Re: Bizarre Tailgunner (2) Experience

At 05:19 PM 8/21/97 -0500, Paul Kahler wrote:
>> 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 :-)

I read that somewhere (probably in a post by you). I don't know, I think
what they game needed was a way to win. In most games there is a way to
play the game, that if you played a perfect game, you would never die.

Since in WotW you have to occasionally use your shields to move under a
critter, and there is no way to replenish your shields, eventually you must
die. Makes for a boring game. Maybe a shield boost if you shot martians
before there legs came down, or shooting those twizzle balls the freeze you.
More martians would just mean more shield usage, making for a faster /
unwinable game.
>
>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 :-)

That was exactly my point! But tell you what, if you add the extra RAM,
I'll remove the wait states and patch it for single ROM usage!

Ok, you go first... ;^)

>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.

Well according to some technicians and engineers that worked there at the
time, they did have sort of a clue, that's why they built Cosmic Chasm as an
open archeticture. The "operating system" they wrote for it was to allow the
easy additition of new games, they planned on using it for all their future
vector games. Only problem was they bought a new building to do the
manufactoring, the president (or what ever the top guy's title was) was
embezzling money in the form of kickbacks, operators were pretty burnt out
on repairing X/Y monitors and didn't want anymore vector games, and the game
industry took a huge dive.

But your right they could have speeded up the bitslice and used it for a few
more games. Unfortunately the people working there at the time did not have
that kind of understanding of the bitslice hardware. They instead, were
designing sound cards, and working on the new raster stuff / Cosmic Chasm
hardware.

-Zonn
Received on Thu Aug 21 14:52:32 1997