That's so cool. I remember loving this game in the arcade but then being annoyed when I had to also buy a paddle wheel to play it on my 2600, which was then useful for exactly 0 other games.
Really nice work! From skimming it, it seems really well written. I'm looking forward to reading through the whole thing. I like how you contextualized how the different versions of the game were written and included primary source documents. The visual diagrams are also neat and help your explanations. If you're interested in even more Tempest source code, the code for the MS-DOS version of Tempest 2000 is publicly available here. https://archive.org/details/tempest-2000-dos-source-code I haven't tried building it myself, but from skimming through the files it seems to be intended for Borland Turbo Assembler in ideal mode.
I once got in a huge argument about the superiority of vector graphics displays around 2010. The idea that LCD could match what Tempest had was silly to me, but the kid I was arguing with had never seen a Tempest cabinet and just assumed old meant bad...
This doc is great, I love this game. So much so that I built a Tempest-insipred audio visualizer [0] for the EYESY platform as one of my first projects on the platform.
I bought and maintain 2 Atari Jaguars just to play Tempest 2K, which is my all time favorite game. And also have a number of Tempest 2K emulators.
Had the privilege of meeting Jeff "Yak" Minter in Singapore, and also attended his presentation. Another legendary game developer, in the same league as David Theurer
If you’re looking to play an official Tempest 2000 where some money (presumably) makes its way to Jeff Minter, then Digital Eclipse have published an “interactive documentary” bundle of his games and the surrounding history, available on pretty much every current platform: https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/llamasoft
Seeing a photo of a filled-out System/360 assembler coding form is like looking at an ancient stone tablet. Imagine the reams of these forms you'd have to go through and iterate on to arrive at a functional piece of software.
The amount of time needed just for one trip around the feedback loop for the smallest imaginable tweak puts any amount of modern "trying to get the build/CI to pass" nuisance to shame.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.atariage.com/software_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=8...
[0] https://signalfunctionset.com/projects/tempestuous/
Had the privilege of meeting Jeff "Yak" Minter in Singapore, and also attended his presentation. Another legendary game developer, in the same league as David Theurer
Found a tiny typo, this sentence from quite early (page 17):
Notice how apparently wasteful this file format is: some of the triplets contain only byte.
I think the word "one" is missing before the final "byte".
(Would love one about Space Giraffe / NEON but I appreciate they're on much more complex systems than Tempest and Psychedelia.)
The amount of time needed just for one trip around the feedback loop for the smallest imaginable tweak puts any amount of modern "trying to get the build/CI to pass" nuisance to shame.