Re: Bizarre Tailgunner (2) Experience

> Excellent summary of neat (and precise) arcade trivia. So let's say we
> disable the wait state generator on the Cinematronics platform so that
> those awesome new games are possible. Does the speed (slew rate?) of
> the monitor become the next bottle neck, since more complicated games
> often have more objects?

Tim Skelly said [there I go name droppin' agian] said he wasn't satisfied
with War of the Worlds because he couldn't draw enough aliens on the
screen due to the "slowness" of the processor (which was really quite fast
at the time). He wanted a LOT of them which in itself might make the game
a little fun :-)

Another CineHack that would be fairly easy is to expand the memory to
4K x 12 instead of 256x12. This could be done by using bigger RAM chips
and an extra latch. Beyond that, the existing instruction set wouldn't
support it. As it is, you'd be forced to use pointers to get beyond 256
words, but that is supported (just need a bigger address latch). The ROM
can easily bank switch up to 64K - the most they ever did was 32K for
Boxing Bugs. Finally, if Zonn wanted to tweak the wait-state generator
he may as well make it work from a single ROM since 100ns and less are
readily available today. I for one have better things to do than write
a game to run on modified 20-year-old hardware :-)

I suppose it's interesting to note that if Cinematronics had a clue they
could have extended the life of that basic design by a couple years. With
added memory and ROM, a little CPU speed boost, and an Atari color monitor
they probably could have done the likes of Star Wars on it.

> So am I out in lala-land if I pose the question of a "universal I/O"
> card that makes use of modems to communicate between two games? In the
> most basic form woudl this be the equivalent to a PC's serial port? I'm
> not limitting this question to just the Cinematronics platform. I'd be
> much more interested in having this for the Sega XY platform (where
> adding another card to the cage isn't impossible).

Kurt & I talked years ago about running Net-RipOff and other CineGames
on the emulator. It'd be fairly simple and might work via modem if there
wasn't too much lag. Some fairly tricky code might even be able to keep
2 emulators in sync WITH lag now that I think about it...Or maybe not.
The basic idea should work with any emulator.

Later,
 ___ __ _ _ _
| \ / \ | | | || | phkahler@oakland.edu Engineer/Programmer
| _/| || || |_| || |__ " What makes someone care so much?
|_| |_||_| \___/ |____) for things another man can just ignore. " -S.H.
Received on Thu Aug 21 14:15:22 1997