
Atari Asteroids: Creating a Vector Arcade Classic - videotopia
https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/10/24/atari-asteroids-creating-a-vector-arcade-classic/
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doodlebugging
I wish I had a quarter of all the quarters I dropped down the slot in an
Asteroids arcade cabinet. I just know I would go right out and find another
machine and start blasting rocks.

The 7-Eleven where I grew up was just a convenient place to get a Slurpee or a
Big Gulp before they got their first Asteroids machine. Word got out in the
small town where I grew up and we would all take any opportunity to go down
and try to beat the latest high score. Having your initials on the leader
board would create jealousy among my male peers and desire among the females.
Who wouldn't want to be seen with the high-score holder? We spent hours trying
to outdo each other. Competition was fierce and taunting was normal behavior.

The store had several other machines over the years including Frogger, Space
Invaders, Supreme Commander (is that a real one - the nuclear bomber game),
Centipede, etc. and periodically the owner would rotate new machines in and
old ones out. The one game that he had two of was Asteroids. It was extremely
popular. Other places in town also got in on the arcade games bandwagon and
before long you could play at the pool hall (spent a lot of time there too),
almost every beer joint, and even some fast food joints. Anywhere you might
see a crowd of people waiting for something became a great place to give them
a way to spend their time and their quarters before you soaked them on the
main event.

While working with one crew in town we passed our time gambling by pitching
quarters. The quarter closest to the line would win all. We even used the lane
stripes on the highway in some spots if the traffic was low or non-existent.
There was no better feeling than getting off work with a shit-ton of someone
else's quarters to drop in the slot.

I love that game. I bought an emulator version for my kids when they were old
enough to understand video game controls and they love it too.

I worked with a guy in Houston several years ago and we were shooting the
breeze when he mentioned that he had just bought several pinball machines to
restore. I asked him what his favorite arcade game had been while he was
growing up. He told me he only played pinball. I was hoping he could be my new
best friend and we could hang out and waste time with his Asteroids game but
nope, just another Pinball wizard loser. ;)

~~~
CmdrKrool
How common was the later revision (small saucer fires immediately when it
appears, and can aim at you across the wrap around) compared to the original?

MAME makes the newest revision the 'default' (in terms of their ROM naming) so
I sometimes feel like that's the one I 'ought' to play but it's very much
harder than the original, which I enjoy more (while currently I'm not good
enough to deliberately 'hunt' the saucers anyway).

~~~
ddingus
In my area, there was one. A good player could tell straight away.

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joezydeco
If you love Atari vector games and haven't read Jed Margolin's primer on how
they did it, this is a great technical read:

The Secret Life of Vector Generators:
[http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm](http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm)

And it's companion piece, the Secret Life of XY Monitors:
[http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm](http://www.jmargolin.com/xy/xymon.htm)

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dmbaggett
If you look at the letter from Thomas M. Saunders, Esq. towards the middle of
the page, you'll notice a handwritten reference to Skip Paul. This is the same
Skip Paul who championed our game, 13 years later, while a senior executive at
Universal Studios -- and who in fact decided the character of Crash should be
a bandicoot rather than a wombat. (The article also quotes Mark Cerny, who was
our producer, and who was brought in to Universal by Skip.)

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bitwize
If you haven't seen an Asteroids cabinet in action, I suggest you find one at
an arcade museum near you. Actual Asteroids is quite different from any port
or emulation of it. The slow-decay phosphor leaves visible trails for your
ship and shots, and the machine has control over electron-beam intensity in a
way that raster units do not, which means that your shots and enemy saucers
glitter in the dark, creating a "spacey" atmosphere that's hard to replicate
on a raster display.

~~~
mgcross
And Tempest too - just isn't the same without the dial/paddle!

~~~
stcredzero
I would say that Tempest is even more of a true classic. It's immediately
accessible even to today's audience.

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ilamont
I love that the proposal fit on a one-page mimeographed form.

I also find it kind of funny that these are museum pieces now. I played a lot
of Asteroids as a 12-year-old - the neighborhood indoor archery range bought
or leased one, and nearly every day after school there was a small gaggle of
kids playing it. This and "Battlezone" were part of my arcade gaming coming-
of-age in the early 80s.

~~~
stcredzero
I was a volunteer at a video game museum. I was also a kid playing Space War,
Asteroids, and Battlezone. There's a big difference between kids nowadays and
kids back then, in terms of how much problem solving and science they're
willing to do to figure out a game!

Basically, most kids nowadays will just walk up to Battlezone, wiggle the
sticks for 2 seconds, which just pivots/vibrates the tank for 2 seconds, then
they give up. (A few adults were like this too.) Of the kids who didn't give
up, there was one who didn't figure out the 3D world also existed out of the
field of view. He asked of the radar screen, "What's that clock thing in the
top?" ("It's a radar screen." \-- blank look. "It's a minimap." \--
Comprehension!)

I have a MMO Asteroids style game up online. At one point, I hired a high
school aged kid to do testing. His first reaction: It doesn't go where I point
it! It's impossible to strafe! For the younger kids reading this comment 1) is
the point of the mechanic and 2) It's not, if you grok basic physics.

I've noted that the "Asteroids" movement mechanic is generally hugely
bastardized and dumbed down for modern audiences in today's games, to the
point that it breaks the expectations of anyone who has skill with the
mechanic in Asteroids. "Heat Signature," and "SPAZ" are two examples of this.

