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.
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
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
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.
The "paddle" and "driving" controllers looked the same, but they did not have the same function.
A paddle controller for the Atari 2600 had a hard stop, so that it could only make one revolution (or a bit less) in each direction. Therefore, you could use it with Tennis or Pong or whatever else just had you going back-and-forth.
A driving controller spun freely in both directions without stopping its motion. This was not analogous to the steering wheel of a car, but it did permit driving games to be relatively free-wheeling, and you could spin the car's wheels endlessly in either direction.
In my experience, paddle controllers were more compatible with more games, but if you had a diverse library, it behooved you to keep driving controllers on-hand for that eventuality. Other unique controllers included the BASIC Programming pads, and one of those space games which had some really intricate controls on the dash.
The "driving" controller class was the type that was supported by Tempest. Analogous to the arcade controller, you could spin indefinitely in either direction without having the physical tab to stop the motion. This definitely contributed to the fun and suspense of the gameplay!
Driving controller makes way more sense for tempest, and the lack of use. My family had a pretty extensive collection of 2600 games, and two sets of paddles (needed for four player paddle games, we had one, but it wasn't very good and the 2nd set of paddles was wonky anyway), but no driving controller or any games that used it.
I had several driving games, too. But they used a joystick or the paddles.
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.
(Would love one about Space Giraffe / NEON but I appreciate they're on much more complex systems than Tempest and Psychedelia.)
[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".
A paddle controller for the Atari 2600 had a hard stop, so that it could only make one revolution (or a bit less) in each direction. Therefore, you could use it with Tennis or Pong or whatever else just had you going back-and-forth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_(game_controller)
A driving controller spun freely in both directions without stopping its motion. This was not analogous to the steering wheel of a car, but it did permit driving games to be relatively free-wheeling, and you could spin the car's wheels endlessly in either direction.
In my experience, paddle controllers were more compatible with more games, but if you had a diverse library, it behooved you to keep driving controllers on-hand for that eventuality. Other unique controllers included the BASIC Programming pads, and one of those space games which had some really intricate controls on the dash.
The "driving" controller class was the type that was supported by Tempest. Analogous to the arcade controller, you could spin indefinitely in either direction without having the physical tab to stop the motion. This definitely contributed to the fun and suspense of the gameplay!
I had several driving games, too. But they used a joystick or the paddles.