Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game

(tempest.homemade.systems)

30 points | by mwenge 2 hours ago

6 comments

  • chuckmeyer 4 minutes ago
    The vector graphics are why I always seek this game out first in any arcade.
  • ndiddy 33 minutes ago
    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.
  • bandrami 44 minutes ago
    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.
    • VectorLock 14 minutes ago
      Video game history is littered with cool peripherals that were only supported by less than a handful of games. NES R.O.B., SuperScope, etc.
    • chuckmeyer 4 minutes ago
      Wait. Did you never play Kaboom? Kaboom was awesome!
  • faxuss 1 hour ago
    Great work and detail. It gets quite technical at times; simplifying a bit would make it more accessible.
  • gedy 1 hour ago
    Worked with Dave Theurer some years ago, nice guy.
    • artifact_44 38 minutes ago
      Same. Super down to earth. We had our office next to his company that was making a graphics processing tool called Debabelizer. We used it heavily in our games workflow, and would occasionally find bugs... more than once, Dave came over to our office and debugged it on his laptop right in front of us. Truly inspirational dude.
  • maxkonrad 2 hours ago
    gold mine