Newsgroups: rec.games.video.arcade Path: spies!sgiblab!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!linac!att!cbnewse!ofoz From: ofoz@cbnewse.cb.att.com (steven.s.ozdemir) Subject: History of Cinematronics - last time posted Organization: AT&T Distribution: na Date: Mon, 3 May 1993 22:32:43 GMT Message-ID: Keywords: Space Wars, Rip Off, Star Castle, and other vector games Lines: 422 INTRODUCTION ------------ Many thanks to the other serious collectors who over the years have helped me piece this together and fill in the blanks!! I hope you enjoy reading this, and do send some email to me if you'd like to see more articles like this!!! (If you are reading through this for recreation, you may want to skip the sections marked TECH NOTE....they tend to be boring to read.) Writing the history of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam has felt like writing an obituary (probably because Cinematronics stopped making vector games back in 1982, or possibly because Cinematronics went out of business back in 1986). However, in my several years of reading r.g.v.a, I've never seen anyone collect into one article all the disjointed facts about Cinematronics presented in this group. So here's the history of Cinematronics/Vectorbeam with plenty of technical facts intersperced throughout the article...if you want to do conversions of your Cinematronics games, this article will be of particular interest to you!! Space Wars and Sundance, Star Hawk and Warriors, Tail Gunner, Rip Off and Star Castle, and the final pairing Armor Attack and Solar Quest are all BW vector games covered below. War of the Worlds was another Cinematronics conversion kit for Star Castle. Cinematronics also made other raster games like Jack the Giant Killer, Cerberus, Danger Zone, several sports oriented games and the popular Dragon's Lair/Space Ace (along with color vector games called Boxing Bugs and Cosmic Chasm ) but these games are not covered below because they don't fall under the BW vector game category. Folklore involving Vectorbeam/Cinematronics says that the hardware for Space Wars was created in a garage by someone who wanted to play this MIT game at his house! The Vectorbeam/Cinematronics folks stopped by and offered to license the hardware....and from that point they went on to make almost a dozen games on that hardware platform! In fact, the fact that the later games like Armor Attack and Solar Quest were still using the bit slice technology is pretty amazing! Microprocessors had been in use for several years at that point!! If you think about it, things make sense though....if you were trying to make Space Wars in a garage back in 1975 (two years would be enough time to develop the first prototype that Vectorbeam/Cinematronics discovered and produced in 1977) you might not be able to afford the new fangled microprocessor of the time!! Naturally, you'd use a bit-sliced architecture that used 74 series chips that were widely available and cheap enough. And as we said above, Cinematronics went on to make almost a dozen games on that architecture without significantly changing it. I wonder just how much revenue was generated by that one person's hardware design....20 million? 50 million?? TECH NOTE: All the BW vector games used similar hardware. So for the most part, all the Cinematronics boards are interchangable, except for the control panel!! The actual Cinematronics boards do have wiring modifications (for an unused gate) for boards using 2716s vs. 2732s, but this only involves adding wires to use an extra gate for addressing the larger address space in a 2732. Do not confuse this wiring modification with the strap option near the connectors on the mother board. There is a small wire (1/4 of an inch) with "NORM" and "VAR" printed nearby....this tells the mother board if the Cinematronics monitor has the optional VARiable intensity daughter board used in Solar Quest. None of the modifications affect the interfaces between the boards and the cabinet so you can use a single cabinet to test any Cinematronics board set, but you can't play the game because the control panel is wired only for that one particular game. You can see the game come up on the monitor and make the appropriate noises!! The physical appearance of the board set is as follows. The board set for any of the Cinematronics games consists of two boards. A mother board that is about 12 inches by 16 inches and had three connectors to one side plus a molex connector to supply power and coin door. And a sound board that is about 6 inches by 8 inches and has a single connector to one side plus a molex connector to supply power and speakers. The single connector of the sound boards connects to the center