Amiga shooter Menace hits the Apple IIgs in a free native port

Homebrew developer rmprod has released MENACE IIGS, a free, native Apple IIgs conversion of DMA Design's 1988 side-scrolling shoot 'em up Menace.

The Apple IIgs is my favorite computer, and it's the machine I grew up with, which means I'm well aware that European 16-bit action games mostly skipped the platform during its retail run. Released in September 1986 and discontinued in 1992, Apple's machine had a custom Ensoniq DOC audio synthesizer and Super Hi-Res graphics, yet it spent the late '80s watching the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST get fast arcade shooters like this one. Getting a full conversion of a Psygnosis release nearly four decades later feels like settling an old score.

What's in the 65816 port

This isn't a cut-down demo or a proof-of-concept level. Built with a native W65C816S assembly engine written for the Apple IIgs architecture, MENACE IIGS brings over the entire six-world campaign, along with all of its bosses and weapon upgrades. It runs directly from the GS/OS Finder environment, supports both joysticks and keyboards, and includes Rookie and Expert difficulty modes.

Pushing an Amiga action game through a stock 2.8 MHz Western Design Center 65816 processor takes some heavy lifting. Unlike the Amiga, the IIgs doesn't have dedicated custom chips for hardware sprites or blitter operations, so the engine handles its multi-layer parallax scrolling, Super Hi-Res visuals, adapted HUD elements, and digital audio playback entirely through 65816 assembly routines. It'll run on an unaccelerated 2.8 MHz machine, though rmprod recommends a 7 MHz to 14 MHz accelerator card and a mass storage device if you want the framerate to hold up when the screen fills with alien biomechanical parts. I'm curious to see how smoothly that parallax holds on a stock ROM 01 motherboard before a TransWarp GS card gets involved.

Before Grand Theft Auto, there was Draconia

Menace has a major place in developer history as the first commercial game from DMA Design. Before the Scottish studio created Lemmings in 1991, and long before it created Grand Theft Auto and became Rockstar North in 2002, founder David Jones programmed Menace in his bedroom in Dundee.

Published by Psygnosis under its Psyclapse label in 1988 for the Amiga, the game sent players across the six hostile planetary sectors of Draconia. Ports to the Atari ST, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS followed by 1989. With dark biomechanical artwork and an atmospheric soundtrack by David Whittaker, the original release sold over 20,000 copies, which gave DMA Design the cash it needed to expand out of bedroom development and fund games like 1989's Blood Money.

MENACE IIGS is available for free on itch.io.