Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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Recently I discovered Sea Wolf, an arcade video game by Midway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJBu5fGKKpE

Sea Wolf was an electronic update to Midway's electromechanical game Sea Devil, which in turn was inspired by Sega's Periscope, which itself competed with Torpedo Launcher, a similar game that was the first designed by Masaya Nakamura, founder of the NAkamura Manufacturing COmpany -- later, Namco.

Sea Wolf preserves some of the "practical effects" of its predecessors, despite being a microprocessor-based game with a video screen. Aiming and firing is done with a swivelable periscope that has a piece of reflective glass in it and a sight painted on for aiming. Explosions are indicated by lights which are reflected off the glass; reflected lights also indicate how many torpedoes you have left until you need to reload. For this reason, emulating Sea Wolf leaves a lot to be desired, even though the electronic bits are thoroughly emulated.

My dad used to tell me about going to the fair in California and playing an arcade game where you assumed the role of a gunner in like a B-17. Film footage of fighter aircraft in pursuit would roll, and you had to shoot them down. When a hit was registered, it would somehow switch to footage of the enemy aircraft crashing and burning.

From the description, I'm guessing that the game your father played was "Firefox", a 1983 laser disc game by Atari.

The game synced dynamic computer graphics on top of pre-recorded laser disc background video. The "somehow switch to footage of the enemy aircraft crashing and burning" was, unsurprisingly, accomplished by simply jumping to a different track on the laserdisc, and typically happened when you completed one level and were about to begin the next.

I've never played it myself, but the gameplay actually looks surprisingly similar to Atari's vector graphic "Star Wars" game.

Or maybe not surprisingly once you notice that Firefox was created by the same team who had made that Star Wars arcade game the year before, and would go on to make the also-similar Empire Strikes Back arcade game the following year. I guess if you've got a winning formula, don't mess with it too much!

I remember once standing at a booth at the MacWorld Expo looking up at the massive display of a newly released game "Jump Raven" in which you were tasked with flying a hovercraft through city streets, shooting baddies, and all that usual video game stuff. I commented to the random guy standing next to me, "It looks a bit like Apache Strike, doesn't it?", referring to an old helicopter sim from like eight years earlier which had used a very similar viewpoint and game mechanics, albeit with only fairly primitive black and white graphics. And that random guy standing next to me turned and said, "I'm allowed to plagiarize from myself". Oops! (Sorry, Bill, I hadn't realised you were the programmer on Jump Raven too!) :D

> From the description, I'm guessing that the game your father played was "Firefox", a 1983 laser disc game by Atari.

I'm older than you think (and so is my father). The arcade machine he played dates from the 1960s, and did not involve a computer.

Ah, cool, I wasn’t aware of arcade machines using recorded video before the brief laser disc era! If you have any references or links where I could read up about them, I’d be fascinated to learn more!

Yeah, they used to use film reels (not video). The way he described it, it was similar in principle to Nintendo's Sky Hawk from 1976:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLcT5eaUZw0

This is the actual film footage used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-lUgkT2sz4

I don't know if the game my dad remembers worked the same way, but as you can see the footage is divided into two halves: the top half is the footage of the plane flying, and the bottom half has both a spot of light and footage of the plane exploding. A mirror inside the machine normally is positioned such that it reflects only the top half of the picture to the screen. The spot of light on the bottom half corresponds directly to the plane's location in the top half; a light sensor corresponds to the gun's motion such that when the gun is pointed at the plane, the sensor will pick up the spot of light (similar to the NES Zapper) and register a hit. Then at the right moment, if a hit was registered, the mirror will rotate, shifting the image from the top half of the film footage to the bottom half and showing the explosion sequence, before resetting for the next plane.

That's so clever! I would have guessed that film reels would be too fragile for that sort of continuous usage, though I'll confess that I have no personal experience with them.

I was really curious about how they would handle 'rewinding' a film reel between plays; assuming 16mm film, I figured, it would have been about 30 meters of film, so I wondered whether you could splice it together into a full loop and concertina it inside the cabinet so that it doesn't actually require rewinding between plays, and can instead just keep playing it continuously in a forward direction, and... after a bunch of Internet trawling, I found a forum post by somebody who had purchased and restored two units, that's exactly what they'd done! (I had my calculations about the length of the film wrong, though; apparently the full film is only about 10 meters long, which would definitely make it easier to wrangle the loop!)

The world of these older electromechanical arcade games is seriously cool; so much history and ingenuity here that I hadn't been aware of!

Yes, Sea Wolf was the first arcade game I ever played. Even before Space Invaders, which came out a couple years later. You are right about emulations of it being lacking, as they just emulate the electronic part.

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