Big_Mo

So far I've not been able to successfully play anything but Novice because I find the hyperspace steering so maddening I want to throw the controller across the room.

Ah, it's not on the Control Summary. Thanks!

I played it some more. A few additional observations. I let the Zylons get to Earth and they destroyed it after a time. Heck they destroyed the entire solar system! Weirdly, the game didn't end with that cataclysm! Hitting the Zylon cities/factories on the planet is best done by shooting them them they are specks in the distance. They're actually harder to hit the closer you get due to the jumpiness of the screen, especially when banking Starbases can survive one hit, blow up on the second. If you hit the base once, then put or or leave it in docking position, it fires on your with the message ZYLON SWINE! Zylons can enter the system you're in. That never happened in the original game! One problem with the controls is that the reticle doesn't recenter if you stop steering. This makes it hard to "stabllize" your ship and end up with the targeting dead-ahead. You literally can't recenter your reticle in the crosshairs without actually steering towards it. It oughta have auto recentered after X seconds of no input.

Love it! I loaded it onto my XE and played it there. Realize it's unfinished, and there would be tweaks, but since I don't know what such a final version would be like, here's the feedback I'd give on this version if I were asked to review it: CONTROLS The reticle doesn't move fast enough, so chasing it around the screen is frustrating Steering in Hyperspace is needlessly difficult. It doesn't feel right. Steering over planets is much too twitchy. The banking is too severe, and the objects jump around too much I understand the desire to to do Up is Up and Down is Down because of the reticle, but it leads to some weirdness because an old school Star Raiders player expects it to behave one way, and, it doesn't. And then if you Invert the controls it feels sorta okay in space combat mode and wrong over planets. I think the moving reticle is somewhat at odds with the airplane type flying. Player ship should not come out of hyperspace at a speed different from that which you had before entering it. This forces the player to constantly reach for the keyboard to adjust if they don't prefer the default velocity The 3D illusion is currently ruined by the fact that the enemy ships pop in really big and do not diminish to specks at longer range. It makes the space feel very teeny rather than vast. The 3D ships are cool but what's lost is the smoothness of the original enemy ship movement Why is there no pause? Where did the Manual Target Selector go? The sector maps and zooms are cool, but they're slow, so you waste precious seconds waiting for images to scale up and down. Speaking of waiting, while the history is neat, it keeps the player from actually playing for quite a while. Furthermore, there seem to be no way to even abort out of the game during this, so if you accidentally started a game in the wrong difficultly, you can't jump back out to the main menu for a good 15 seconds

Yes, but those are a little harder to reliably press.

Serial ports meaning controller ports?

Brilliant! Thanks.

So, here's the question... with the pinouts on the expansion port, could you have networked two 5200s together in a simple way? Send bits through some interface?

I always thought someone should have tried two make it so the left button fires from the left base, the right from the right, and BOTH from the center.

Pardon my bringing this topic back from the dead, but I was wondering if the expansion port had a working R/W line on it ( I see a R/W on some pinouts, but want to be sure), and if yes was that consistent across all 5200 models and variations?

When I was at Namco Networks we licensed this game for mobile. The game ran in an original mode, which looked just like the arcade, and then we had an advanced mode with more detailed graphics and a few newly designed levels, including one based on the Popeye cartoon "A Dream Walking". You can see what the game looked like here (I set the video link to open at the beginning of the "A Dream Walking" stage link to image): LINK TO VIDEO. You can scrub back to see more of it. Sorry for the stupid music the video maker laid over it. To the final stage (The Black Barnacle: link to image) in Advanced mode we added the early Popeye character of Bernice the Whiffle Hen seated atop one of the masts as a power-up. Eugene the Jeep also appeared in one level.

This goes right to the Atari segment start: And this one skips right to where Atari first gets mentioned: But, caveat emptor, right off the bat the narration claims "the first game Atari designed was PONG" and getting the whole Andy Capp's story wrong.

Well, since this zombie thread has been re-animated, I'll chime in. Of the original launch and shortly-after launch titles only PAC-MAN or Galaxian would've worked. Centipede (I forget when it came out) could have worked, but it plays much better with a Trakball, and you really want your launch title to play well with the pack-in controllers. Missile Command wasn't different enough from the 2600 version to be exciting. Star Raiders would have been a terrible pack-in. I remember lots of my friends trying it and being confused trying to navigate in 3D space. No good as a pack-in. Space Invaders was too old, AND the 5200 version is, well, lame. It's only saving grace is the sheer amount of animation in the game, not starting the Invaders off-screen and having them march in always made the game too easy, and the saucers were worth so little they weren't worth bothering with.

Does anyone know if there's a hack of 5200 Centipede to fix the bug with the fleas? I forget at what point it happens, but once you get a certain ways in the game stops dropping fleas, period. This totally wrecks the arcade-accuracy of the game and makes it less fun.

I never likes this version much. Having the invaders enter from one side makes it too easy, and the low point values for the saucers makes them not worth going after. The animations of the invaders on the 5200 is great, though.

Hahaha. I just found some of the art for that.

I think just getting rid of the slowdown would do a lot to make it easier.

I forget what my highest score was, but it was pretty damned high. I used to play the Hell out of that game.

Yeah, the 5200 manual has the Zydar/Krytolian one (link).

Space Dungeon's always been one of my favorite games on the 5200 except for one thing: as the game gets into later levels and there are a lot of objects and explosions happening the game really bogs down and it becomes nearly unplayable at times. I was wondering if anyone had even hacked the game and knew the code. Seems to me that if it weren't drawing all the shrapnel of exploding objects all the time it might not slow down as much. Anyone ever try this?

Most home Space Invaders games don't get one major detail right: The Invaders don't move simultaneously. The original arcade game only updates the position of one Invader per frame. This results in the characteristic "ripple" you see across the formation early in the game. The more Invaders there are, the slower the formation moves. If there are 30 Invaders present it takes a full second for them all to take one step. When there are 10, they each take 3 steps per second. When there are 2, they each take 15 steps per second. They actually why they speed up.

If he wanted to do the arcade style he could easily have copied them without the help of the art dept. They're not exactly complicated. As to the VCS Invaders, my brother and I had nicknames for them. I remember the ones on the second row from the top we called "Romper Stompers" (after a toy from Romper Room) and the third row were like Monkey Men or something.

Yeah, it's a clever trick to make your eye see detail that isn't there with only one color on each scanline of the Player. It creates the illusion of his arms casting shadows on his body.

It was a good time and I got to meet a few of you guys.

Al gave a good "Goldilocks" talk: not too long and not too short but just right. I'd met him before but got to sit down with him for about 15-20 minutes before the talk and chatted. Also ran into Jerry Jessop. Missed Mike Albaugh, though he was there for a while. Did get to go out for beer with Dan "The Trak-Ball Man" Kramer and a couple of other guys from AtariAge. Dan gave me an LED overlay insert for a 2700 controller which he found when it fell out of one of his notebooks. Funniest moment for me personally is when I chatted with a guy with some STs and I mentioned that I used to wrote for ANALOG and ST-Log and he said "you're the guy with the rat on his shoulder!" since that (my Avatar here) was always alongside my byline. Funny to be recognized after all this time. P.S. He's a Mouse.