THE HISTORY OF CINEMATRONICS AND A DESCRIPTION OF THEIR VECTOR GAMES -------------------------------------------------------------------- COPYRIGHT 1994, 1995 REVISION NUMBER: 2.0 REVISION DATE: 23 December 1994 REVISION HISTORY: 1.0 (02/11/92 - First attempt at listing and ordering all Cinematronics games.) REVISION HISTORY: 2.0 (12/23/94 - Rearranged sections, added new sections for Barrier, Speed Freak, Boxing Bugs, Cosmic Chasm and added lots of details in the TECH sections. Rewrote MISC section.) CREATED BY: Steve Ozdemir THANX TO: David Hanes, Bill Esquivel, John Grigsby and Patti Ozdemir STANDARD DISCLAIMER: -------------------- The author hereby grant permission to reproduce and distribute this document for personal use, subject to the condition that the document (along with any copyright and disclaimer notices) is not modified in any way. The opinions expressed within this document are those of the author only and not necessarily those of the author's employer(s). This document is provided for informational purposes only. Although the author have made every effort to provide accurate information, they cannot guarantee the accuracy or usefulness of any of the information contained herein due to the complexity of the issues involved. The author take no responsibility for anything arising as a result of anyone using the information provided in this document, and the reader hereby absolves the author of any and all liability arising from any activities resulting from the use of any information contained herein. INTRODUCTION ------------ Many thanks to the other serious collectors who over the years have helped me piece this together and fill in the blanks!! Especially David Hanes, who's interview with Tim Skelly provided LOTS of information (and probably raised even more questions to be answered)!!! I've included this interview at the bottom in the miscellaneous section. I hope you enjoy reading this, and do send some email to me if you'd like to see more articles like this!!! (If you are reading through this for recreation, you may want to skip the sections marked TECH NOTE....while full of details I could see how they'd be boring to read.) Writing the history of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam has felt like writing an obituary (probably because Cinematronics stopped making vector games back in 1983, or possibly because Cinematronics went out of business back in 1986). However, in my several years of reading r.g.v.a, I've never seen anyone collect into one article all the disjointed facts about Cinematronics presented in this group. So here's the history of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam with plenty of technical facts intersperced throughout the article...if you want to do conversions of your Cinematronics games, this article will be of particular interest to you!! Also, since I first wrote this document, I've written another document detailing how to convert Rip Off or Star Castle to play both games with a flick of a switch, or to convert Armor Attack to play all the later Cinematronics games, Rip Off, Star Castle, Armor Attack and Solar Quest, again with the flick of a single switch!! Below I cover all of the Cinematronics black and white vector games in chronological order: Space Wars and Speed Freak, Barrier and Star Hawk, Warriors and Sundance, Tail Gunner and Tail Gunner II, Rip Off and Star Castle, and the final pairing Armor Attack and Solar Quest. I've added another pairing for the Cinematronics color XYs, Boxing Bugs ane Cosmic Chasm, at the very end just in case someone is interested in them. War of the Worlds was Cinematronics conversion kit for Star Castle though when the second revision of this document was being written not one of the collectors had this game or any of its hardware. Also, just before the second revision of this document was done, a set of standard Cinematronics hardware was found that had been licensed to Rockola. KLOV lists only one vector game for Rockola called Rocket Racer, however the neither the KLOV description nor Tim Skelly's description of Rocket Racer matches the gameplay of the board set that was found. The sound board for Rocket Racer game was quite unique and is discussed later in this document. Cinematronics also made other raster games like Jack the Giant Killer, Cerberus, Danger Zone, several sports oriented games and the popular Dragon's Lair/Space Ace laser disc games. Given the popularity of the laser disc games, they merit their own document and aren't covered here. And unfortunately, no one has volunteered their time to write up a document about Cinematronics laser disc games or laser disc games in general. Folklore involving Vectorbeam/Cinematronics says that the hardware for Space Wars was created in a garage by Larry Rosenthal who wanted to play this game that he'd seen on MIT's PDP-11s at his house! The Vectorbeam/Cinematronics folks stopped by and offered to license the hardware....and from that point they went on to make almost a dozen games on that hardware platform! (Actually, things weren't that simple....what I've heard was that Vectorbeam was formed when some of the Cinematronics folks had a falling out. Later the two companies join back together.) In fact, it's quite amazing that the games made five years after Space Wars like Armor Attack and Solar Quest were still using the bit slice technology is pretty amazing! Microprocessors had been in use for several years at that point!! If you think about it, things make sense though....if you were trying to make Space Wars in a garage back in 1975 (two years would be enough time to develop the first prototype that Vectorbeam/Cinematronics discovered and produced in 1977) you might not be able to afford the new fangled microprocessor of the time!! Naturally, you'd use a bit-sliced architecture that used 74 series chips that were widely available and cheap enough. And as we said above, Cinematronics went on to make almost a dozen games on that architecture without significantly changing it. I wonder just how much revenue was generated by that one person's hardware design....20 million? 