Xargon

Xargon
Developer: Allen Pilgrim Publisher: Epic MegaGames Platform: DOS Released internationally: 1993 This game has unused areas. This game has hidden development-related text. This game has debugging material. This game has a prerelease article

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A game based off the Jill of the Jungle code where fish make human moans and collecting items plays varying pitches of the same guitar chord.

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Prerelease Info

Debugging

There is an undocumented "/TEST" parameter which will show the detected CPU speed as a number on the hardware detection screen. According to the source code, an 8MHz 286 gives a value of 5452, a 16MHz 386 is 17819, and a 33MHz 386 is 36392.

Pressing the Z key three times will activate a debug mode. All this seems to do is replace the yellow high score number with a blue number representing the amount of free memory.

The source code release includes keycode printing functions (W three times) and macro (demo) recording functions (R to start, E to end) and a level editor (Ctrl+E), however the code to activate these was commented out for the commercial release.

(Source: ModdingWiki)

Hidden Levels

Xargon main menu normally.

Xargon main menu, being played as a game level. Walking off the screen to the left puts the player in the demo map. Despite the "beta" text, this was taken from a public shareware release.

Many of the screens in the game are not graphics but actual levels, and by renaming certain game files these "levels" can actually be played. By renaming the files below so that they are named board_01.xr1, these extra levels can be played by starting a new game and entering the first level from the world map.

Filename	Level
demo1.xr1 demo2.xr1 demo3.xr1	Demo levels (2 and 3 from registered game, playable in shareware version).
intro.xr1	Main menu and demo map.
story.xr1	Story/help screens (not really playable).

It is worth noting that in the second and third demo level, there are creatures from the later episodes that are fully functional, however they are not used anywhere else in the shareware game.

Music

"Groove" (XR0-DEMO.CMF) by Dan Froelich

Velocity Ignored (In-Game)	Velocity Enabled (MuchMusic)

The music is in CMF format, which stores velocity values for each note. Despite these, Creative Labs' official CMF player, and the Xargon CMF player, ignore velocity values and play notes at full volume all the time.

Xargon's CMF-format soundtrack has notes with different velocity values, so playing these songs with a CMF player that honours the note velocity fields, such as Drum Blaster or MuchMusic, results in a slightly different sounding song. Some notes that are repeated in the game will fade out more like an echo when note velocities are respected. Groove, the song used for the demo, is the most obvious of these.