Favorite Old Arcade Games?

Video would be Qix, Pac-Man, Tetris and Dr. Mario. On to pinball and my all time favorite was Medieval Madness.

I had a friend who did Star wars a lot! he did the trench a few times 'using the force' (not shooting at anything..)

https://montrealgazette.com/news/lo...g-resolved-arcade-mtl-finally-opens-its-doors

Montreal had a "game on" exhibition at our 'science centre" featuring games game games!! the old to the new. pay the admission, and play till your hearts content! Hosted by Ubisoft..

https://www.polygon.com/2015/8/10/9127269/game-on-exhibition-montreal

dr wogz said:

I had a friend who did Star wars a lot! he did the trench a few times 'using the force' (not shooting at anything..)

Click to expand...

As often as possible!

Robotron, Stargate and Millipede. I have original, dedicated cabinets for all 3 -plus another 7 vids and a few pins. Just can't seem to leave the 80's behind !

I can't access videos at work, but if I could, I'd post Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite saying, "She says I'm livin' too much in '82." :lol:

Defender, then Zaxxon. First 3D game...

The laser disk games like Dragon's Lair were cool too, but I sucked at them.

Lots of goodies listed, some I had forgotten. My list:
Golden Axe
Altered Beast (good name for a rocket)
Joust
Rampage - the reboot on PS3 was pretty good too!
Star Wars
Popeye
There was a helicopter game where you sat in a seat and it made a loud pop and hit your seat when you took fire, Steel Talons maybe. Pretty awesome back then.
Gauntlet "Red Wizard is dying" also a fairly decent reboot on PS3.
Icari Warriors
Lethal Enforcers. A shooter.
There was one more, you controlled a giant monster and fought others like you in a completely destructible environment - cities and what not. Just can't think of the name
I was horrible at all of them of course.

I went to a retro video game arcade this weekend (https://www.playland-not-at-the-beach.org/index.html). I was impressed with how stupid some of the old games were. There was one about riding an elevator...

Pong. Have find memories of lunch hours spent at a bar a few blocks from my office where quarters were lined up 10 deep across the bottom of the screen for a chance at a game. Played Liars' Dice while waiting.

Market Street and Van Ness in SF...diagonally across the intersection from the Fillmore West.

I liked the vector graphics games. In particular, Tempest and Battle Zone. For raster graphics I kind of liked Crystal Castles.

anyone remember Wizard of Wor i think it was?

Moon Cresta: your three lives were the parts of a three-stage craft and after you completed a wave, if you had spare lives remaining, you gained one of the stages.

Gorf: first arcade game I saw which had synthesised voice. "Try again. I devour coins".

Sinistar: the enemy ships would try to shoot you but they'd also be building a super-ship, the Sinistar. You'd know when that was complete because it announced itself, "Beware - I live!"

The next person to visit Berlin can look for the Computer Games Museum:
https://www.computerspielemuseum.de/1210_Home.htm

adrian said:

Sinistar: the enemy ships would try to shoot you but they'd also be building a super-ship, the Sinistar. You'd know when that was complete because it announced itself, "Beware - I live!"

Click to expand...

Thank you! This is one I've been trying to remember the name of! I liked it when it would rumble "I Hunger!"

There was one that was all Olympic events.. track & field mostly.. hurdles, javelin (hit a bird), long jump, high jump, sprint.. a friend played that one a lot!

Oh, then there's Tiger Heli, 1941, and Commando

No love for Dig Dug? I sucked at video games and my friends never let me forget. It was a tough time to grow up with no arcade skills...

RocketFeller said:

No love for Dig Dug? I sucked at video games and my friends never let me forget. It was a tough time to grow up with no arcade skills...

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I don't believe I saw Pole Position or Pole Position II either.

Dig Dug was good for a while, one of many games I played some and got decent at but never really went full throttle on. Mr. Do was also a lot of silly fun during my freshman year in college.

I was always drawn to games that had interesting controls, other than basic joystick and fire or jump. Games in this category were Tempest, Joust, Robotron, Centipede/Millipede. I enjoyed Food Fight for a while.

And who can forget Atari Football?

A friend of mine was in a arcade, playing [driving?] one of those 'sit in driving games'. He had a cell phone, one of the first ones, that Motorola 'Brick' phone; that luxury "car phone". He didn't drive, nor did he have his licence at the time. The phone rang. He answered it.. "Hey man, what-cha doin'?" he was asked.. "Uhm, you're not going to believe this, but I'm driving" he responded.. So picture it: there's a guy in an arcade, playing driving game, talking on the phone...

And no mention yet of Donkey Kong..

thequick said:

I went to a retro video game arcade this weekend (https://www.playland-not-at-the-beach.org/index.html). I was impressed with how stupid some of the old games were. There was one about riding an elevator...

Click to expand...

Yeah, addictive game play doesn't require game goals that aren't stupid, quite often just the opposite. Simple and fun was the old standard, the "simple" part being required due to the old computing hardware, the game play therefore being the part that made the game(s) succeed or not. Similarly, the GOOD older scifi movies had to depend far more on a great story than on special effects they couldn't do convincingly versus now where CGI effects and nothing but action scenes sometimes attempt to make up for an uninspired or poorly executed story.

cerving said:

Defender, then Zaxxon. First 3D game...

The laser disk games like Dragon's Lair were cool too, but I sucked at them.

Click to expand...

