Ajax

Ajax, known as A-JAX in Japan, is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up arcade game released by Konami in 1987. The game was also released on the home computer systems ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 in 1988 by Imagine Software under the name Typhoon, the one chosen for distribution outside Japan and on Sharp X68000 by SPS as "A-JAX" in its home country.

Set during a fictional global war in 2007, the players control a "Tom Tiger" helicopter (in the 2D stage) and later a "Jerry Mouse" fighter jet (in the 3D stage), and shoot enemies in the air and bomb them on the ground, collecting power-ups and defeating bosses to advance levels.

Ports
The IBM PC and Tandy 1000 ports were done by Banana Development, Inc. (Programmer - Logan Poelman, Artwork - Chris Grow and Brenda Johnson, Music - Kris Krug) It was written completely in 8086 assembly language. A custom multitasking kernel was developed for the game, to provide for simultaneous animation, music, collision detection and scoring on the single tasking MS DOS operating system, quite advanced for the time on the IBM PC platform. To support flicker free scrolling, double buffering was used. The music routines supported 4 note polyphony on suitable sound hardware, as well as sound effects related to the game play. (The computer graphics and the music for the game were authored/transcribed on an Amiga 500 and then the files transferred to the IBM platform used by the software designer.)