50 million?? TECH NOTE: All the BW vector games used similar hardware. So for the most part, all the Cinematronics boards are interchangeable, except for the control panel and the sound boards which have POTS on vs. off the board!! The actual Cinematronics boards do have wiring modifications (for an unused gate) for boards using 2716s vs. 2732s, but this only involves adding wires to use an extra gate for addressing the larger address space in a 2732. Do not confuse this wiring modification with the strap option near the connectors on the mother board or the JMI interrupt. On Cinematronics mother boards there is a small wire (1/4 of an inch) with "NORM" and "VAR" printed nearby....this tells the mother board if the Cinematronics monitor has the optional VARiable intensity daughter board used in Solar Quest. While Sundance has been rumored to use the variable intensity option, Vectorbeam boards do not have this convenient NORM/VAR option and instead alot of wiring modification were used. The JMI interrupt is used in for conditional jumps and was present on all boards except Space Wars. You'll see every board having this wire modification, though on the more modern boards the wire modification is only a 1/4 of an inch in length and located about two inches below the intensity strap option between the chips at location G2, H2, G4 and H4. For early Cinematronics boards and all Vectorbeam boards, the strap option is a wiring modification that originates from the same place but goes across the width of the board between the [A-T]2 and [A-T]4 rows and finally terminates on the back side of the board near T2. Neither of the modifications affect the interfaces between the boards and the cabinet so you can use a single cabinet to test any Cinematronics board set, but you can't play the game because the control panel is wired only for that one particular game. You can see the game come up on the monitor and make the appropriate noises!! (NOTE: Just before the second revision of this document, one exception to the above paragraph is that the Tail Gunner cabinet uses the monitor's DAC to translate the analog input from the joystick. As such, you can't necessarily put other games in a Tail Gunner cabinet. A Rev K Star Castle did not work in a Tail Gunner cabinet. Keep in mind that while the Tail Gunner cabinet is not very useful for testing boards, a Tail Gunner board set will come up in any other cabinet though you won't be able to play the game since you don't have the joysticks piped through the DAC.) A wordy description of physical appearance of the board set follows this diagram: NOTE: The board set should be positioned like this on a metal plate, though I've seen the metal plate rotated 180 degrees in the cabinet meaning TOP/BOTTOM and LEFT/RIGHT would have to be swapped. ------------------------------------ |ribbon conn->==== X | |power connector(MOLEX)-^ | | ^ | | SOUND BOARD TOP | | <-LEFT RIGHT->| | BOTTOM | | V | ------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ | ======= ==== ======= XXX | | ^ ^ ^ XXX | | | | | ^ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | monitor sound board control panel power | | connector connector connector connector | | (ribbon) (ribbon) (ribbon) (MOLEX) | | __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ | | | V | | V | | V | | V | | | | | | | | | | | | | |U7 | |T7 | |R7 | |P7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | |___| |___| |___| |___| | | ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ | | | |2716| | | | | |____EPROMs_____| TOP | | MOTHER BOARD <-LEFT RIGHT-> | | BOTTOM | | | | | V | | NOTE: There must be a hundred standard | | TTL chips on this board that aren't shown. | ------------------------------------------------------------ The board set for any of the Cinematronics games consists of two boards. A mother board that is about 12 inches by 16 inches and had three ribbon cable connectors to one side plus a molex connector to supply power and coin door on the corner of the mother board sharing a side with the other three connectors. (The mother board is composed of purely 7400 series chips that make up the bit sliced architecture, ALU chips and either masked ROMs used mainly in pre-Rip Off games or EPROMs for Rip Off and later games.) While all mother boards are interchangeable at the connector level (if VAR/NORM is set to NORM), Cinematronics mother boards do have a revision number (B, H or K). Vectorbeam mother boards do not have any revision number. And a sound board that is about 6 inches by 8 inches (though later games like Armor Attack and Solar Quest have much larger sound boards) and has a single connector to one side plus a molex connector to supply power and speakers. Both the sound board and the mother board are mounted on a metal plate and not stacked. A second ribbon cable connector on the sound boards connects to the center ribbon cable connector of the three ribbon cable connectors on the mother board. The sound boards for all the Cinematronics BW vector games were composed of discrete components...a practice Cinematronics continued long after other manufacturers converted to using digital gone generators. By sticking with analog, Cinematronics was able to make the "droning" sounds like Rip Off background noise! The other two connectors on the mother board go to the control panel and the BW vector monitor (where the signals going to the monitor are digital, not analog). The mother board has room for four sockets that hold EPROMS or masked ROMs, though in the both the cases of Tail Gunner and Warrior the games were designed to work with a daughter board with over a dozen 2708 EPROMS plus power regulators to generate the strange voltages from the +25v and -25v from the sound board. Another connector from this daughter board would go into one of the sockets of the mother board! For many of the earlier games, only two of the four