"proto" of Parker Bros. Monopoly

[Zwackery]

This wasn't a game but more of a technology demonstrator.

 

While I was doing some research, I ran across this in The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit (2004) by Philip E. Orbanes (the senior vice president of research and development at Parker Brothers during the 1980s):

 

"...I invited my boss upstairs to the electronics department. There, in the lab where so many recent handheld games had been brought to life, sat a TV screen, an Atari video game system, and a young engineer seated next to a smiling Miffitt. The engineer flipped a switch and a picture of the train icon from the Monopoly game appeared on the screen. He then picked up a joystick and maneuvered a cursor over a column of colored bars. Whenever he clicked on a bar, the train changed to that color. That was it, pure and simple."

 

According to a footnote, the engineer was John Gates (and not the plastic molding expert John Gates who also worked at PB).

 

While not as cool as other protos around, that would still be a nifty little find.

[Tempest]

Weird. I've never heard of that one, but it doesn't sound like much of a proto though. Was this for the 2600 or 8-bit? I assume 8-bit because there was no way in hell they were going to do Monopoly on the 2600.

 

Tempest

[Zwackery]

It's a little unclear. According to Orbanes, he was approached by the head of Atari's home computer division at the 1981 CES to talk about licensing Parker Bros. games for cartridge development and that is basically what put him on track to thinking about getting PB involved in game development, but later he talks about allocating $50,000 to reverse-engineer Atari's hardware and at that point it seems like he is talking about the 2600.

 

So not a game, but more of a technology experiment along the lines of Venetian Blinds, I would guess. Using the Monopoly train icon was definitely the way to impress the management.

[Tempest]

I always wondered if Monopoly could be done on the Atari 8-bit. I know my friends and I used to play a really primitive version of it on his PCjr that didn't have many graphics and was mostly text (just a picture of a few of the squares you were near or on without any text on them). I suppose the 8-bit could easily do something like that.

 

Ahh here we go. This was the version we played: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/monopoly_/screenshots

 

 

Tempest

[Curt Vendel]

Well... it would've been possible to have had the 2600 rolling dice for each game piece, maybe even doing some basic tracking of properties (that may be a stretch) and players could play on a real board, would've been a nice combination of technology and board play, similar to the various Odyssey2 board games.

 

 

 

Curt

[supercat]

Well... it would've been possible to have had the 2600 rolling dice for each game piece, maybe even doing some basic tracking of properties (that may be a stretch) and players could play on a real board, would've been a nice combination of technology and board play, similar to the various Odyssey2 board games.

 

There are 28 properties. Ownership and development could be handled easily with one byte each (two bytes would be enough to handle every set of three, since development can only occur when all members of a set are unmortgaged and owned by the same player). Three bytes per player should easily handle cash (even two would probably suffice), plus one for board position and one for get-out-of-jail-free status (could easily combine with position). So that's 58 bytes so far.

 

What other state information is there? The game is well within the Atari's 128-byte limits.

 

Property names would probably require 30 bytes of ROM each to store (use 48x5 bitmaps). Pad things out to 51 messages (easiest way to avoid page crossings) and that's 1.5K.

 

While I don't see much point as a homebrewer developing a trademarked property I couldn't sell, I see no technical reason why the Atari 2600 couldn't handle a reasonable implimentation of Monopoly. In an 8K pb-banked cart I would think it should be possible to even include a recognizable color-coded board.

[Tempest]

Well one thing that would make it difficult is lack of a keyboard or more than one button. I know the SMS somehow handled it, but you were dealing with at least two buttons there (I don't know if it used the pause button or not).

 

Tempest

[YOK-dfa]

Well one thing that would make it difficult is lack of a keyboard or more than one button. I know the SMS somehow handled it, but you were dealing with at least two buttons there (I don't know if it used the pause button or not).

Why would you need two buttons? (It has been at least 15 years since i played my last game of monopoly ). If you really need several options, one could always use the Star Raiders pad, or simulate multiple buttons in the software...

[+bcombee]

What other state information is there? The game is well within the Atari's 128-byte limits.

 

If you wanted the 2600 to handle the Chance and Community Chest cards, you'd need a bit-per-card to store the "drawn/not-drawn" status and a routine to pick a random bit and show the message. There are 16 cards each, so you'd need four bytes of RAM for that info.

[kenfused]

What other state information is there? The game is well within the Atari's 128-byte limits.

 

If you wanted the 2600 to handle the Chance and Community Chest cards, you'd need a bit-per-card to store the "drawn/not-drawn" status and a routine to pick a random bit and show the message. There are 16 cards each, so you'd need four bytes of RAM for that info.

houses and hotel counts per property would probably consume the most maybe?

[supercat]

houses and hotel counts per property would probably consume the most maybe?

 

Every set of three properties could actually be encoded in twelve bits.

 

If the set is not developed, each property has 3 bits to indicate the owner (001-110, or 000 if none) and one bit to indicate whether it it mortgaged. If the set is developed, then the first three bits are 111, the next three bits give the owner, the next three bits state the development level of the least-developed property in the set (000=none, 001=one house, 100=four houses, 101=hotel), and the last three bits indicate which properties if any are developed a notch beyond that lowest level.

 

The eight sets of colored properties could thus fit in 12 bytes. The utilities are railroads could easily fit in three more bytes. For purposes of having a practical kernel, I think things would need to be stored less compactly. Even so, I don't think RAM would be a problem.