connector of the three connectors on the mother board. The sound boards for all the Cinematronics BW vector games were composed of discrete components... a practice Cinematronics continued long after other manufacturers converted to using digital gone generators. By sticking with analog, Cinematronics was able to make the "droning" sounds like Rip Off background noise! The other two connectors on the mother board go to the control panel and the BW vector monitor (where the signals going to the monitor are digital, not analog). The mother board has room for four sockets that hold EPROMS or masked ROMs, though in the one case of Tail Gunner a daughter board with over a dozen EPROMS would go into one of the sockets! For many of the earlier games, only two of the four sockets/pads were filled and in many cases the masked ROMs were soldered directly into the board (bypassing the need for a socket). The dipswitches for most of the Cinematronics boards serve the same purpose except for Rip Off's diagnostic mode, which is set to OFF (instead of ON) for normal play. SPACE WARS and SUNDANCE ----------------------- Vectorbeam was created back in 1976 and was located in the San Diego area. Their first game was Space Wars, which was a two player game developed at MIT. Space Wars was quite novel for the time, in that you could program the type of game you were going to play using a numerical keypad that consisted of a two row, five column matrix of keyboard buttons. The standard four button controls (right, left, thrust and fire) were used for each player. Once you selected the type of game (gravity, reverse gravity, strong gravity, weak gravity, speed of ships, wrap around universe and/or invisible sun), the two players would fight for a fixed amount of time with the person making the most kills within the time limit winning. Note though, that hitting the other player could result in the player only being injured, and still able to fight. A few last bits of information about Space Wars....one player looked like the Enterprise, another player looked like the Asteroids ship, and lastly there was a reset button that would be hit to restart the battle with the players in their original starting position (scores were preserved). Sundance came after Space Wars, but we can't be sure since no owner on VAPS has a Sundance! This was Tim Skelly's first game...he went on to make the classics, Rip Off, Star Castle and finally Reactor. Sundance was not very popular and very few were made. A first person perspective was used and the game was rather simple. Sundance consisted of two tictactoe boards (with borders thus making them into three by three matrixes) that where place above (where the clouds would be in a first person perspective) and below (on the ground in a first person perspective). The controls were a matrix of buttons (three row and three columns) that corresponded to the squares on the bottom tictactoe board. By pushing the button, the player caused a "hole" to appear in that square. The game consisted of "suns" (which looked more like astericks) being released from the upper tictactoe board and falling down to the bottom tictactoe board where ideally you'd open up a hole in the correct square and swallow the sun! If you didn't, then the sun would bounce back up and bounce off of the upper tictactoe board only to return again. Thus you'd have another chance to swallow the sun in a hole! However, as the game progressed, the tictactoe boards would get close, and if I remember correctly by allowing suns to bounce back and forth this would cause the tictactoe boards to move closer together. Either that our the suns (after numerous bounces) would become unstable. Whatever the case, the game would end because you didn't swallow the suns in a hole fast enough! As I said before the game was quite simple.... TECH NOTE: The Space Wars hardware consists of two masked ROMS that reside on the standard Cinematronics motherboard. Since there is room for four masked ROMS/EPROMS, two of the pads are completely empty (no sockets). Most Space Wars boards have the masked ROMS soldered in, and no wire jumpers exist on any of the boards. The sound board is rather simple. The markings on the masked ROMS are as follows (note that the markings from three different sets of Space Wars boards are below....their are only two masked ROMS per board): BOARD SET #1: SPACE WARS C1977 SPACE WARS C1977 'S' 7825 2147 and 'S' 7823 2148 BOARD SET #2: 'S' 8204 'S' 7818 C28277M and 2148 2147 SPACE WARS COPYRIGHT 1977 BOARD SET #3: 'S' 7825E<-----?E? 