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Space Invaders Names!


SoundGammon

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Lets just name them after prominent people in the leadership of Atari that made all those terrible decisions back in the day that had our beloved Atari die and later be resurrected as the monster it is today.

 

Our revenge will come one "zap" at a time ;).

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Actually, there are only three proper types in the real (original) Space Invaders, and they are called:

 

1) the little ones

2) the middle size ones

3) the big ones

 

In the 2600 adaptation, they're all pretty much the same size, so they're called:

 

1) the top ones

2) the second from the top ones

3) the middle ones

4) the second from the bottom ones

5) the bottom ones

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I did a quick ROM hack yesterday to do what I wanted to do 34 years ago... fix the graphics to make Space Invaders look like Space Invaders. It's probably been done already, but I wanted to take a shot at it. Can't do pixel perfect because all sprites (with the exception of the top row of aliens) is wider than 8 pixels, and the 2600 has "fat" pixels, but I gave it the old college try. It always made me wonder why Atari would shell out so much cash to secure the rights, only to turn around and have their engineers come up with such dorky stand ins. I think my ROM hack came out pretty good and it certainly "feels" a heck of alot more "Space Invader-ish".

 

invadermod.png

 

 

invade_mod.bin

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I did a quick ROM hack yesterday to do what I wanted to do 34 years ago... fix the graphics to make Space Invaders look like Space Invaders. It's probably been done already, but I wanted to take a shot at it. Can't do pixel perfect because all sprites (with the exception of the top row of aliens) is wider than 8 pixels, and the 2600 has "fat" pixels, but I gave it the old college try. It always made me wonder why Atari would shell out so much cash to secure the rights, only to turn around and have their engineers come up with such dorky stand ins. I think my ROM hack came out pretty good and it certainly "feels" a heck of alot more "Space Invader-ish".

 

invadermod.png

 

 

Rick Maurer actually tried to get the Atari art department to help him with designing the invaders but was unsuccessful and ended up doing them himself.

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....how about "helicopter guy" for the top row?

 

But I've never considered these little guys having names. If that happened, I probably would feel sorry for them, not shoot them, and lose horribly. Nope, I'll keep them anonymous so I can blast them outta the sky. :D

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Rick Maurer actually tried to get the Atari art department to help him with designing the invaders but was unsuccessful and ended up doing them himself.

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.

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Bonnie, Clyde, Inky, Stinky, Enos, Wild Bill,

Billy, Ned, Alf, Calamite Jane, Bo, Daisy,

Boss Hog, Stan, Laurel, Eustace, Jim-Bob, Cletus,

Ralph, Nelson, Kenny, Stewie, Ned, Smithers,

Norton, Rik, Niel, Vivian, Mike, Jerzy,

Wilma, Bobby, JR, Pam, Ellie, Alexis.

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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.

It just seemed odd to me that Atari would go through all the trouble of spending alot of money to secure the rights to do the game only to change the graphics so drastically. If I were in the coder's position at that time, I would have opted to go for as close to the arcade look and feel as possible.

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Maybe they did try the arcade graphics - but they just don't look right at the 2:1 pixel ratio and the 8 pixel Player size is limiting as well.

 

The 2600 version animates "better" than the arcade. You see right away that the 2600 one is animated but have to look more closely to notice with some of the arcade characters - although of course they're somewhat smaller and higher res.

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Maybe they did try the arcade graphics - but they just don't look right at the 2:1 pixel ratio and the 8 pixel Player size is limiting as well.

 

The 2600 version animates "better" than the arcade. You see right away that the 2600 one is animated but have to look more closely to notice with some of the arcade characters - although of course they're somewhat smaller and higher res.

I always thought the Atari versions of the aliens looked cheesy. All the animations are simply mirrored, and the coder did it wrong according to what I'm hearing. One could make a sprite, and when displaying it simply mirror it, but when I did my hack, there were two separate sprites with the 2nd one being a simple mirror of the first. The coder also complained that he had to squash it from 7k down to 4k and complained about that process. He could have simply done the mirroring in hardware and several of the sprite animations could have been done via hardware rather than 2 ROM images, thus freeing up some precious ROM space for more code, or, he could have done 4 frame animations instead of two by combining mirroring with 2 different sprites (and their corresponding mirrors). Other tricks could have been done, but they may not have been discovered yet, and Atari milked 4K ROMS for all they were worth thus constraining the options the coder had, but even my simple hack made it look 100 percent better.

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I've always enjoyed the VCS Space Invaders myself, finding them "unique" from the arcade version, each with their own "personality", as it were. Having played the Space Invaders arcade exclusively during my younger years, it was a nice change when I went home to practice on my VCS.

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The 2600 animations aren't mirrored - OK, 1 or 2 of them appear that way but the ROM actually contains all the images so it's done in software.

 

It really is a bit of a feat that it all fit in 4K - most other system's SI versions or clones are significantly bigger and have the advantage of an OS that does some of the housekeeping load not to mention more advanced hardware allowing the same graphics to be produced with somewhat less coding work.

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