Comment by purplejacket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by purplejacket | Hacker News Reader

I love this video game. For a brief moment, about four years back, I was the top player on the Williams Defender Players Unite facebook group at hard difficulty settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iEqoYW013E

And, for the hackers, here's a version of the Defender ROM, modified by a programmer named Jim Bowley, to render an impossibly difficult version of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhZlOwEvd5M

The above is running on JROK -- http://www.jrok.com/ -- custom silicon to emulate the original chip (much better than MAME), it's contained in an original cabinet, with an original monitor, and a custom built control panel, designed to be as authentic to the original as possible, and hand-built by Jim Bowley https://www.jbgaming.co.uk .

Here's a player, mikeville66, whose video inspired me to get better. This is maximum difficulty on the first-run ROM chips, the infamous Green ROMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrkx6vuiMrE

And if you're interested in an instructional video of how to play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PEpDMgR9D0

Defender was a big game back in the day, grossing about a billion dollars worldwide.

I also loved this game, but then Stargate was released and I liked it more. Do you why they are so similar? Do they share any code or the same programmers?

Stargate is Defender 2. Some marquees even said Defender 2. It's by Jarvis and De Mar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_(video_game)

Legend has it that the reason Stargate is so hard compared to Defender is because the one of the early test units ended up in an arcade where one of the best Defender players in the country hung out; when it came back to Williams with his scores filling the high-score table, they assumed this was because it was just too easy. So they fixed that.

I like Stargate too. In fact these days it's the game I'm playing. Though I go back and forth. For me, back in the day, I went from Stargate to Defender because the 7/11 got rid of their Defender and the Safeway on the next block got a Stargate :-)

What I noticed about Stargate back then, coming from Defender, was that it was easier to shoot things. I think this was because the Stargate chip was an upgrade--the faster CPU wouldn't steal time slices from me at odd moments, so the game was more predictable. I remember Eugene Jarvis and Sam Dicker talking about the Defender->Stargate upgrade process at the California Extreme arcade convention in 2014. Stargate is a fun game, and these days I play more casually, not really trying to perfect my skill.

As someone else in the comments noted: Defender is more raw. It's like those characters from the older version of the Matrix: Difficult to kill. It's like Yngwie Malmsteen's demo tape before his first album. There is a basic visceral appeal to it.

> Yngwie Malmsteen's demo tape before his first album

Saw him more than once live because he was always opening for a band I wanted to see :)

I've got a cabinet built by Jim - it's amazing. Highly recommended.

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