On Tue, 13 Mar 2001 09:51:09 EST, MKDUD@aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 3/11/2001 6:00:09 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>warlords@ntlworld.com writes:
>
><< i picked up a vectorgame today off a friend, 'Stellar Castle' by
> elettronolo.. >>
>
>This is a bootleg Star Castle. Elettronolo also did Asteroids copies with
>different sideart & control panels. I think the last Asteroids bootleg I saw
>like this came from Portugal (Ed? was this the one in 7th?).
I believe this was a licensed copy of Star Castle. I was told by an ex-employee
the he seemed to remember, Cinematronics making a few changes in Star Castle for
a couple of European knock-offs.
So either his memory is correct, or someone went through a lot of trouble
reverse engineering the whole Cinematronics platform, dis-assemblying / reverse
engineering the Star Castle ROMs, just to change to title to Italian.
When a Japanese company bootlegged Star Castle they added some blanking
circuitry to blank the Cinematronics copyright notice at the bottom of the
screen. Cinematronics won their lawsuit by demonstrating to the judge that by
cutting a wire, the copyright notice would magically appear. The other company
had a hard time explaining why they added a Cinematronics copyright to "their"
software.
They did do a nice job of bootlegging though, I've seen the board, it was nicer
than Cinematronics. It also had all the monitor DACs as part of the main CPU
assembly, allowing it to use standard (WG) B&W XY monitors.
-Zonn
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Received on Tue Mar 13 12:26:53 2001
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