Amiga Moon Cresta
A downloadable game
👽👽👽👽
Moon Cresta Recreation for Amiga – Free Tribute Game
A tribute to François Lionet — the mind behind AMOS, empowering a generation of Amiga developers to turn ideas into games.
🚀 We proudly present a faithful recreation of Moon Cresta for the Commodore Amiga, developed entirely from scratch by Johnny Acevedo. This is not a port: no original source code was converted. Instead, the game was handcrafted, built piece by piece, based on a deep understanding of the original arcade mechanics, with graphics extracted from MAME ROMs (Thanks to 125Scratch) and converted for the Amiga.
💾 What’s included in this build Beta Version 2 :
5 weeks of hard work.
- Ship control via Joystick – smooth and responsive.
- Full ship assembly system – 3 docking parts.
- Shooting mechanics & engine thrust animation.
- 99% Complete recreation of arcade levels and graphics.
- Sound system.
- Vertical scrolling starfield.
- Dual Playfield mode:
- Background: 4 colors (stars)
- Foreground: 8 colors (game action)
⚡ Performance and optimization:
- This is ~99% of game logic powered by AMAL for speed and smoothness ,.
- Main loop kept minimal to maintain fluid gameplay 50 Hz on Stock Amiga 1200.
- Collisions, sound triggers, and scoring handled efficiently in AMOS BASIC
- Micro-lags minimized with optimized score updating
- Continuous testing on real hardware ensures faithful arcade experience
- Running on a vanilla Amiga 1200 ? 50 FPS gameplay, game is already 99% arcade-perfect.
- *Note: At the moment, due to limited time, the game is not yet fully optimized to run at maximum speed on an Amiga 500. We plan to improve its performance over time. This build currently runs at 25 FPS on Amiga 500.
Amiga OCS 512KB + 512KB users need Kickstart 2.00 or higher to run the game.
Kickstart 1.3 is not supported. (we have a Alpha No Scroll Version for 1.3 users , let us know if you are interested on test this dirt Wip solution for KS1.3 users)
đź’– Why support us:
This is a single-developer project, a labor of love for the Amiga community. The game is free, only if you want donations are welcome to help us continue creating new games for our beloved platform, but not necessary. Supporting independent developers helps keep the Amiga alive and encourages more retro game engineering.
🎮 Inspired by the arcade classic Moon Cresta (Nichibutsu, 1980)
👇 If you love:
- Amiga development
- Low-level optimization
- Retro game engineering
- AMOS / AMAL techniques
…this project is for you. Join us in celebrating and keeping the spirit of the Amiga alive!
— Johnny Acevedo
Compatible for A500+ / A600 / A2000 / A3000 / A1200 / A4000
Online Feedbacks
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A big thank you to these websites for their support of Amiga Moon Cresta:
https://www.indieretronews.com/2026/04/moon-cresta-faithful-recreation-of.html
https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/04/20/classic-arcade-shooter-moon-cresta-ge...
https://theoasisbbs.com/moon-cresta-amiga-arrives-on-itch-io-as-a-free-amiga-arc...
https://www.retroshell.com/moon-cresta-amiga-recreation-amos-tribute/
🚨Live Dev Videos🚨
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgECc-2jtPvmayZiVkDSJZzxwC_Caf9l6&si=-qjSjCy4...
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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not a transcode but pretty good, and the fact that it runs on A500 1MB at 25 fps is great. People tend to underestimate early 1980 hardware but they were already beating every single computer in terms of performance.
Yeah, people forget how insanely optimized those machines were. The Amiga’s custom chips were doing things mainstream PCs couldn’t touch for years. Running this at 25 fps on an A500 with just 1MB is honestly more impressive than a brute-force modern port (for Windows etc..). It’s not a straight transcode, but technically it captures the spirit of squeezing every last cycle out of early 80s/late 80s hardware.
And thanks for your comment, which I really appreciate coming from someone who perfectly understands the amount of work involved in making these kinds of Amiga adaptations. You’re doing a fantastic job with your own ports as well.
On the other hand, I’m honestly tired of hearing the same old nonsense from some ignorant people who jump at every opportunity to dismiss the wonderful AMOS language. At this point, the old myth that Blitz is somehow “better” or “faster” than AMOS just doesn’t hold up anymore. When you actually know how to use it and understand what you’re doing, AMOS is just as valid as any other language.
Cheers mate!
I didn't think that it was AMOS. It doesn't matter. On amiga, not everything needs to be 100% asm optimized. On this kind of game, if you can leverage the blitter in parallel of the cpu you get a lot more power, no matter the language, C, asm, AMOS, Blitz, whatever.
I agree with your point. On the Amiga, raw 100% assembly optimization isn’t always necessary, especially for this kind of game. If you design things properly and make good use of the blitter alongside the CPU, you can get a significant performance boost regardless of the language you’re using—whether it’s C, assembly, AMOS, Blitz, or anything else. In the end, architecture and smart use of the hardware matter more than the specific language.
Best regards, and if you ever need help with graphics, I’d be happy to help you out.
BTW I missed the docking, and the next level started immediately when I was respawning. I think that it's not really expected right?
Hi , beta 2 or alpha? , in alpha is possible in beta 2 must not do that ... but is possible , have to check that part again , thank you jotd666!
Hi,
Nice game, I tried it (BETA2) on my A500 ECS ACA500Plus in mode A500 ECS 1MB Chip and KS 2.04. It's a nice game but it will be great to have a KS1.3 version to test it on A500 (512+512) KS1.3 ; the most standard configuration... if it is possible.
Congratulations on the development of Your Game
Thanks! But at the moment, as stated in the description on this website, A500 KS1.3 is not supported. If we cannot find a proper solution later on, we may release a KS1.3 version without scrolling. Cheers!
Very good shooter game to Amiga. I added it to my video along with other games released in April.
Thank you so much for featuring Amiga Moon Cresta in your video.
Very clean arcade conversion that already makes a good impression. We can look forward to the final version. Our German-language preview can be found at 01:59:39. English subtitles are also available. 🙂
Thank you.
:-)
Thank you!
Awesome game!
Thank you Saberman , great video!
Excelente! Un sueño que será realidad!
Gracias por tu trabajo.
Un saludo , gracias!
very good
Thank you
neat!!!
Hi Indie Retro News 🙂 As always, thank you very much for featuring our game on your fantastic website. We really appreciate the support and the visibility you give to indie and retro projects like ours.
Thanks again!
You are most welcome!! I just love arcade/ports/conversions etc! So this is high up there on my wishlist. Great job :)
Thank you Amigo , keep up the great work!
Awesome
Thank you so much!
Very nice game!
Thanks as always, Saberman! We were waiting for your video so we could add it to the site as usual 🙂. Thanks for featuring our game on your channel—we really appreciate it and hope to see our game featured again when we release the final version. Hugs!
Great, I'm so happy—I love Moon Cresta! It's a fantastic game.
Really nice! Love the game. Great to see it on the Amiga.
Thank you!