S' in "BONUSES AND WEAPONS") have been adjusted to display their complete authored strings.
- Simultaneous Music & SFX. On original Amiga hardware, Paula's 4-channel limit forced a compromise between 4-channel ProTracker music and synth sound effects. The port allows full ProTracker playback and sound effects to run side-by-side cleanly.
- Collision Modes. By default, the port uses Pixel-Perfect collision, but purists can switch to ORIGINAL in the boot-time OPTIONS menu to restore Edgar's authentic 18x36 cell-grid inclusive bounding boxes.
An Enhanced Mode was added as well. See the Enhanced page for new features, power-ups, and strategies.
Note: You can change what mode you're in by hitting G inside the game and choosing it from the blue "first boot" screen.
Preservation
Preservation mode is a perfect recompile of Edgar's Deluxe Galaga AGA v2.6C - including all the bugs, code "warts" and some broken game logic Edgar never got around to fixing. You'll see some Secrets you buy have corrupted graphics, for example. When you MUST have the OG, this is the mode to play. You cannot use the Shane Voice Pack in this mode - only the original Male and Female voice.
Restoration
Restoration is a "lightly touched" OG version. Simple bug fixes, some logic nips and tucks - nothing that Edgar didn't already want for the game - but finally fixed 30 years later. This is probably what Edgar intended for you in a final version - we're doing what we can to keep his legacy alive.