sockets/pads were filled, and two traces (next to a wider power trace) running along the top (next to the EPROM's notch) of the EPROMs and ALUs just above the J6 chip would be connected together to allow four EPROMs (in Rev H and Rev K Cinematronics mother boards these traces are actually joined). In many cases the masked ROMs were soldered directly into the board (bypassing the need for a socket). The dipswitches for most of the Cinematronics boards serve the same purpose except for Rip Off's diagnostic mode, which is set to OFF (instead of ON) for normal play. SPACE WARS (Vect/Rev B) and SPEED FREAK (Vect) ---------------------------------------------- Space Wars was a two player game developed at MIT, where there was no computer opponent so you couldn't play by yourself. Space Wars was quite novel for the time, in that you could program the type of game you were going to play using a numerical keypad that consisted of a two row, five column matrix of keyboard buttons. The standard five button controls (right, left, thrust, fire and hyperspace) were used for each player. Once you selected the type of game (gravity, reverse gravity, strong gravity, weak gravity, speed of ships, wrap around universe and/or invisible sun), the two players would fight for a fixed amount of time with the person making the most kills within the time limit winning. Both fuel and shots were limited, and a shortage of either generally meant you were dead! Note though, that hitting the other player could result in the player only being injured, and still able to fight. A few last bits of information about Space Wars....one player looked like the Enterprise, another player looked like the Asteroids ship, and lastly there was a reset button that could be hit to restart the battle with the players in their original starting position (scores were preserved). (AUTHORS NOTE: My favorite part of Space Wars is that with very strong reverse gravity player's shots are bent as the shots are repelled away from the sun. Nothing is more satisfying that to take a shot at the sun, see the bullet deviate wildly from its straight and narrow path and finally hit your opponent! Makes it look like you really know what you are doing ...however, in rare cases I've also seen shots that are approaching the sun dead on be repelled straight back at the shooter. This can be quite embarrassing if you manage to kill yourself!!) Speed Freak is a Vectorbeam game made in 1977, and was certainly beyond its time. According to the interview with Tim Skelly (included below in the miscellaneous section), Speed Freak was created by Larry Rosenthal after Space Wars. Basically the game was a vector Night Driver with more stuff. The road would curved more than once on the screen producing S curves that had to be navigated! Light poles, stick figures, random stuff the side of the road, and occasionally oncoming traffic made the gameplay rather difficult. Controls were a steering wheel, 4-speed shifter, and accelerator (and maybe brake). To date no one has seen the board set....all we have is a vague collective memory of the complete game. Vectorbeam was created back in 1976 in the Bay area and Space Wars was their first game. This was back when of the most complex games were Pong and Space Invaders! Later Cinematronics located near San Diego also released Space Wars in a larger cabinet that most people remember because their production run was long. This cabinet was so large, that you could easily fit the huge modern day 33" monitors if it weren't for the tube's neck! Because both companies released the same game and Cinematronics had such a long production run, Space Wars is not the rarest game. However, the size of the cabinet (which encouraged operators to throw out the big cabinet or convert it) and the general popularity of the game means that the few Space Wars (mainly the Cinematronics version) that do appear are snapped up by collectors! As to why both Vectorbeam and Cinematronics both released the same game, Space Wars was considered public domain software, and as such couldn't be copyrighted to prevent the other company from making it. Ultimately, the two companies merged making the point moot, but it is notable that no other game was produced by both companies. TECH NOTE: The Space Wars hardware consists of two masked ROMS that reside on the standard Rev B Cinematronics mother board. (The occasional Space Wars board has been found using the Vectorbeam mother board, which don't have revision numbers.) Since there is room for four masked ROMS/EPROMS, two of the pads are completely empty (no sockets). Most Space Wars boards have the masked ROMS soldered in, and no wire modifications exist on any of the boards. All other Cinematronics and Vectorbeam games require the JMI wiring modification. The sound board is rather simple. The markings on the masked ROMS are as follows (note that the markings from three different sets of Space Wars boards are below....their are only two masked ROMS per board): BOARD SET #1: SPACE WARS C1977 SPACE WARS C1977 'S' 7825 2147 and 'S' 7823 2148 BOARD SET #2: 'S' 8204 'S' 7818 C28277M and 2148 2147 SPACE WARS COPYRIGHT 1977 BOARD SET #3: 'S' 7825E<-----?E? 