Ed Logg's plan form for Atari Asteroids
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The control scheme comes directly from Spacewar; even the hyperspace button works the same way. Space Invaders inspired the "clear the level" aspect of the game. Nishikado cites Breakout as the inspiration for this aspect of Space Invaders. (Shooting games until that point usually didn't have levels to clear, you just ran up your score until the game ended.)
There's an old archived post with more trivia and design docs here: https://web.archive.org/web/20141222010537/http://www.edge-o... (might be display errors, maybe ad-block-detector caused)
I wonder if there is a browser version, or iOS version around these days?? Would love to revisit it for nostalgic reasons.
As much I sometimes grown when I hear people talking about CRT emulation of classic computers and games consoles, if there was any game that would benefit from CRT emulation it would be Spacewar!
I recently stumbled across a youtube video where someone takes a modern laser projector and recreates asteroids using it. A little long, but kinda interesting.
The laser projector link you put up is really cool. Laser servos can't move around anywhere near as fast as a vector monitor, so it's neat to see how he had to scale the number of objects down to a manageable level.
I'll have to take another look at an asteroids, but the fact that you can't even tell that how it works, even when the screen is full of objects is telling.
those XY monitors were quite the thing. I'm getting "VECTREX" flashbacks (the 80s vector based home game console)..
http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm
The secret is very precise (and expensive) DACs. The vector generator actually did all the hard work in Asteroids. The main CPU (a 1.5 MHz 6502) just created vector lists for the AVG to draw.
6502 sounds like the Apple // processor.
Thanks.
Also: Commodore PET/VIC20/64/128, BBC Micro, Nintendo NES, Atari 2600/5200, and Atari 400/800 home computers.
Note how it shoots at asteroids that haven't spawned yet, e.g. at 10s, or lines up perfects shots on the splitters of an asteroid at ~28s, before the large one is actually hit.
Each time something random happens at the beginning of the game, it narrows down the internal state of the PRNG, and quickly can perfectly predict the game.
Probably the most awe-inspiring thing to me about most great 20th century engineering (and other) accomplishments is that, except in a very few fields (and then rather late) they basically took place without the aid of computerized communication, research, and organizational tools. It seems so daunting to, for example, fight a globe-spanning war on two fronts involving dozens of allied nations and millions of men and women, without even the aid of a spreadsheet.
Another account describes the game as a "creative exercise" that turned into an actual product (this wasn't uncommon!): http://www.rawbw.com/~delman/pdf/making_of_Asteroids.pdf
In any case, it's a fascinating sign of the times. Today the completed game would be considered a "creative exercise"--a skilled programmer could probably finish it in a day.