Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
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I'm sure this happened after Atari was bought, but Dave said the purchasing agents were driving around expensive cars, cars that he as an engineer couldn't afford, the implication that there were obvious kickbacks going on. Programmers were sometimes given coke by their supervisor during crunch time to increase work. Some of the technical talent hired agents to negotiate with Atari -- the thinking being they are in the entertainment business, just like Hollywood.
Jeff Minter is clearly a fan as well:
Raw, minimalistic, and utterly satisfying. Atari did so much with so little. The end of every level felt like a rush of endorphins.
This needs a youtube link for the young ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af4uPgYcm04 [this one seem to capture the bass in the audio effects]
They have Tempest as well.
"The programmer had to do everything: Write the whole operating system from scratch, design all the graphics, write the tools to do the graphics, create sound tools, and do the sound design – everything from scratch for every game….I’d write the code on programming sheets and turn it in to the typists who’d type them in to a DEC computer, then give us a tape with the resulting compiled/linked program. We’d then take that to a blue box [which used the FORTH programming language] for debugging. We’d mark changes to the code on a listing, give it back to the typists who’d edit our files and give us a new tape. Repeat ad infinitum."
Before you can write any program, you have to build, run and execute it in your head. That's the challenge most of us face today. Hardware/Software doesn't matter much. The average indie developer is writing games in about 20k-50k line of code. Doesn't matter if it's 6502/z80 asm code in 80's or Unity/C# or Java code in 2018.
Tempest epitomizes early arcade games, to me. It was subject to all the same technical limits of games of the era, but it seemed to be apart from them; there's nothing you'd need to add to make it better. The sound and the look of it, from the intro screen on, is just really iconic.
This is the best video/music I have heard that captures the feeling of the early arcade from my childhood.
Tempest, recorded in 1982: http://www.coinopvideogames.com/mp3/videogames01/11-tempest....
I was playing it at the video games exhibit at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago and setting all the high scores and eventually a small audience was watching me play and asking me questions about it. I wasn’t sure if the game was the exhibit or I was.
Later on T3K for the Nuon (a system which nearly nobody knows about) also supported spinner input but the spinner controller was never actually released.
It wasn’t until 13 years later[1] a buddy and I reversed the settings to enable spinner control via a modified controller, which are extremely rare themselves because who buys a game controller for a DVD player?
[0]: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/202166-tempest-2000-and-rot...
[1]: https://assemblergames.com/threads/spinner-for-tempest-3000-...
Jeff Minter is God. What was the deal with llamas? Llamatron, is there a cooler name?
Also, I know that the ROM emulators had issues getting games to work on nonCRT screens as the games had to do some interesting programming "tricks" to deal with the quirks of NTSC. I wonder if the vector game emulation teams had any additional issues to deal with to get the game to work on nonCRT displays?
Larry Rosenthal made the first cheap vector game system from the guts of an old TV and a custom TTL CPU, to play Spacewar: https://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/11/at-end-of...
http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm
And "The Secret Life of XY Monitors"
http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm
(Jed was an Atari engineer during the vector era and beyond)
> The Math Box was built around the AMD 2901 Bit Slice which contained an Arithmetic/Logic Unit, a 16-deep dual port RAM, two registers, and a multiplexer. Each one was only 4-bits but had hooks so that it could be expanded. Four were used to produce a 16-bit machine and they were controlled by another State Machine.
> Battlezone was the first game to use a new development system: the Blue Box and White Box duo. The Blue Box was programmed in Forth and controlled the emulator/analyzer in the White Box. It also had an external 8" floppy disk drive as well as a serial port for connecting to the VAX. Unfortunately, it did not have a full featured editor/assembler. Editing/assembling/linking was originally done on the department's PDP11 Model 20s which placed the output file on an 8" floppy, which could then be loaded by the Blue Box.
> Later, when we got the first VAX, the Blue Box could be used as a terminal and the VAX was used to edit, assemble and link the program, and the output could be downloaded into the Blue Box/White Box.
I never saw the "blue FORTH box" but it was probably a ROM emulator of some kind that you downloaded code to, with some FORTH words for doing low-level stuff like debugging, resetting the target and diagnostics. The game itself was not written in FORTH.
I'd forgotten that some programmers depended on other people keyboarding their source code. I think this was largely a coin-op thing; the other engineering departments never practiced that.
I'd love to know the details of that bug. All I've been able to find is this quote which doesn't really explain things:
The fact you can earn 40 free games with a certain score was the fault of developer Dave Theurer himself. He had created a special security code to protect against piracy which checked the placement of different objects. If the objects were not in the correct place, the game would shut down. Before the game was shipped, however, Theurer, who would fuss over minute details, noticed an Atari logo was off-center. He adjusted it slightly. This small change caused the code to malfunction and the player to earn 40 free credits if a certain score was reached.
Also, I seem to recall the bug makes an appearance in the plot of Ready Player One.
Like many games at the time the code in the ROMs had tamper protection. The basic idea is to detect if the ROM has been altered and if so assume it is a pirated copy and do something to cause the game to fail. Pirates could still make exact copies but they'd have to retain copyright notices and trademarks which makes them more vulnerable to detection and prosecution.
At the last minute Dave changed the position of some logos on screen but forgot to update the copy protection. When an illegal copy was detected the game would use some of the digits of the score obtained at the end of the game to zap bytes in memory if the overall score itself was within some range. This kind of random scrambling that only happens semi-randomly is better than copy protection that triggers deterministically. Imagine if the game did a checksum of its ROM and immediately said "Illegal Copy Detected - Program Halted". It would make it easier to find the copy protection routines and disable them.
So the first version that shipped thought it was an illegal copy and triggered the random scrambling. It so happens that sometimes the random scrambling would result in giving the player 40 credits.
There were other effects which players discovered and are listed here: https://forums.arcade-museum.com/archive/index.php/t-79058.h...
Thanks, Dave, for so many happy arcade hours!
Having said that, I was still a big fan of Tempest.