'S' 7819D C28277M and C28276M 2147 2148 ^---this one chip in set #3 was in a socket Just as the second revision of this document was being written, a single broken set of Vectorbeam board were found. After numerous discussions with the person, my only guess was that they had Speed Freak boards, however we were in the midst of determining what the mystery board set was. Speed Freak boards may be identifiable by the sound board, which in addition to the more typical connectors also had an additional six pin Molex connector that might have connected the pots in the steering wheel to the DACs in the monitor so the mother board could get digital outputs from the controls (similar to Tail Gunner's joystick pots being routed through the monitor's DACs). Also, instead of a control panel PCB used in later games like Rip Off, the control panel's ribbon cable terminates on the sound board and an additional mini-molex 24 pin connector went from the sound board to the actual controls/monitor. Again, let me emphasize that this is all conjecture, since the boards didn't work and we can't be sure they were from a Speed Freak. BARRIER (Vect) and STAR HAWK (Rev B) ------------------------------------ A couple of months before the second revision of this document, a new game surfaced called Barrier. The game was made by Vectorbeam, and the interview with Tim Skelly indicates that the game was made around the time of Star Hawk. Barrier can be described best with numerous comparisons to Mattel's hand held football game. For those of you who are too young to remember this toy, it was simply 21 LEDs in a 3 by 7 grid. Lit LEDs represented the opponent, and you used the buttons to run your guy (also a lit LED) past the opponents to the endzone! One difference was between Barrier and Mattel's football game was game play is psudo 3d tapering off into the distance to form a first person perspective. Another difference is that the playfield is 4 squares wide by 7 deep. The control panel is quite similar to both Star Hawk and Warrior, which were just about the same time. Star Hawk is a rare Cinematronics games made in 1978, that never did catch on. The game play is similar to the Star Wars trench scene. You fly above the trench shooting enemies on the surface of the sphere and in the trench, and the KLOV description says that a "pirate" ship flies through every so often and shoots your score causing you to loose 800 points! Sort of like the UFO in Space Invaders, but with offensive capabilities!! Star Hawk uses a standard joystick to control the crosshairs for aiming, and besides the fire button there are three buttons that control the speed that the crosshairs move. Note that KLOV also lists a game called Space Hawk, but my research into the late 70's Replay magazines never lists a game called Space Hawk leading me to believe that Space Hawk in KLOV is really suppose to be Star Hawk. TECH NOTE: While Barrier used a larger monitor than the traditional 19" Cinematronics monitor, the game used only the upper third of the 25" monitor. Barrier is the only game that had a vertically mounted monitor. The back door had to be cut to accomadate the neck! There has been some conjecture that the game was slapped into a Speed Freak cabinet, and only a few prototypes were made. Barrier's sound board was as sparse as a Space Wars sound board (implying that it may be possible to wire wrap one), and the traces on the sound board are not organized at all though traces are on both sides of the PCB. The Vectorbeam mother board didn't have any special wiring modifications except for the JMI interrupt. Star Hawk is a relatively rare game, but does have some notable differences between it and older Cinematronics games. For the first time with Star Hawk, the sound board of a Cinematronics game was quite organized, had traces on both sides and was designed to be easily repaired because sections of the circuit could be isolated. This would be the start of a trend, and all future Cinematronics games had a similarly designed sound board. As implied in an earlier paragraph, Star Hawk used two masked ROMs. The JMI interrupt was hooked up in a bizarre way. The 8th pin on the connector going from the mother board to the sound board was the source of the JMI's wire modification, instead of more typical places to source the signal! The board set is the Rev B Cinematronics mother board with two empty places right next to the masked ROMs (same hardware configuration as Space Wars and I've converted Star Hawks to run with Space Wars). The numbers on the Star Hawk masked ROMs are: BOARD SET #1: 93163-2325 93163-2326 3-50001 and 3-50002 GI 7910 GI 7910 NOTE: Some time around when Star Hawk, Barrier, Sundance or Warrior were being made, Vectorbeam and Cinematronics combined!!!!!! SUNDANCE (Vect) and WARRIOR (Vect) ---------------------------------- Sundance was one of Tim Skelly's first game...he went on to make the classics, Rip Off, Star Castle and finally Reactor. Sundance was not very popular and very few were made. A first person perspective was used and the game was rather simple. Sundance consisted of two tictactoe boards (with borders thus making them into three by three matrixes) that where place above (where the clouds would be in a first person perspective) and below (on the ground in a first person perspective). The controls were a matrix of buttons (three row and three columns) that corresponded to the squares on the bottom tictactoe board. By pushing the button, the player caused a "hole" to appear in that square. The game consisted of "suns" (which looked more like astericks) being released from the upper tictactoe board and falling down to the bottom tictactoe board where ideally you'd open up a hole in the correct square and swallow the sun! If you didn't, then the sun would bounce back up and bounce off of the upper tictactoe board only to return again. Thus you'd have another chance to swallow the sun in a hole! However, as the game progressed, the tictactoe boards would get close, and if I remember correctly by allowing suns to bounce back and forth this would cause the tictactoe boards to move closer together. Either that our the suns (after numerous bounces) would become unstable. Whatever the case, the game would end because you didn't swallow the suns in a hole fast enough! As I said before the game was quite simple.... Warrior is a 1978 Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 2 player game that was truly a work of art from the game designing perspective! The layout of the cabinet combined with the black light shining on the numerous cardboard cut outs makes for an incredible playfield!!! One difference from the other Cinematronics games is the mounting of the monitor, which you look down into (the neck of the tube is pointing straight down). A piece of mirror glass is