Re: (Color Asteroids (was reproduction artwork...)

From: Bill Esquivel <mrb2084_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Sat Aug 01 1998 - 05:08:05 EDT

The idea sounds great, and I would love to get one, but why mess with
tempest? Would not a gravitar or space duel be the logical game? Although a
blasteroids type of control would be neat, I think the vertical aspect would
be hard to get used to...

Clay Cowgill wrote:

> > Yeah, in fact, I have an Asteroids mod which lets you run Asteroids on
> > a
> > Wells Gardner 19K6403D color 3D monitor and plays with full 3D
> > effects.
> > Asteroids are in 2 different dimensions, ships another dimension,
> > scores
> > are on another monitor, shots fly out of the screen past your head,
> > thrust rotates your house, etc. Just short two pins together-- no code
> > changes.
> >
> :-) Oh, c'mon you people act like it's hard to do or something... ;-)
>
> The only hard part was coming up with the idea-- I'm suprised nobody
> else has done it. The reason I was keeping quiet is that I didn't want
> anyone to beat me to it. ;-)
>
> The hardware tells you exactly when the beam should be turned on and off
> on the CRT. The game also has to load the "intensity" value for the
> beam. Well, as it turns out, Atari used slightly different intensities
> for a lot of stuff in Asteroids... So, if you take those 4-bit
> "intensity" values and use them as an index for a color lookup table.
> *Viola* color! Just takes something to generate a few bits of output to
> make some resistor dividers for color outputs with some transistors.
> Neat, huh? ;-) Seems like Asteroids only used 7 or 9 intensities very
> often... To make the "flashing" color I had a counter that was
> associated with one particular intensity value and instead of using a
> lookup value for the color map, fed the outputs of a counter there
> instead...
>
> -Clay
Received on Sat Aug 1 04:06:59 1998

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