Aliens - update...

Well, good news!

I managed to sneak into the computer room and work with the Aliens
boards a bit last night (we've had company all week so hacker-time has
been limited).

Long story short-- both sets of Aliens ROMs work, and are different!
They also appear to run on stock Tempest hardware. (Yay! :-)

I've dubbed the sets "Aliens Proto 4" and "Aliens Proto 5" based on the
board serial numbers.

Aliens Proto 4 appears to be the earlier set. It's smaller by 2K, and
has a lot of unused space in the ROMs. It also appears to have been
related to Lunar Lander somehow 'cause it appears there's chunks of
Lunar Lander source code in the ROMs. Go figure. Gameplay is
definately "Tempest", but seems REALLY hard. That could just be the
fact that the shooter doesn't auto-fire - one bullet per press on the
button! The game appears to be in some kind of early beta-state-- there
is no title screen, enemy movement is slightly different (faster?), and
all enemies but the red flippers "sparkle" instead of having solid
colors. Explosions are also multi-colored, and the player "death"
animation is completely different. I haven't tried it on a machine with
sound capabilities yet, so I can't comment on that yet. Oh, yeah-- "NEW
SUPERZAPPER" instead of "SUPERZAPPER RECHARGE". High-score table
doesn't seem to be functional either.

Aliens Proto 5 looks much closer to the released game. It does however
have one obvious and cool difference-- the title screen proudly
proclaims "VORTEX by Atari" in a cool-looking font. ;-) (Same sort of
"zoom in" effect that the Tempest title screen does, but the "trails"
 from the letters stay on screen for a while.) Once again, gameplay
seems close to final Temest, but possibly a little harder. It may also
allow more player bullets on the screen at once-- although that could
have just been my perception after playing with Proto 4 for a while.
Auto-fire works, and all the rest of the game functions seem
more-or-less the same as Tempest. There's definately differences
though, but until I do a side-by-side compare they're tough to describe.

Anyway, this is just entirely too interesting (to me at least ;-) to
pass up, so I'm putting together a multigame for all this stuff. It's
not going to be super-fancy, but should serve its purpose-- a software
based menu system allows selection of Aliens Proto 4, Aliens Proto 5,
Tempest rev 1, Tempest rev 2, Tempest rev 3, and Tempest Tubes (if OK
with author). There will be three jumpers on the board that allow
selection of any game (or the menu) to be the default "power-up" mode of
the cabinet. The menu will still be call-able from a dedicated
menu-button.

-Clay
Received on Thu Mar 18 11:00:47 1999