Download Bottom Gas - Atari 2600 Dragster for the Unisonic Champion & Inty

[decle]

Hey guys,

Continuing the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the release of the Unisonic Champion, I have created Bottom Gas, a port of Activision's Dragster to the Intellivision's little brother:

You can download ROMs for both the Unisonic Champion version and a Li'l Bro version for the Intellivision from the programming forum. These can be played using the unichamp driver in MAME and JzIntv respectively. Like the other Li'l Bro titles instructions, overlays and box art are included:

 

 

Bottom Gas is the first new game for the Unisonic Champion to be released in 40 years. It is also the first action game and the first 3rd party title for the system^*.

Bottom Gas should be an accurate port of the central, "no-steering" game mechanic of the original Atari 2600 game, and has been tested against Omnigamer's TAS spreadsheet. Like the original, it is a 2K game that runs at roughly 60Hz on both the Unisonic Champion and Intellivision. Also included are versions in which player 1 is replaced with a computer opponent that will reliably reproduce a 5.57 second run, using Omnigamer's 18 tacho, 5 shift strategy:

 

 

As of early 2018, this is the fastest, fully documented time seen in Dragster on the Atari 2600. You may be aware that recently there has been a great deal of controversy around the validity of the official World Record of 5.51 seconds set by Todd "Mr Activision" Rogers in 1982.

I hope you enjoy Bottom Gas and find it a fun and challenging addition to the Unisonic Champion game catalogue.

Let me know what you think.


Cheers

decle


^*Paul Robson rewrote the Unisonic EXEC and Blackjack from scratch for his brilliant RetroChallenge entry in 2013. However, because these games were built into the console and owing to an unfortunate addressing detail Paul could not have known without the actual EXEC, his rebuild will not run on a real Unisonic Champion without code or hardware alterations.

[maximebeauvais]

Wow that is very fun.

Dragster is one of my best game. I played so many hours when I was young

[mr_me]

This made me smile; it's a little crazy when you think about it. Now you just have to design an adapter for an intellivision cartridge so unisonic champion owners can play it on real hardware. Maybe an ltoflash can be adapted with new firmware.