'S' 7819D C28277M and C28276M 2147 2148 ^---this one chip in set #3 was in a socket While no one on the net has ever seen the Sundance hardware, it is fair to say that given it's simplicity Sundance must be very similar to the Space Wars hardware. Just like Space Wars, there should be two masked, 2K ROMs and no strap options. If anyone sees Sundance or knows where the hardware might be stored, I'd be interested....you can contact me at ofoz@ihlpb.att.com or ozdemir@xenon.stanford.edu. STAR HAWK and WARRIOR --------------------- Star Hawk is a rare Vectorbeam/Cinematronics games made in 1978, that never did catch on. To date only one non-functioning Star Hawk exists among all the collectors on r.g.v.a, though the ROMS are available in the archive! The game play is similar to the Star Wars trench scene. You fly through shooting enemy, and the KLOV description says that a "pirate" ship flies through every so often and shoots your score causing you to loose 800 points! Sorta like the UFO in Space Invaders, but with offensive capabilities!! Star Hawk uses a standard joystick to control the crosshairs for aiming. Note that KLOV also lists a game called Space Hawk, but my research into the late 70's Replay magazines never lists a game called Space Hawk leading me to believe that Space Hawk in KLOV is really suppose to be Star Hawk. Warrior is a 1978 Vectorbeam/Cinematronics, 2 player game that was truly a work of art from the game designing perspective! The layout of the cabinet combined with the black light shining on the numerous cardboard cut outs makes for an incredible playfield!!! One difference from the other Cinematronics games is the mounting of the monitor, which you look down into (the neck of the tube is pointing straight down). A piece of mirror glass is also used to mirror in some of the playing field. Below is a side view of the cabinet to give a better idea of how the playing field is constructed. -------------- playfield | | cardboard | | cut out being| | reflected in | | w/ mirror--> | ---------- | PLAYERS | | STAND more | | | o HERE cardboard--> | | | | <-------------joysticks | | |--- mirror-----> | ---------- | | | |--- tube ------> | ---------- | that can | \ / | show images | \ / | through the | \ / | mirror | \ / | | || | | | | | | | -------------- The playing field consists of the mirrored in cardboard cut outs (being reflected in by mirror) and the top view of knights (or rephrased a "bird's eye" view) being displayed on the Cinematronics BW vector monitor from below. Together they show a scene of two knights fighting around two square pits! Each knight is controlled by a joystick, and proceed to fight each other by swinging long swords at each other until one of them dies and goes spinning into the pit!! The Warrior program has been put into the archive so that 2532 EPROMS could be used instead of masked ROMs. (NOTE: The jumper to the masked ROMs should not be connected to the EPROMS!) TECH NOTE: As implied in an earlier paragraph, Star Hawk used two masked ROMs and does have modifications to the board to handle these larger ROMs. To give details, the 6th pin from the 3 connectors at the top of the board on the side of the ROM closest to the center of the board has been connected with a special wire. The board set is the standard Cinematronics mother board with two empty places right next to the masked ROMs. The numbers on the Star Hawk masked ROMs are: BOARD SET #1: 93163-2325 93163-2326 3-50001 and 3-50002 GI 7910 GI 7910 Warrior also uses exactly the same hardware configuration (2 masked ROMs and the 6th pin specially wired). Below are the numbers from two sets of Warrior boards (note there are only two masked ROMs per board): BOARD SET #1: MA0804-01 MA0804-02 01950 N69 and 003N69 0090 7942 320091 BOARD SET #2: MA0804-01 MA0804-02 088056 and 088056 320090 7945 320090 7945 TAIL GUNNER and TAIL GUNNER II ------------------------------ For the time, Tail Gunner was truly one of Cinematronics greatest triumphs! The game's perspective is first person with a rescending star pattern as background. Groups of three enemy ship (displayed in 3-D like Battlezone) and you try to shoot them down by lining the sites up with them and firing. If you miss any one of them, you can use a shield to prevent them from getting by you. You have a limitted number of shield uses, and after enemy ships get by you a certain number of times the game is over. As the waves progress, the enemy ships get faster, but the game play doesn't get much more complex. Technologically, Tail Gunner does deviate the most from the standard hardware. First, Tail Gunner came out in a sit-down version, Tail Gunner II. Second, the control panel has a pots joystick used to aim the site. And third, due to the complexity of the 3-D display program a daughter board with numerous EPROMS (and banking hardware) was added, though in some