Vectorlist Archives: Aliens - update...Aliens - update...
From: Clay Cowgill <ClayC_at_diamondmm.com> 
Date: Thu Mar 18 1999 - 12:00:18 EST

Well, good news! 

I managed to sneak into the computer room and work with the Aliens 
boards a bit last night (we've had company all week so hacker-time has 
been limited). 

Long story short-- both sets of Aliens ROMs work, and are different! 
They also appear to run on stock Tempest hardware. (Yay! :-) 

I've dubbed the sets "Aliens Proto 4" and "Aliens Proto 5" based on the 
board serial numbers. 

Aliens Proto 4 appears to be the earlier set. It's smaller by 2K, and 
has a lot of unused space in the ROMs. It also appears to have been 
related to Lunar Lander somehow 'cause it appears there's chunks of 
Lunar Lander source code in the ROMs. Go figure. Gameplay is 
definately "Tempest", but seems REALLY hard. That could just be the 
fact that the shooter doesn't auto-fire - one bullet per press on the 
button! The game appears to be in some kind of early beta-state-- there 
is no title screen, enemy movement is slightly different (faster?), and 
all enemies but the red flippers "sparkle" instead of having solid 
colors. Explosions are also multi-colored, and the player "death" 
animation is completely different. I haven't tried it on a machine with 
sound capabilities yet, so I can't comment on that yet. Oh, yeah-- "NEW 
SUPERZAPPER" instead of "SUPERZAPPER RECHARGE". High-score table 
doesn't seem to be functional either. 

Aliens Proto 5 looks much closer to the released game. It does however 
have one obvious and cool difference-- the title screen proudly 
proclaims "VORTEX by Atari" in a cool-looking font. ;-) (Same sort of 
"zoom in" effect that the Tempest title screen does, but the "trails" 
 from the letters stay on screen for a while.) Once again, gameplay 
seems close to final Temest, but possibly a little harder. It may also 
allow more player bullets on the screen at once-- although that could 
have just been my perception after playing with Proto 4 for a while. 
Auto-fire works, and all the rest of the game functions seem 
more-or-less the same as Tempest. There's definately differences 
though, but until I do a side-by-side compare they're tough to describe. 

Anyway, this is just entirely too interesting (to me at least ;-) to 
pass up, so I'm putting together a multigame for all this stuff. It's 
not going to be super-fancy, but should serve its purpose-- a software 
based menu system allows selection of Aliens Proto 4, Aliens Proto 5, 
Tempest rev 1, Tempest rev 2, Tempest rev 3, and Tempest Tubes (if OK 
with author). There will be three jumpers on the board that allow 
selection of any game (or the menu) to be the default "power-up" mode of 
the cabinet. The menu will still be call-able from a dedicated 
menu-button. 

-Clay