I Hear That Asteroids Machine Calling My Name | Hacker News Reader

I Hear That Asteroids Machine Calling My Name

insentricity.com

56 pointserickhill16 comments

Jed Margolin is an ex-Atari hardware engineer that wrote an excellent tutorial on how the vector graphics systems worked on classic Atari arcade titles.

http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm

The Vector State Machine mentioned in OP's article was essentially a custom processor designed out of TTL latches and DACs to draw the vectors faster than the 6502 main CPU ever could.

It's a great piece of engineering and a close cousin to Apple's Disk ][ Controller that Wozniak designed out of a handful of TTLs and an EPROM.

Thanks for that link, from there I discovered "I, Robot", 1983/4 game I guess was at least 3 years ahead of its time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmvWxG2zvs8

I, Robot was another amazing piece of engineering. A simple 6809 main CPU and a custom math coprocessor built out of AMD 2901 ALUs.

What a coincidence, just this morning I was reading the discovery saga of Atari's Color Gotcha, most probably the first color video game:

https://edfries.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/fixing-color-gotcha...

That's a great story. I continued to read the post on his restoration of a Computer Space cabinet which was also a good read.

Great set of links hanging from these pages (computer space + Atari stuff) another hour I'm not getting back..

I bought (and still have) an Asteroids Deluxe machine 20 years ago, thinking at the time "Wow this old retro game is 15 years old!". It's funny how 20 years ago seems like yesterday in comparison...

I don't think I've ever played Asteroids in its original form. Do the shots actually sparkle and flare like that, or is that just a camera artifact?

The vector display seems to have a decay time so there are some trails I think but not as strong as the picture. I remember the shots being really really bright on the display, but the camera seems to add a bunch of flare.

Compared to asteroids in a MAME emulator the real display is way different.

I think it's because of the shutter. The camera is capturing the image over a period of time so the photons for those trails will be additive.

It certainly does have that effect, but you're right in that it's not quite that pronounced.

I spent a lot of time playing Asteroids in the arcade growing up (that and Tempest). I have a physical problem with my left hand so I found playing a lot of later arcade games that required a lot of very specific movements of the joystick difficult so I kept coming back to those two because the left hand control was basically just a dial.

I found a video with some really good close-ups of gameplay, and it looks like the sparkle effect may actually be caused by the bright bullets refracting through tiny scratches in the display, which is fascinating. I've queued up 3:12, and there's a specific shot around 3:16 where the concentric radial glow is very clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w60sfReTsRA&t=3m12s

I recently played an Asterioids cabinet at a retro gaming convention.

The shots in particular are extremely bright. Perhaps the cathode ray sits there slightly longer than for the other lines so that it's brighter.

I have a lasting impression of just how different the screen looks from modern displays. The combination of high contrast, light bleeding and the long image persistence makes it so different to emulation.

Not on original Asteroids, no. I want to say the first game I can remember with sparkling or pulsating shots is either Star Castle or Space Duel.

Good old Atari. I liked Asteroids, but personally, my favorite arcade game from them was Tempest.

I would love to own a Tempest cab but wouldn't want to maintain it. Fortunately, I have TxK[0] which isn't a good Tempest clone at all but an amazing game in it's own right.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TxK

i bought one in 1995 played it regularly until i was posted to the UK in 2000 and had to sell it.

the reason the guy only charged me $250 for it was that the fire button didn't work. i was aware of this but i bought it with the intention to fix it.

After playing it for a few days, i got used to playing without the fire button and just left it the way it was

to play, you had to crash your ship into the enemy saucers, kamikaze style.

If you're successful, you get the same points (100 for the big slow ones, and 500 for the small, fast ones) as if you had hit them using the fire button.

over the past decade or so, i've played asteroids a few dozen times, where i've happened to see a machine, but not once have i used the fire button.

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