To show the relative power of modern PCs versus the then very expensive custom hardware found in arcade game machines, here's a site where you can play in-browser emulations of actual arcade console ROM code:

The Internet Archive's Arcade

https://archive.org/details/internetarcade&tab=collection

Quick guide on how to play on the Internet Arcade

https://armchairarcade.com/perspect...-guide-on-how-to-play-on-the-internet-arcade/

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The Internet Archive Arcade

Wlliams Defender

https://archive.org/details/arcade_defender5

When the Defender ROM code "boots up", it's just like the arcade machine's screen looked when the arcade machine was powered on. Press F2 until you get through all of the machine setup settings, then use these keys to play:

5 – Insert virtual coins (press multiple times to insert multiple coins)
1 – Start one player game (after inserting a coin)
UP and DOWN arrows to move your ship up and down the screen
ALT/OPTION to thrust your ship
Z for Reverse
CONTROL to fire
SPACE to fire a "Smart Bomb"
SHIFT to go into Hyperspace

Game play is VASTLY better with the original arcade unit's controls, of course.

Defender arcade machine PC boards:

Winston said:

To show the relative power of modern PCs versus the then very expensive custom hardware found in arcade game machines, here's a site where you can play in-browser emulations of actual arcade console ROM code:

The Internet Archive's Arcade

https://archive.org/details/internetarcade&tab=collection

Quick guide on how to play on the Internet Arcade

https://armchairarcade.com/perspect...-guide-on-how-to-play-on-the-internet-arcade/

---------

The Internet Archive Arcade

Wlliams Defender

https://archive.org/details/arcade_defender5

When the Defender ROM code "boots up", it's just like the arcade machine's screen looked when the arcade machine was powered on. Press F2 until you get through all of the machine setup settings, then use these keys to play:

5 – Insert virtual coins (press multiple times to insert multiple coins)
1 – Start one player game (after inserting a coin)
UP and DOWN arrows to move your ship up and down the screen
ALT/OPTION to thrust your ship
Z for Reverse
CONTROL to fire
SPACE to fire a "Smart Bomb"
SHIFT to go into Hyperspace

Game play is VASTLY better with the original arcade unit's controls, of course.

Defender arcade machine PC boards:

Click to expand...

That bottom board. I had a look inside the Defender game one day. The chips on the board were twice a dense and there were ten boards.....



On reflection that is probably the Defender board but I do remember the stack of them, the tech said there was 10 boards.....

dave carver said:

That bottom board. I had a look inside the Defender game one day. The chips on the board were twice a dense and there were ten boards.....



On reflection that is probably the Defender board but I do remember the stack of them, the tech said there was 10 boards.....

Click to expand...

That was listed as a Defender arcade board set where I found it. I wouldn't doubt there might have been multiple versions over it over time.

I kinda chuckle when I see these old 'computer boards'. massive sheets of green G10 / FR4 with their neat rows of chips, a few caps & resistors and some ribbon cables. I remember seeing some designer's drawing / plansets for boards, where they were laid out by hand, at a 4:1 scale.. stacks of rub-down transfers for pads & crepe tape for their traces..

Now-a-days, all those chips are in one package, and about the size of my pinky nail. And all the other components are SMT, and also microscopic in size, all mounted on a 16 layer board..

Winston said:

To show the relative power of modern PCs versus the then very expensive custom hardware found in arcade game machines, here's a site where you can play in-browser emulations of actual arcade console ROM code:

Click to expand...

Sorry for drifting a little further off-topic, but just yesterday, I stumbled on a site with a collection of TRS-80 software and links to run the programs in your browser.

https://willus.com/trs80/

Bugs From Outer Space and Raid are two arcade games that I wrote (another person wrote the other software in the list credited to "Roger Smith").

The emulator seems to have some problems with the games in the browsers I tested it with, but it's still amazing to me that the whole TRS-80 computer can be emulated that well in javascript. Neither of the games is particularly exciting.

Bugs was written as an assembly-language tutorial and appeared in a six-part series in 80 Micro magazine. Raid was originally hand-assembled and entered as machine code:

21 00 3C 11 01 3C 01 00 04 36 20 ED BO

The code above cleared the screen on the TRS-80. I entered it so often that I can still type it out by memory.

I have an unfinished TRS-80 game, sort of a cross between PacMan and Centopede, that is actually really fun to play. Someday, I'll get around to rewriting it as an Android app or whatever.

Oh, as to the original topic. Galaga was my favorite. I played it so often during college that I'm pretty sure I could drop a quarter in a Galaga machine and play until I get too bored or too tired to continue. After some level the game ceases to get any more challenging.

-- Roger

Back in the high school days, we (my group) hung out at the local pool hall. And in that haunt they had 2 or 3 games, one video, and one pin ball. They rotated out about 2 a year.. There was one particular pinball game "Caveman" that had a video game built in. You played the ball part unitl a certain combination was hit, then you had a caveman version of donkey kong on the screen. We got so good at that game, that whomever showed up first, with their 1st quarter managed to get about 4 or 5 free games for us all.. We sometimes left the game with about 20 free credits..

(The on-screen portion was rather easy, and the pattern became obvious after a while.. so, it became quite easy to rack up points..)

dr wogz said:

I kinda chuckle when I see these old 'computer boards'. massive sheets of green G10 / FR4 with their neat rows of chips, a few caps & resistors and some ribbon cables. I remember seeing some designer's drawing / plansets for boards, where they were laid out by hand, at a 4:1 scale.. stacks of rub-down transfers for pads & crepe tape for their traces..

Now-a-days, all those chips are in one package, and about the size of my pinky nail. And all the other components are SMT, and also microscopic in size, all mounted on a 16 layer board..

Click to expand...

Yeah, it's amazing how far the tech has advanced in such a short time. Take a look at how the even the IC masks used to be laid out:

https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-design-integrated-circuits-in-early-years#!n=12





Try that now:

Wire-wrap all the way, baby

Galaga is my #1 all time favorite. We have one of the new "old" game systems in our basement. We have a console with 60 plus games. Ms. PacMan is my wife's favorite.

Mike