also used to mirror in some of the playing field. Below is a side view of the cabinet to give a better idea of how the playing field is constructed. -------------- playfield | | cardboard | | cut out being| | reflected in | | w/ mirror--> | ---------- | PLAYERS | | STAND more | | | o HERE cardboard--> | | | | <-------------joysticks | | |--- mirror-----> | ---------- | | | |--- tube ------> | ---------- | that can | \ / | show images | \ / | through the | \ / | mirror | \ / | | || | | | | | | | -------------- The playing field consists of the mirrored in cardboard cut outs (being reflected in by mirror) and the top view of knights (or rephrased a "bird's eye" view) being displayed on the Cinematronics BW vector monitor from below. Together they show a scene of two knights fighting around two square pits! Each knight is controlled by a joystick, and proceed to fight each other by swinging long swords at each other until one of them dies and goes spinning into the pit!! (NOTE: The wiring modification to the masked ROMs do not be connected if you use 2532 EPROMS!) TECH NOTE: Warrior used a modified hardware configuration (2 masked ROMs and the 6th pin specially wired) because of the differences between 2532s and 2732s. Below are the numbers from two sets of Warrior boards. BOARD SET #1: MA0804-01 MA0804-02 01950 N69 and 003N69 0090 7942 320091 BOARD SET #2: MA0804-01 MA0804-02 088056 and 088056 320090 7945 320090 7945 While no one on the net has ever seen the Sundance hardware, it is fair to say that given the complexity of the variable intensity display Sundance must have alot of modifications to hardware. Up till then, neither Cinematronics or Vectorbeam every tried to use the variable intensity option! However, because of the simplicity of game play, there should be two masked, 1K ROMs. If anyone sees Sundance or knows where the hardware might be stored, I'd be quite interested....you can contact me at ofoz@intgp1.att.com or ozdemir@xenon.stanford.edu and I'll pay you top dollar (a minimum of $100 for a complete board set, more if it is working) for your find! TAIL GUNNER (Vect) and TAIL GUNNER II (Vect) -------------------------------------------- For the time, Tail Gunner was truly one of Cinematronics greatest triumphs! The game's perspective is first person with a receding star pattern as background. Groups of three enemy ship (displayed in 3-D like Battlezone) and you try to shoot them down by lining the sites up with them and firing. If you miss any one of them, you can use a shield to prevent them from getting by you. You have a limited number of shield uses, and after enemy ships get by you a certain number of times the game is over. As the waves progress, the enemy ships get faster, but the game play doesn't get much more complex. Technologically, Tail Gunner does deviate the most from the standard hardware. First, Tail Gunner came out in a sit-down version, Tail Gunner II. Second, the control panel has a pots joystick used to aim the site. And third, due to the complexity of the 3-D display program a daughter board with numerous EPROMS (and banking hardware) was added, though in some case the boards used 4 masked ROMs. TECH NOTE: Tail Gunner's sound board is much more complicated than any sound board before it (except for Speed Freak's sound board). Besides having the daughter board for 2708's connected to the sound board via a six pin Molex connector, there is a second six pin Molex connector that the joystick's pots are connected to! The daughter board for 2708s contains only the power regulators (7815 and 7915) that cut the +25v and -25v from the sound board down to +15v and -15v for the 2708's, and eight 2708's. The daughter board is bolted perpendicularly to the sound board. Warriors has the same connector coming of the sound board to supply a daughter board, but the only Warriors to date has been found with masked ROMs. The second 6 pin Molex connector is used to route the analog signal from the joystick to the DACs on the monitor. The analog signal is then converted to digital signals that the mother board can use. Oddly enough, there isn't any way to adjust/initialize the joystick on Tail Gunner! Another piece of trivia is that a Cinematronics Rev K mother board from Star Castle was put in a Tail Gunner cabinet and the video output was screwed up....we guessed that it had something to do with the Cinematronics mother board trying to use the same slots in the DACs that the different wiring harness in Tail Gunner used to decode the control panel joystick! (We did put the Star Castle mother board back in a Star Castle cabinet, and the boards were verified to be working). The conclusion that may be drawn from this experience is that while most Vectorbeam/Cinematronics cabinets can use any set of Vectorbeam/Cinematronics boards, both Tail Gunner and Speed Freak cabinets may be wired differently so that other Vectorbeam/Cinematronics board sets won't work in them!! All sound boards up till Tail Gunner only used five of the nine pins on the Molex connector for speaker, +25v, -25v, +5v and ground, since the pot control the volume was actually on the sound board. The extra pins are used to handle the larger voltages and extra grounds. All further Cinematronics games remoted the volume pot on the coin door, and as such needed to use three of the extra pins to connect up the pot. The consequence of this is that putting pre-Rip Off sound boards into Rip Off or later cabinets causes the speaker in the Rip Off cabinet to be connected to +25v. I haven't broken a sound board yet, by doing this, BUT you'll hear one hell of a squeal/static on the speaker by doing this!! RIP OFF (Rev B/H/K) and STAR CASTLE (Rev H/K) (and WAR OF THE WORLDS) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Rip Off, made in 1979 by Cinematronics, starts a series of VERY popular video games that used the BW vector monitor and sometimes an overlay. If you can only think of one game made by Cinematronics, it's probably Rip Off or Star Castle!! The game