~~~
ilamont
_Basically, most kids nowadays will just walk up to Battlezone, wiggle the
sticks for 2 seconds, which just pivots /vibrates the tank for 2 seconds, then
they give up. (A few adults were like this too.) Of the kids who didn't give
up, there was one who didn't figure out the 3D world also existed out of the
field of view._

Wow. And I thought the youngest generation was pretty quick when it came to
figuring out interfaces and liked old-school games.

Maybe the interest is limited to pseudo old-school interfaces based on blocky
graphics, like Minecraft or Nintendo-ish platformers?

~~~
stcredzero
_Wow. And I thought the youngest generation was pretty quick when it came to
figuring out interfaces and liked old-school games._

I think that mostly has to do with subculture and what one's peers are
interested in. I never had that much interest in platforming mechanics.
(Honestly, I'm about as bad as that game journalist who got called out for his
clumsiness with the Cuphead tutorial.) To a lot of hardcore "gamers" that
marks me as a non-gamer. However, my clumsiness with platform mechanics isn't
any different than most other's illiteracy with the Asteroid movement
mechanic. It's just that certain mechanics are subscribed to and practiced
more than others.

Also, most successful games nowadays come with fairly extensive tutorials, and
even if they don't but are still popular, then there are tons of YouTube
videos which can be used as reference. In the 80's, you just had instructions
printed on the arcade console and a few screens animating basic game
mechanics. We figured things out because we had to, or we got advice from
friends who figured things out. In 2018, there are so many games, no one
really knows what to do with them all, so you skip over everything that
doesn't grab you immediately or you go and do what all your friends are doing.

So yeah, they probably would be as quick, but in 2018, only a very few are
going to bother.

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blt
If you have never seen one, I strongly recommend seeking out a real vector
arcade machine. The monitor has a beautiful, otherworldly appearance that
can't be captured in photos or emulation. Somehow the lack of the raster grid
makes the image feel more tangible. In an arcade the vector machines have an
aura that even the best raster machines don't have.

~~~
cbm-vic-20
For me, it's the intensity and brightness that really stand out. In Asteroids,
the ship and rocks are clear, smoothly drawn straight lines, but the shots
from enemy ships are intensely bright points that actually make a small circle
around it on the CRT also glow faintly.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
The first time someone sees what Asteroids really looks like is pretty
special. Those ridiculously bright bullets burn themselves into your retina in
a way that simply can't be emulated.

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evo_9
Stuff like this always reminds me of this amazing vector-based home gaming
machine from the 80's:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex)

~~~
stevekemp
That was a good machine! One of my cousins received a copy for a
Christmas/Birthday present and we spent hours playing it.

The gel-overlays were an inspired solution to making the displays more
interesting.

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tabtab
Vector game monitors created a look that's either impossible or really hard
emulate well with pixel-based monitors and scan-line-based CRT's. A beam of
electrons can dwell on a single spot or narrow area for a relatively long
period of time, making it _glow mega-bright_.

It's roughly the same technology as a CRT, except instead of periodic scan
lines, the "beam aimer" can dynamically point to wherever it wants on the
screen. It's kind of like some laser shows.

I'd love to see one again and show it to my (grown) kids.

~~~
acomjean
You could get a laser projector and port asteroids to it (like this guy did)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FkHjG759ABY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FkHjG759ABY)

~~~
smcameron
A buddy of mine built his own RGB laser projector for about $400 back in 2013
or so, and got MAME to work with it. But the games typically try to draw too
many lines for a laser projector to keep up with, so you either need multiple,
and split up the lines among the projectors and carefully align the
projectors. Anyway we learned that filming laser projections is hard, and
doesn't look like it does in real life.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2JKr-
Vkz8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2JKr-Vkz8A)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA6pvAZ3nq4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA6pvAZ3nq4)

~~~
acomjean
Very cool. A lot of games i forgot we’re cector based.

Battle zone, tempest, Star Trek and some game with vector blimps and space
squids (world war vi?). How did the mame output which is usually to a crt
translate to your projector?

~~~
smcameron
Word War vi[1] is a little game I made long before the laser projector, and we
were looking for things to do with the projector, so I converted word war vi
to be able to use it.

You can look in the commits here to see how MAME is hooked to the projector.
[https://github.com/jv4779/openlase-
mame/commits/master](https://github.com/jv4779/openlase-mame/commits/master)

I believe the jist of it is MAME already has to start with lines meant for a
vector display and rasterize them one way or another for a modern computer.
Before this happens, the data can sent to the openlase library[2] which
generates signals on 5 channels of audio: 2 channels for control of X and Y
galvos, and 3 channels for red, green, and blue laser power control. These
signals then get sent to amplifiers and then to galvos and laser controls.

[1]
[http://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/](http://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/)
[2] [https://github.com/marcan/openlase](https://github.com/marcan/openlase)

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corysama
If you like this, you might appreciate
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/)

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shove
We had one at Quarter Horse here in Durham until very recently. Really wanted
to keep it in the lineup but it didn’t get enough plays :(

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Domark
When I was a kid, my parents would drop my off at a daycare called Kids Time
Out.

This was the early 80s and they had a cocktail version of Asteroids. I
mastered it! I could play it all day!

One of my favorites to this day, along with Gauntlet, STUN Runner and VR
Racing/Daytona USA.

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tragomaskhalos
I had always assumed that Asteroids was a spin-off of Space War, seeing as the
latter also used vector graphics and one of the player ships was the same
design as the Asteroids ship. I loved Space War, but it was incredibly rare
(in the UK)

~~~
stcredzero
Space War was the very 1st arcade videogame I played, ever!

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mcshicks
So are you gonna play ships or rocks?

~~~
ddingus
Alternate

