Atari Tempest: Time-Lapse Photography (2016)
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And if you're really interested in how vector effects were achieved, here's another that goes into the nitty gritty of how Tempest encoded point, line, color, etc. data in RAM and then rendered those images [1].
This meant most of the screen wasn't illuminated most of the time (think LCD vs OLED). This is why long exposures like this are possible and super interesting.
That’s disappointing, but understandable. It would need to be original cabinet hardware to be THAT cool.
EDIT: Ah, duh, in order to produce color it necessitates differently colored phosphors and a shadow mask, which might explain what I'm seeing. It does look like horizontal vector scan lines though, if you look at the screenshot I provided in other comments
The electron gun is still having to hit discrete pixels on the screen. Rather than drawing the image line by line, it's traveling at angles to render the image. It wasn't so much that these graphics couldn't be done with the NTSC/PAL standard (although you would have an increased backlight), but it was a limitation of game hardware of the time. Defining a series of points to draw lines between required less memory than sprite-based graphics.
I'm not sure why everyone's jumping to (unnecessarily) correct me instead of actually zooming in on, say, the 2nd photo to see what I'm referring to. Here, let me try to screenshot:
Do you not see the horizontal scan lines here? A vector monitor has free reign over the beam's direction and would then not need to rasterize
EDIT: Ah, duh, in order to produce color it necessitates differently colored phosphors and a shadow mask, which might explain what I'm seeing. I was presuming single color vector display and no shadow mask, which is of course incongruous with the fact that Tempest is full-color.
On a monochrome vector monitor, like an oscilloscope or Asteroids, there is one electron beam that draws on the single-phosphor screen, without obstructions between the beam and the screen, leaving sharp lines. There are no pixels as such (though the hardware in arcade games may be limited to moving the beam to discrete locations), the glass is just covered with a smooth layer of phosphor.
On a color vector monitor however there are three beams, and the screen has an RGB pattern of color sub-pixels. In between the electron guns and the screen is a 'shadow mask'. This is basically a plate with holes, positioned such that the 'blue' beam can only hit the blue subpixels, and likewise for the other colors.
What you see in the pictures is the result of the beams sweeping over that mask and interacting with the small dots of colored phosphor on the glass.
The CRT of a color vector game is just a standard television CRT. The electronics are very different however.
Color vector monitors still have discrete phosphors. You're not seeing discrete scanlines, you're seeing discrete lines of phosphors.
> I also don’t see how this scheme would be less possible with NTSC/PAL.
Vector drawn video games must necessarily be on an all black background. Video games that draw backgrounds and sprites typically illuminate the entire screen. Your character will move around on a colored background. It wouldn't make any sense to do a long exposure on an illuminated background; it would just be a picture of the background with some blurriness where the sprites occasionally were.
(Not sure why Imgur is gating that with an adult content warning, but I assure you all it contains nothing of the sort.)
For me being able to do this kind of stuff without needing a tripod or external features was a big selling point of the camera.
There’s an iPhone app called Spectre (from the makers of Halide) which can do long exposures like this too, but I’ve not had the best luck with the results in comparison
If you've got any interest in astrophotography, I think you might be interested in this [1]. The combination of IBIS with the synthetic high-res mode inherently averages out noise in night sky shots, giving you both higher-resolution and very low noise.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxwYZ5HaYMM&ab_channel=Chasi...
For the unaware, the early Tempest machine left the factory with several cheat codes that were enabled when you got specific scores in the game. One of those scores granted 40 free credits on the game. How these code left the factory is a mystery to me. The fellow who operated the arcade machines at the Student Union was obviously frustrated, as one week he showed up and cranked all of the difficulty settings as high as they would go, perhaps hoping that would boost the revenues.
It was so interesting early on because it was not uncommon to just walk into an arcade and find a Tempest machine with the free credits. But, eventually, someone figured out how it worked, and the word got out.
The real sleeper of a code was the code that unlocked all of the levels. Like many games, Tempest would allow you to continue near where you left off if you continued playing. After the game, it would go into attract mode. If it went a full cycle of the attract mode, it would reset. This is why the level unlock code remained elusive for so long, as you had let the machine fully cycle in order to enable it (which nobody normally wanted to do).
When that code got out, the high score on every machine in town skyrocketed since the game could be started at the highest level (level 81, the Green level I think).
Outside the cheat codes, it was a fabulously satisfying game, from the gameplay to the sounds, to the pace. There was real nice hit when you hit the Super Zapper (which killed all the monsters), cleared the level, immediately started rushing through, while holding down the fire button to grind down the remains of the spike in your lane before you got thrown into space. The sights and sounds of that was just great.
When the team (well, Dave Theurer) finished the game, they sent it off to the factory floor and went on vacation. Mission accomplished.
Then Atari legal decided that they had to update the copyright message (e.g., to alter some spelling). Since the team was away, someone without the above knowledge just changed the string. The game appeared to work, and that's what they shipped.
That modification didn't abjectly crash the machine. Instead, it did Weird Shit depending on the remainder of the score line.
Just luck of the draw.
Do you know of an analysis that details this? The post-mortem on this must have been crazy. That's got to be a great "You've got to be kidding me" moment for the folks when they went in to fix the issue.
Goes into excruciating detail of many of the anti-piracy measures in Tempest, and probably covers what the parent is talking about. All "writing" was executable code in Tempest because everything being drawn is by telling the electron gun where to aim, so you have commands like a "Turtle" graphics library.
There were sections of anti-piracy code that would check magic numbers and perturb those copyright drawing routines if the check failed.
The author mentioned car lights doing light painting, which is achieved by compositing at least two pictures (one long expo for lights, one for the car which would otherwise be blurry as well)
So. Many. Quarters.
Especially at the Gold Star on Division in Chicago. :_)