cas Posted April 12, 2008 Share Posted April 12, 2008 (sorry for crossposting, but not many people interested in this also read the programming forums) The European Computer Magazin "c't" has an interesting competition celebrating their 25st anniversary. The goal is to write a program that will play against the original Atari Asteroids Coin-Up machine. For that they describe the inner workings of this machine from 1979, esp. the interesting vector engine build in. For the competition, they have made a special version of MAME that will send the content of the vector RAM each screen refresh by UDP and will receive the key control information also over UDP. They expect the program to run under Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux or MacOS X 10.5. However I wonder if it would be possible to have such a program running on an original Atari machine, like an Atari800 from the same year. The hardest part will surely be the Ethernet UDP. The competition is open until June 30st 2008. Atari has agreed to make the original Arcarde ROM of Asteroids available for this competition. Details can be found on the competitions webpage http://www.heise.de/ct/creativ/08/02/details/ Happy coding...... Carsten Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted April 12, 2008 Share Posted April 12, 2008 Interesting concept. Is there doco relating to how the vector RAM is structured? I've got an ancient book "Winners guide to arcade games" (or something like that). It mentions that there are "collision hexagons" defined to detect collisions. Would be interesting to know how they did the actual game - especially considering it didn't have much ROM/RAM to start with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted April 12, 2008 Share Posted April 12, 2008 Is there doco relating to how the vector RAM is structured? Yup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cas Posted April 12, 2008 Author Share Posted April 12, 2008 Interesting concept. Is there doco relating to how the vector RAM is structured? Yes, it's in the magazine issue and it's in german, I'll see if I find time to translate the bit (but no promises) Carsten Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted April 12, 2008 Share Posted April 12, 2008 http://www.heise.de/ct/08/09/176/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cas Posted April 14, 2008 Author Share Posted April 14, 2008 English information on the Asteroids Vector ROM and the Opcodes can be found at http://andysarcade.de/asteroids.html and http://www.ionpool.net/arcade/asteroidtech...oidsrepair.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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