4 ms·

If I had a nickel for every quarter I pumped into this game I’d be a rich man now.

whartung 3y ago
The Tempest machine at college was lucky to get 10 quarters a week. We had a little cabal of players, one would put the morning quarter it, get the right score, fire up the free 40 credits, and that would be all she wrote. We'd play it throughout the day. For the unaware, the early Tempest machine left the factory with several cheat codes that were enabled when you got specific scores in the game. One of those scores granted 40 free credits on the game. How these code left the factory is a mystery to me. The fellow who operated the arcade machines at the Student Union was obviously frustrated, as one week he showed up and cranked all of the difficulty settings as high as they would go, perhaps hoping that would boost the revenues. It was so interesting early on because it was not uncommon to just walk into an arcade and find a Tempest machine with the free credits. But, eventually, someone figured out how it worked, and the word got out. The real sleeper of a code was the code that unlocked all of the levels. Like many games, Tempest would allow you to continue near where you left off if you continued playing. After the game, it would go into attract mode. If it went a full cycle of the attract mode, it would reset. This is why the level unlock code remained elusive for so long, as you had let the machine fully cycle in order to enable it (which nobody normally wanted to do). When that code got out, the high score on every machine in town skyrocketed since the game could be started at the highest level (level 81, the Green level I think). Outside the cheat codes, it was a fabulously satisfying game, from the gameplay to the sounds, to the pace. There was real nice hit when you hit the Super Zapper (which killed all the monsters), cleared the level, immediately started rushing through, while holding down the fire button to grind down the remains of the spike in your lane before you got thrown into space. The sights and sounds of that was just great.
- kabdib 3y ago
  It was common practice in early Atari games to have custom, non-ASCII character sets. For Tempest, as an anti-tamper measure the team made the character assignments for the game's copyright message executable 6502 code. Periodically, in an obfuscated way, the machine would execute this code. People who pirated the ROM (this did happen in the industry) would be tempted to modify the message; the machine would crash, and they'd have to figure it out. When the team (well, Dave Theurer) finished the game, they sent it off to the factory floor and went on vacation. Mission accomplished. Then Atari legal decided that they had to update the copyright message (e.g., to alter some spelling). Since the team was away, someone without the above knowledge just changed the string. The game appeared to work, and that's what they shipped. That modification didn't abjectly crash the machine. Instead, it did Weird Shit depending on the remainder of the score line. Just luck of the draw.
  - whartung 3y ago
    Wow, really? Do you know of an analysis that details this? The post-mortem on this must have been crazy. That's got to be a great "You've got to be kidding me" moment for the folks when they went in to fix the issue.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewoDLDDgHkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewoDLDDgHkI Goes into excruciating detail of many of the anti-piracy measures in Tempest, and probably covers what the parent is talking about. All "writing" was executable code in Tempest because everything being drawn is by telling the electron gun where to aim, so you have commands like a "Turtle" graphics library. There were sections of anti-piracy code that would check magic numbers and perturb those copyright drawing routines if the check failed.

The Tempest machine at college was lucky to get 10 quarters a week. We had a little cabal of players, one would put the morning quarter it, get the right score, fire up the free 40 credits, and that would be all she wrote. We'd play it throughout the day. For the unaware, the early Tempest machine left the factory with several cheat codes that were enabled when you got specific scores in the game. One of those scores granted 40 free credits on the game. How these code left the factory is a mystery to me. The fellow who operated the arcade machines at the Student Union was obviously frustrated, as one week he showed up and cranked all of the difficulty settings as high as they would go, perhaps hoping that would boost the revenues. It was so interesting early on because it was not uncommon to just walk into an arcade and find a Tempest machine with the free credits. But, eventually, someone figured out how it worked, and the word got out. The real sleeper of a code was the code that unlocked all of the levels. Like many games, Tempest would allow you to continue near where you left off if you continued playing. After the game, it would go into attract mode. If it went a full cycle of the attract mode, it would reset. This is why the level unlock code remained elusive for so long, as you had let the machine fully cycle in order to enable it (which nobody normally wanted to do). When that code got out, the high score on every machine in town skyrocketed since the game could be started at the highest level (level 81, the Green level I think). Outside the cheat codes, it was a fabulously satisfying game, from the gameplay to the sounds, to the pace. There was real nice hit when you hit the Super Zapper (which killed all the monsters), cleared the level, immediately started rushing through, while holding down the fire button to grind down the remains of the spike in your lane before you got thrown into space. The sights and sounds of that was just great.

kabdib 3y ago
It was common practice in early Atari games to have custom, non-ASCII character sets. For Tempest, as an anti-tamper measure the team made the character assignments for the game's copyright message executable 6502 code. Periodically, in an obfuscated way, the machine would execute this code. People who pirated the ROM (this did happen in the industry) would be tempted to modify the message; the machine would crash, and they'd have to figure it out. When the team (well, Dave Theurer) finished the game, they sent it off to the factory floor and went on vacation. Mission accomplished. Then Atari legal decided that they had to update the copyright message (e.g., to alter some spelling). Since the team was away, someone without the above knowledge just changed the string. The game appeared to work, and that's what they shipped. That modification didn't abjectly crash the machine. Instead, it did Weird Shit depending on the remainder of the score line. Just luck of the draw.
- whartung 3y ago
  Wow, really? Do you know of an analysis that details this? The post-mortem on this must have been crazy. That's got to be a great "You've got to be kidding me" moment for the folks when they went in to fix the issue.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewoDLDDgHkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewoDLDDgHkI Goes into excruciating detail of many of the anti-piracy measures in Tempest, and probably covers what the parent is talking about. All "writing" was executable code in Tempest because everything being drawn is by telling the electron gun where to aim, so you have commands like a "Turtle" graphics library. There were sections of anti-piracy code that would check magic numbers and perturb those copyright drawing routines if the check failed.