Existence of Centipede/Millipede prototypes for the NES?

[DNA128k]

This is fantastic, thanks to everyone involved for preserving this.

[Asaki]

Wow, this is really cool, despite being unfinished.

I don't think the "scrolling" option does anything?

DDT graphics are in here, but not implemented at all.

FOUR-PLAYER SIMULTANEOUS CO-OP woah (too bad it won't work with the FourScore though).

Buttons seem to be all wrong for players 3 and 4 though, or maybe that's just FCEUX?

Interesting that Namco was going to publish it?

[DNA128k]

17 hours ago, Asaki said:

Wow, this is really cool, despite being unfinished.

I don't think the "scrolling" option does anything?

DDT graphics are in here, but not implemented at all.

FOUR-PLAYER SIMULTANEOUS CO-OP woah (too bad it won't work with the FourScore though).

Buttons seem to be all wrong for players 3 and 4 though, or maybe that's just FCEUX?

Interesting that Namco was going to publish it?

If I'm not mistaken, NAMCO had the licenses for ATARI titles in Japan.

[TheRedEye]

Just to record this somewhere:

 

This was hand-assembled by bunnyboy, not built cleanly as they would have at the time, as we don't have a complete repo or understanding of the build tools. It is POSSIBLE that something is wrong here, but probably not.

 

This project was by Atari for Namcot in Japan for the Famicom specifically, this was never a planned U.S. title, it's an unreleased Famicom game. Documentation in the repo shows that they halted development when they realized they didn't actually have the full rights to the game. There was some discussion about re-theming the game to a space themed Millipede clone, but that probably never went anywhere.

Edited June 7, 2021 by TheRedEye

[Abzeronow]

This is a certainly fascinating prototype and interesting bit of Atari history.  Good that this is being preserved.

[Shawn]

On 1/26/2021 at 5:31 PM, Asaki said:

Yeah, I found the rest of the dumps, as well as the Intellivision ones.

Some of the games are kind of alright, I guess?

Other games, it's quite impressive just how wrong they got it.

 

Weird thing is that any of the mapper programs I use to split the PRG and CHR data doesn't seem

to read any of those FB1 dumps correctly.   I normally use Rom Splitter 2.0 but is doesn't know

what to make of those dumps. I'm guessing most, if not all of them, are Mapper 0 (NROM) but there

is a couple that look to be Mapper 4 (MMC3)?

[Asaki]

15 hours ago, Shawn said:

 

Weird thing is that any of the mapper programs I use to split the PRG and CHR data doesn't seem

to read any of those FB1 dumps correctly.   I normally use Rom Splitter 2.0 but is doesn't know

what to make of those dumps. I'm guessing most, if not all of them, are Mapper 0 (NROM) but there

is a couple that look to be Mapper 4 (MMC3)?

Yeah, like I said before, most of them don't seem to have any CHR data.

[Shawn]

On 8/24/2021 at 4:03 PM, Asaki said:

Yeah, like I said before, most of them don't seem to have any CHR data.

 

OK, I was thinking that was an error from the program not being able to read it right. I might give a couple a try as nrom with only prg data. Seems really odd but stranger things have happened I guess.

[MrMaddog]

On 6/6/2021 at 10:08 AM, Dutchman2000 said:

At long last, here is the ROM of Ed Logg’s version of Millipede for the Famicom.  There is no sound as that wasn’t started yet.  Looks like all work on this stopped in July of 1986.  Thanks to TheRedEye and his crew for assembling this game from the source code found on the backup tapes.

milli.nes 24.02 kB · 225 downloads

Thanks! Aside from the missing sound and the strange way the ship(?) moves vertically, it looks and plays much better than the version done by HAL Lab (even the Atari prototype).