If you’re looking to play an official Tempest 2000 where some money (presumably) makes its way to Jeff Minter, then Digital Eclipse have published an “interactive documentary” bundle of his games and the surrounding history, available on pretty much every current platform: https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/llamasoft
Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#22These are great. Anyone who can interpret Minter deserves our support and praise.
(Would love one about Space Giraffe / NEON but I appreciate they're on much more complex systems than Tempest and Psychedelia.)
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#23I just pulled my 1981 Tempest out of storage yesterday. Hope it still works!
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#24The vector graphics are why I always seek this game out first in any arcade.
Not the tank game (Battletanks?)
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#25If you’re looking to play an official Tempest 2000 where some money (presumably) makes its way to Jeff Minter, then Digital Eclipse have published an “interactive documentary” bundle of his games and the surrounding history, available on pretty much every current platform: https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/llamasoft
It's also in Atari 50th along with the original Tempest.
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#26- does anyone know of a book that breaks down how the quake game or counter strike works?
Michael Abrash and Fabien Sanglard have excellent books on Quake.
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#27That's so cool. I remember loving this game in the arcade but then being annoyed when I had to also buy a paddle wheel to play it on my 2600, which was then useful for exactly 0 other games.
The "paddle" and "driving" controllers looked the same, but they did not have the same function. A paddle controller for the Atari 2600 had a hard stop, so that it could only make one revolution (or a bit less) in each direction. Therefore, you could use it with Tennis or Pong or whatever else just had you going back-and-forth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_(game_controller) A driving controller spun freely in…
I'm not sure about the specific Atari 2600 controllers but my hazy memory has at least three types of what appear to be rotary.
One is basically a self centring sprung up/off/down switch. That would be similar to a car indicator stalk and simple left/right arrow keys.
Another would be rotary with a stop but it sent a physical position, presumably it was something like a variable resistor or very fine resolution rotary switch. With these you could instantly position your character by the position on the ring/slider. This could be interpreted as position 1, 2, 3 etc etc.
The third was a free spinning which moved the character faster the faster you spun it. This would be how I remember Tempest playing, you could slowly nudge it or just do a fast spin & stop to quickly move around. This would produce a signal such as clockwise+very slow or anti-clockwise+very fast.
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#28That's so cool. I remember loving this game in the arcade but then being annoyed when I had to also buy a paddle wheel to play it on my 2600, which was then useful for exactly 0 other games.
Video game history is littered with cool peripherals that were only supported by less than a handful of games. NES R.O.B., SuperScope, etc.
I have a bin of plastic instruments lying around somewhere
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#29Seeing a photo of a filled-out System/360 assembler coding form is like looking at an ancient stone tablet. Imagine the reams of these forms you'd have to go through and iterate on to arrive at a functional piece of software.
The amount of time needed just for one trip around the feedback loop for the smallest imaginable tweak puts any amount of modern "trying to get the build/CI to pass" nuisance to shame.
Re: Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
#30That's so cool. I remember loving this game in the arcade but then being annoyed when I had to also buy a paddle wheel to play it on my 2600, which was then useful for exactly 0 other games.
The "paddle" and "driving" controllers looked the same, but they did not have the same function. A paddle controller for the Atari 2600 had a hard stop, so that it could only make one revolution (or a bit less) in each direction. Therefore, you could use it with Tennis or Pong or whatever else just had you going back-and-forth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_(game_controller) A driving controller spun freely in…
On the Apple 2 at least the paddles registered a number between 0-255. The joysticks were just “2 paddles” with an x and y between 0-255.
I remember a little adjustment slider to help the joystick center near 0,0