case the boards used 4 masked ROMs. RIP OFF and STAR CASTLE (and WAR OF THE WORLDS) ----------------------------------------------- Rip Off, made in 1979 by Cinematronics, starts a series of VERY popular video games that used the BW vector monitor and sometimes an overlay. If you can only think of one game made by Cinematronics, it's probably Rip Off or Star Castle!! The game play is intense...probably as intense as Robotron. When the game starts, the players have an over head view of 10 to 15 fuel pods that are in the middle of the playfield and represented by triangles. The enemy appears in groups of three at a random point on the border of the screen and proceeds to try to "rip off" the fuel pods by momentarily pausing by one fuel pod to link it up and drag it off the screen. While one of the three ships in the group is attempting to "rip off" a fuel pod, the other two enemy ships will attempt to kill you and your partner (if the game is being played by two players). The truly original part to Rip Off is that the game only ends when all the fuel pods have been taken off the screen....SO you can die as often as you like!!! You just reappear at your starting point after a brief delay! The strategy of the game is dramatically changed by the infinite life approach, since you now can suicide into enemy ships if you like!! The control panel to Rip Off is composed of buttons and in the standard Asteroids layout minus the hyperspace button. There are controls for two players, so with the start buttons there was 10 buttons on the control panel! (AUTHOR'S NOTE: Rip Off is the game that started me collecting video games... mainly because of the intense gameplay and teamwork in the two player game! A few minor details that weren't mentioned above are that only 4 bullets are allowed on the screen at one time AND you can get set it up so that a single enemy ship will loop around you infinitely (so you can go to the bathroom)!) Star Castle is an equally popular game made in 1980 by Cinematronics. While the game does not involve two players on the playfield at the same time, Star Castle make up for the lack of teamwork by providing VERY difficult enemies! The game starts with a single ship in the middle surrounded by "spinning rings" that you can run into without being destroyed. The perspective is "bird's eye" as with most Cinematronics games. The ship and rings have different colors due to the color overlay. By shooting at the rings, you open up holes to shoot through and when the holes of the different rings allign themselves, you can get a straight shot to the center ship. The down side is that whenever the rings allign to give you a straight shot, the center ship takes a shot at you also!! If you do manage to kill the center ship, you do get an extra ship, so if you both manage to hit each other you'll come out ahead. The last part of the gameplay is the small ships that live on the rings and cannot shoot you. When the section of the ring (with a small ship on it) gets destroyed by your shots, these small ships are released and proceed to home in on you and destroy you! You can trick them into running into the ring, and the small ship reconnects with that ring section until you come along and destroy that section of the ring. These small ships are not numerous, but annoying enough that you must keep moving to avoid them! War of the Worlds was a conversion for Star Castle. Given the rarity of the game, it's debatible that the game was popular or even had a decent production run. Again, to date no one has seen the board set, and only old issues of Replay magazine prove the game existed. The game's control panel use the same layout as Star Castle. TECH NOTE: Starting with Rip Off, four socketed 2716's hold the game. No jumpers are needed, and for the most part these games can be considered the "standard" Cinematronics hardware. Different wiring modifications are used in later games for 2732's, but Cinematronics never really changed the mother board significantly in later games. For this reason (along with the standard connectorization described above), you can EASILY covert the games from one to the other by merely burning new EPROMS!! If you decide to change sound boards and do minor rewiring of the buttons, you can be playing the other game in its original form!! A small detail, which may affect conversions, is that the dipswitch settings for Rip Off are slightly different from most other Cinematronics boards. Rip Off has the dipswitch for diagnostics set to OFF (not surprising give the name is Rip OFF) for normal play, where as Star Castle, Armor Attack and Solar Quest all have the dipswitch for diagnostics set to ON. In most other respects, the other dipswitches