play is intense...probably as intense as Robotron. When the game starts, the players have an over head view of 10 to 15 fuel pods that are in the middle of the playfield and represented by triangles. The enemy appears in groups of three at a random point on the border of the screen and proceeds to try to "rip off" the fuel pods by momentarily pausing by one fuel pod to link it up and drag it off the screen. While one of the three ships in the group is attempting to "rip off" a fuel pod, the other two enemy ships will attempt to kill you and your partner (if the game is being played by two players). The truly original part to Rip Off is that the game only ends when all the fuel pods have been taken off the screen....SO you can die as often as you like!!! You just reappear at your starting point after a brief delay! The strategy of the game is dramatically changed by the infinite life approach, since you now can suicide into enemy ships if you like!! The control panel to Rip Off is composed of buttons and in the standard Asteroids layout minus the hyperspace button. There are controls for two players, so with the start buttons there was 10 buttons on the control panel! (AUTHOR'S NOTE: Rip Off is the game that started me collecting video games... mainly because of the intense gameplay and teamwork in the two player game! A few minor details that weren't mentioned above are that only 4 bullets are allowed on the screen at one time AND you can get set it up so that a single enemy ship will loop around you infinitely (so you can go to the bathroom)!) Star Castle is an equally popular game made in 1980 by Cinematronics. While the game does not involve two players on the playfield at the same time, Star Castle make up for the lack of teamwork by providing VERY difficult enemies! The game starts with a single ship in the middle surrounded by "spinning rings" that you can run into without being destroyed. The perspective is "bird's eye" as with most Cinematronics games. The ship and rings have different colors due to the color overlay. By shooting at the rings, you open up holes to shoot through and when the holes of the different rings align themselves, you can get a straight shot to the stationary ship in the center of the screen with all the rings around it. The ship rotates and follows you as you cross the screen, though it won't anticipate that you are about to wrap around to the other side of the screen. The down side is that whenever the rings align to give you a straight shot, the center ship takes a shot at you also!! If you do manage to kill the center ship, you do get an extra ship, so if you both manage to hit each other you'll come out ahead. The last part of the gameplay is the small ships that live on the rings and cannot shoot you. When the section of the ring (with a small ship on it) gets destroyed by your shots, these small ships are released and proceed to home in on you and destroy you! You can trick them into running into the ring, and the small ship reconnects with that ring section until you come along and destroy that section of the ring. These small ships are not numerous, but annoying enough that you must keep moving to avoid them! (AUTHOR'S NOTE: One time I powered up my Star Castle and a power glitch caused me to start with 365 ships! I took an hour or two and played almost all of the ships to see if the score wrapped around at 100,000 points. Well, it didn't (and I should have expected this since Rip Off will allow scores above 100,000), however I did find out that at extremely high levels the center ship will rotates so fast it's instanteous! Also, just like Rip Off, the gameplay has a maximum speed that is still playable. Never does it get so hard that you don't have a chance.) War of the Worlds was a conversion for Star Castle. Given the rarity of the game, it's debatable that the game was popular or even had a decent production run. Again, to date no one has seen the board set, and only old issues of Replay magazine prove the game existed. The game's control panel use the same layout as Star Castle. TECH NOTE: Starting with Rip Off, four socketed 2716's hold the game. No jumpers are needed, and for the most part these games can be considered the "standard" Cinematronics hardware. Different wiring modifications are used in later games for 2732's, but Cinematronics never really changed the mother board significantly in later games. For this reason (along with the standard connectorization described above), you can EASILY covert the games from one to the other by merely burning new EPROMS!! If you decide to change sound boards and do minor rewiring of the buttons, you can be playing the other game in its original form!! A small detail, which may affect conversions, is that the dipswitch settings for Rip Off are slightly different from most other Cinematronics boards. Rip Off has the dipswitch for diagnostics set to OFF (not surprising give the name is Rip OFF) for normal play, where as Star Castle, Armor Attack and Solar Quest all have the dipswitch for diagnostics set to ON. In most other respects, the other dipswitches for these four games have the same meaning and thus can have the same settings! Note that Rip Off mother boards have been found that seem to be old Rev B board that were upgraded from Space Wars or Star Hawk and now run Rip Off. When the second revision of this document was written several attempts to "retrograde" the Rev B boards had been attempted with no success. All that happened was a working Rip Off board set was broken! ARMOR ATTACK (Rev K) and SOLAR QUEST (Rev K) -------------------------------------------- Armor Attack is the most complicated game Cinematronics game! Produced in 1980, Armor Attack allows two players to jointly compete against the computer. Like Warrior, the Armor Attack relies heavily on images not displayed on the vector monitor and instead uses an intricate overlay to define the playfield. Using the typical "bird's eye" view, the playfield is the center square of a