Jed Margolin - Atari Videos
When a project was over Atari had no use for the prototypes. We couldn’t sell them to Operators. Sometimes we would keep one to start a new project with. Mostly, they were just taking up space.
The Company gave the team members first dibs on them. The games were sometimes free, sometimes they cost a small amount of money that went into the Donut Fund.
I had three of the games that I worked on: Star Wars, TomCat, and Race Drivin’. A few years ago I made videos of them. That’s me playing them.
Star Wars (1983) - There were several pre-production prototypes made for a Distributors Show. Afterwards, I got one of them. Star Wars is an XY (Vector) game so the raster video made of it loses a great deal of quality.
TomCat (1984) - There was only one TomCat ever made. It never had its own cabinet, it uses a Star Wars cabinet. To test the Game Link I had all the parts for the second TomCat spread out on a workbench. Again, this is a raster video of an XY game.
tc1.wmv - Computer Assisted Mode
tc2.wmv - Full Manual Control (You can fly upside down.)
tc3.wmv - Diagnostics Mode
Race Drivin’ (1990) - This is a prototype made from a Hard Drivin’ prototype. We intended to have the coin door in an external pod attached outside the cabinet so you would have room for your left leg inside the cabinet. The Operators demanded that the coin door be inside. So we did that for production games. If you play a production model you will not have much room for your left leg.
When I tried pointing the camera at the monitor inside the game there wasn’t enough room to get a good picture and play the game at the same time. To make these videos I used the VGA input on an old Vizio TV with a little work to make Race Drivin’s video and sync compatible with VGA. Amazingly, the TV was able to sync to Race Drivin’s non-standard sync. I have since made three PC Boards. One is straight to VGA. One has a circuit for horizontal centering. The third does both horizontal and vertical centering.
rd1990_track1.wmv Original Hard Drivin’ Stunt Track. There are cows in the Hard Drivin’ Universe. Don’t hit them. Or the train either.
rd1990_track2.wmv Autocross
rd1990_track3.wmv Super Stunt Track
rd1990_track1_house.wmv Visit the House
When BattleZone (1980) came out I was living in a small apartment so I didn’t take one.
Joe’s Classic Video Game has done a great job showing off the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdfKy4c7yuc
(He could use a little more practice playing the game.)
Kevin Butler wrote an excellent article about BattleZone including many technical details that I have not seen anywhere else. He did this by talking to Ed Rothberg and Mike Albaugh (and me).
It is in Edition 7 Page 25 of Old School Gamer Magazine at www.oldschoolgamermagazine.com. You might have to hit Refresh several times to bring up the home page but it is worth it. It is an excellent magazine.
After BattleZone came out we were approached by a group of Army colonels who asked us if we would convert it into a trainer to teach the gunners in the new Infantry Fighting Vehicle (later renamed the Bradley Fighting Vehicle) how to properly fire TOW missiles. It was originally called Army BattleZone and then became the Bradley Trainer. This is a good article about it: https://arcadeblogger.com/2016/10/28/bradley-trainer-ataris-top-secret-military-project/
And, amazingly, I found a video of the Bradley Trainer (Army BattleZone.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOhpjf9QUTE
The triangle in the lower center screen is an optical rangefinder.
The Gunners were supposed to use it instead of firing off a few shots to determine the range to the target, which gives away your position.
The Gunners didn’t like the optical rangefinder so it was replaced with a laser rangefinder (in the actual Bradley).
Here is a video of Steel Talons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoyL2sCf8Mw
This must have been made from the actual arcade game (not a port).
1. There are roll bars in the video are because the game did not use NTSC sync.
2. It shows the two side-by-side monitors in the game.
In December 2018 I sold the three games (Star Wars, TomCat, and Race Drivin’) to the
Strong Museum of Play in
I also gave them 22 boxes of Atari documents, schematics, PC Boards, and game manuals.
As a bonus, I am posting the following:
1. When the Army Colonels approached us to do the project that became Army BattleZone (the Bradley Trainer) they gave us these documents:
Video Arcade Technology - Potential For Training
2. I came across the ROMs for TomCat.
3. I came across some software for TomCat. Don’t ask me to explain it.
4. And I came across files for various GALs. I think they are for Hard Drivin’/Race Drivin’. I don’t know exactly what they are for. GALs use the same technology as EPROMs. The memory cells are probably larger than the ones used in EPROMs but eventually they will leak away too. If you read a GAL from the game the part will read that it is blank. That is because the security bit is set. That is what the security bit is for. You can get decent programmers today that are really cheap. They do all sorts of parts including EPROMs and GALs. If someone wants to try the files and verify that they work in a game (and where they work) I will post the results here.
Jed out.
.end