for these four games have the same meaning and thus can have the same settings! ARMOR ATTACK and SOLAR QUEST ---------------------------- Armor Attack is the most complicated game Cinematronics game! Produced in 1980, Armor Attack allows two players to jointly compete against the computer. Like Warrior, the Armor Attack relies heavily on images not displayed on the vector monitor and instead uses an intricate overlay to define the playfield. Using the typical "bird's eye" view, the playfield is the center square of a town where a few enemies tanks come out from a dozen or so possible points on the perimeter of the screen. Your jeep in the middle of the square must go through the streets and around the buildings trying to destroy the tanks without being hit by the tanks. Occasionally, a helicopter that is unrestricted by the buildings comes out and tries to shoot your jeep. Tanks must be hit twice to be killed, and their movement is disabled if they are hit by one shot....the tanks can still shoot you! After all tanks are killed, another round starts and several more tanks come out. If you manage to kill five helicopter, then you are awarded an extra jeep! The controls to the games are identical to Rip Off. You have the standard Asteroids controls (minus the hyperspace), so you're looking at ten buttons and not much more! Solar Quest was the final game that Cinematronics used vectors. Solar Quest was produced in 1981 and had extra hardware on the monitor to generate 64 different intensity levels. Using the typical "bird's eye" view, the playfield looks very much like Space Wars. You have a sun in the center and an Asteroids-shaped ship, that does have the capability to launch "nukes" in addition to the typical laser. The "nuke" act like photon torpedos in Star Trek and you detonate it by pushing the button a second time. A hyperspace button is also available. When a round starts, several ships appear on the border of the screen. Unfortunately, I have never seen the game play, so I can't add more than this. Though KLOV does mention that these ships do attack you and you rescue colonists. The control panel has the standard Asteroids layout with an additional button next to the hyperspace to handle the "nukes". TECH NOTE: As with Rip Off and Star Castle, four socketed 2732's are used in the game. Jumpers are needed since you have 2732's, but for the most part these games can be considered the "standard" Cinematronics hardware. For this reason (along with the standard connectorization described above), you can EASILY covert the games from one to the other by merely burning new EPROMS!! Just like Rip Off and Star Castle, if you decide to change sound boards and do minor rewiring of the buttons, you can be playing the other game in its original form!! One notable exception beyond the more complicated sound boards is the extra daughter board on Solar Quest's monitor that produces 64 different vector intensities. To use the extra daughter board, a wire on the side of the mother board with all the connectors needs to be moved from "NORM" to "VAR" where VAR stands for variable intensity. The wire is about a quarter inch long, and shouldn't be moved to VAR if you are using the standard Cinematronics monitor without the daughter board! MISCELLANEOUS ------------- Speed Freak is a Vectorbeam game made in 1977, and certainly beyond its time.Basically a vector Night Driver with more stuff, the road would curved more than once on the screen producing S curves that had to be navigated! Light poles, stick figures, random stuff the side of the road, and occasionally oncoming traffic made the gameplay rather difficult. Controls were a steering wheel, 4-speed shifter, and accelerator (and maybe brake). To date no one has seen the board set....all we have is a vague collective memory of the complete game. Boxing Bugs is color vector made in 1982 by Cinematronics. This was one of the few color vector games produced by Cinematronics, and only one exists among all the owners in VAPS. Unfortunately, the game doesn't work and as you might imagine parts for it are next to impossible to find! Controls are a knob (Feels like a Clarostat or pot, not a whirligig) and three buttons, one helpfully labelled "PANIC". It has what looks like part of the regular BW monitor circuitry on a separate board to drive the Wells color vector monitor (used in Tempest and other Atari color vector games). Cosmic Chasm was the other color vector. It was originally written for the Vectrex. It had a cool cabinet with viewports larger than but reminiscent of Battlezone. Controls were a rotary knob and several buttons. I've seen pictures but not an actual game. Marquee was 3-sided like Dragon's Lair.