town where a few enemies tanks come out from a dozen or so possible points on the perimeter of the screen. Your jeep in the middle of the square must go through the streets and around the buildings trying to destroy the tanks without being hit by the tanks. Occasionally, a helicopter that is unrestricted by the buildings comes out and tries to shoot your jeep. Tanks must be hit twice to be killed, and their movement is disabled if they are hit by one shot....the tanks can still shoot you! After all tanks are killed, another round starts and several more tanks come out. If you manage to kill five helicopter, then you are awarded an extra jeep! The controls to the games are identical to Rip Off. You have the standard Asteroids controls (minus the hyperspace), so you're looking at ten buttons and not much more! Solar Quest was the final game that Cinematronics used BW vectors. Solar Quest was produced in 1981, didn't have a long production run even though it was so complex and had extra hardware on the monitor to generate 64 different intensity levels. Using the typical "bird's eye" view, the playfield looks very much like Space Wars. You have a sun in the center and an Asteroids-shaped ship, that does have the capability to launch "nukes" in addition to the typical laser. The "nuke" act like photon torpedos in Star Trek and you detonate it by pushing the button a second time. A hyperspace button is also available. When a round starts, several ships appear on the border of the screen. Each progressive round reveals ships with more complex flight patterns. When the ships are destroyed, a "colonists" appears which you can rescue for big points or just shoot for less points. By collecting five colonists, you get another nuke so it's not just a matter of points. The control panel has the standard Asteroids layout with an additional button next to the hyperspace to handle the "nukes". TECH NOTE: As with Rip Off and Star Castle, four socketed 2732's are used in the game. Wiring modifications are needed since you have 2732's, but for the most part these games can be considered the "standard" Cinematronics hardware. For this reason (along with the standard connectorization described above), you can EASILY covert the games from one to the other by merely burning new EPROMS! Just like Rip Off and Star Castle, if you decide to change sound boards and do minor rewiring of the buttons, you can be playing the other game in its original form!! One notable exception beyond the more complicated sound boards is the extra daughter board on Solar Quest's monitor that produces 64 different vector intensities. To use the extra daughter board, a wire on the side of the mother board with all the connectors needs to be moved from "NORM" to "VAR" where VAR stands for variable intensity. The wire is about a quarter inch long, and shouldn't be moved to VAR if you are using the standard Cinematronics monitor without the daughter board! BOXING BUGS (Rev K) and COSMIC CHASM (didn't use bit sliced architecture) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Boxing Bugs is color vector made in 1981 by Cinematronics. This was one of the few color vector games produced by Cinematronics, and only one exists among all the owners in VAPS. The game is best described as Star Castle in reverse...you are the stationary ship in the center being pestered by ship flying all around. Except instead of ships, there are BUGS! Your stationary ship in the center of the screen is a boxing glove, and you don't have any rings protecting you!! The game concept is similar to Black Widow if you've ever played that game. Controls are a knob (feels like a Clarostat or pot, not a whirligig) and three buttons, one helpfully labeled "PANIC". Cosmic Chasm was the other color vector produced by Cinematronics in 1983 on a completely new set of hardware. Game play is similar to Boxing Bugs, except that you have a mobile ship that shoots many shots. From round to round you watch your ship traverse a map till it gets to the center of the map where a reactor is. Once you destroy the reactor, you are suppose to escape back the way you came. It was originally written for the Vectrex. It had a cool cabinet with viewports larger than but reminiscent of Battlezone. Controls were a rotary knob, fire, thrust and shield buttons, and the marquee was 3-sided like Dragon's Lair. The artwork on the cabinet, control panel and marque is FANTASTIC!! TECH NOTE: Both of these games are quite remarkable from a hardware perspective, however given the rarity of these games (less than half a dozen found over five years) I doubt the technological feats that Cinematronics successfully attempted will be widely known. Both games were put into modified Dragon's Lair cabinets, and the Cosmic Chasm cabinet has FOUR florescent lamps in it! Boxing Bugs has the standard Cinematronics hardware with variable intensity used. Besides a daughter board holding 8 2732s and connected by ribbon cable directly to the EPROM sockets (similar to Warrior's and Tail Gunner's daughter board that held 8 2708s plus a power regulator), Boxing Bugs has a completely new board that translates the Cinematronics BW variable intensity signals to Atari color XY where each intensity represents a color! This translator board has the usual DACs that you find on an Cinematronics BW monitor. The Boxing Bug's sound board is bigger than the standard Cinematronics mother board, and does use digital circuits to play music (though there isn't any sound chips). While it has never been tried (because would you risk your Boxing Bugs hardware attempting this), it is feasible that Solar Quest could be plugged into the Boxing Bugs place and you could play Solar Quest on the Atari XY! A standard Condor power supply is used, but it is augmented by an extra isolation transformer that goes to the Atari color XY monitor. Cosmic Chasm represents the first and only departure from the standard Cinematronics mother board used in all vector games! In fact, other than the Cinematronics