Solrax

Hi, just wanted to comment on this thread in case anyone is still interested in this, don't know if anyone will ever read this but what the heck! I was the lead programmer on the 7800 Robotron. I just stumbled onto this site and was excited to see my 30 year old source code! Unfortunately as you discovered, the source code is from a development version and is incomplete. I could tell right away because the Wave Table which we laboriously derived from watching videos we made of Robotron arcade machine gameplay, is incomplete - not defining waves 20-40. This table is used to define how many of each object type to spawn for each wave (Robotron waves repeat waves 20-40 once wave 40 is passed). Someone in the thread asked if we had access to the Robotron arcade source code. We did not. We did not take a ROM dump either, in general when we did our conversions since we knew we could only approximate the gameplay we went for reimplementation instead of trying to port the code. In Robotron's case I suppose it would have made our lives easier to have access to their equivalent of the wave table, but it would have been very difficult to disassemble all that on our tight schedule. I got an interesting anecdote from a Williams programmer at a PAX panel we were on. I asked him why source code was not provided, he said that most often when they were getting a new arcade machine ready to ship they were making their final tweaks and patches right in the machine code, and were not changing the source at all, just tweaking tables and constants. When they had it the way they liked it they dumped it and burned it to make the production ROM. So there was no source code in existence that reflected the final game. I may still have listings at home, though that won't do much good, who'd want to retype all that? I still have some 8" floppies that I think have the final source that may or may not be readable if such drives existed anymore and could read the format Anyway, wanted to say hi, glad to see there is interest in this. I loved Robotron and it was quite an honor to be able to do the 7800 conversion of it.