name on the front of the cabinet there is very little in the cabinet that looks reminiscent of the Cinematronics XY hardware!! Besides the standard Cinematronics XY power supply, a second Dragon's Lair power supply and two more transformers are used to power a modified Sega color XY monitor. All the power supply equipment is bolted to a huge sheet of metal that goes across the bottom of the cabinet. The Cosmic Chasm boards generate the signals expected by the Sega color XY monitor, so no translation board is needed. The boards are a double stack that are longer and thinner (more like Atari boards) with two large ribbon cables connecting the two boards, and besides the JAMMA sized edge connector (again like Atari boards) there's only one small connector with less than a dozen pins between the two ribbon cables that goes to the Sega monitor. One board has a 68000 processor, and both boards have a daughter board with at least dozen EPROMS that looks more like the insides of a large cartridge. These "cartridges" are connected via a edge connector and run parallel to each board separated by only an eighth of an inch from the board. The sound section on one of the boards does contain sound chips and bears no resemblance to the previous Cinematronics sound boards. MISCELLANEOUS ------------- Embargo, Zzyzzyxx and Rocket Racer are rare boards that we guess may exist, but have never found any evidence of (except for one Rocket Racer board set). Rocket Racer was made by Rockola, and deviated from previous Cinematronics sound boards in that it used a sound chip. *********************************** 2150 from rec/games/video/arcade/collecting Subject: Conversation with Tim Skelly *********************************** From: davidhan@csn.org (David Hanes) Date: Tue, 19 Jul 1994 02:05:52 GMT Newsgroups: rec.games.video.arcade.collecting Hi all, here's some Cinematronics info that I've been meaning to post for a while. I managed to find Tim Skelly who was one of the key design engineers who worked for Cinematronics. Tim was originally an artist when he was started work at Cinematronics, and I think that a lot this influence is what made these games so interesting. In any case, this is the list of games (in chronological order) that Tim Skelly programmed and designed: StarHawk Sundance Warrior (built by Vectorbeam, which Cinematronics owned) Rip-Off Armor Attack Tim said that somewhere in the middle he designed "Star Castle" and "War of the Worlds". Scott Boden did the programming on "Star Castle", and Rob Pattin (sp?) did the programming on "War of the Worlds". After Tim left Cinematronics in 1981, Scott Boden also designed and programmed Solar Quest. In addition to his design and programming work, Tim Skelly did the on-screen graphics for all of the games in the first list, and art directed the cabinet art as well). Speaking of cabinet art, Tim Skelly hired Frank Brunner to do the artwork on RipOff and Warrior. Tim said that Frank was a talented comic book artist who drew Dr. Strange and the first issues of Howard the Duck, as well as other titles. Tim Skelly was also the producer on "Tail Gunner". Tim mentioned that Sundance is an extremely rare games because less than 1000 boards were built, and most of them didn't work. The boards apparently required an enormous amount of cutting and jumpering to enable multiple levels of line intensity. Tim also said that the game was popular with some people, but that it didn't test well. Here's some of Tim's other comments: - War of the Worlds was hampered by the machine's horse-power. They couldn't get enough bad guys on the screen at once to be really challenging. - "Blitz" was a rare game, A Cinematronics knock-off of the Mattel hand held football game. Tim said the game was pretty bad. - "Boxing Bugs", Cinematronics first attempt at a cute vector game. Was done after Tim had left. Tim wasn't aware that the game was released. - "Speed Freak". A driving game done by Larry Rosenthal, (who had designed the original board and Space Wars). Speed Freak was Larry's first game for Vectorbeam, which he later sold to Cinematronics. That was pretty much the info that I got from Tim Skelly, he seems like a very nice guy, and I sure appreciated the time he spent in giving me this information. I subsequently talked to Scott Boden (programmer of Star Castle, and Solar Quest), he also was very nice, but didn't have a whole lot of additional information to add. The one interesting tidbit that he mentioned was about the "star field" in the Star Castle game, he said that a lot of people asked him what the pattern was based on, a constellation or what? The answer is amusing now, but apparently wasn't to Cinematronics management, it's the outline of a Playboy centerfold! Well, I hope this information was of interest to the Cinematronics collectors out there. I'm still on my quest to track down some of the Cinematronics hardware technicians, but so far I haven't had much luck. Dave Subject: Boxing Bugs To: ofoz@intgp1.att.com (Steven S Ozdemir +1 708 979 6742) Date: Wed, 21 Dec 1994 23:15:44 -0800 (PST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21] Mime-Version: 1.0 The adapter board converts the digital signal that used to go to the Cine b/w monitor into an analog signal acceptable by the Atari color x/y. It has the same Burr Brown 12-bit DAC and a lot of similar circuitry to the old monitor itself. The BB CPU looks just like all the other B/W ones except it has a daughter board to fit 32K of ROM (4kx8 x 8). Sound board is similar principle to the old ones, a circuit for each sound, and thus is absolutely gigantic (bigger than the CPU) although some circuits are digital. Total of 4 boards: CPU, ROM farm, sound, XY driver. Control is a knob and two buttons (on each side but I assume they're wired in parallel), and 1P/2P start. Cabinet is a Solar Quest cabinet with no mirrors or other stuff, just a Wells X/Y with smoked glass in front. Sides just have a big (and cheesy) Cinematronics logo on a white background. // g