Objective Designs Star Wars

[cavaughan]

Myself and others are really hoping we could find Objective Designs Star Wars program, which was released for the Altair back in 1978 or thereabouts. If anyone knows where we could find this, it would be a great addition to the history of computer gaming.
Thanks!

Curtis

 

[cavaughan]

In case anyone's interested there are references to this demo.
Here:

Star Wars for Intel 8080 (1978) - MobyGames

Star Wars is an adaptation of the final battle of the titular film. The player must aid the rebel alliance to destroy the Death Star by penetrating its trench. Ships move in three dimensions and are shown in real-time moving past the player. Ships can move around, fire and use their deflector...

www.mobygames.com

and here in the comments:

Preliminary Report - Was The Devil's Dungeon the First Commercial CPRG and What Was the First Commercial Microcomputer Game?

While arcade games are the focus of my research, I occasionally delve into computer game history. While I certainly played my share of arcad...

allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com

 

[plus10db]

I've generated the ASM source for this, see attached ZIP. It is modified to use the Chromemco Analog I/O board instead of the on-board analog joystick interface. Those mods are @ L463C

 

[plus10db]

I've generated the ASM source for this, see attached ZIP. It is modified to use the Chromemco Analog I/O board instead of the on-board analog joystick interface. Those mods are @ L463C

I've found some errors in the disassembly so I know this source is a little off. e.g. the logon screen text for Star Wars, some pieces of tie and x-wing fighters.

 

[plus10db]

Found and fixed the 'bug' added a lot of comments along the way.

 

[plus10db]

This may be the final post of this code.
I re-built it with ZASM.
There are more comments, and I fixed a bug in the original FONT.

 

[plus10db]

Bad News.

The code I've posted is missing data needed for the game to play properly.

When I first created it back in the 1980's I ran it for a short time and observed the screens and general behavior were correct.

However, when the game runs long enough it fails. I suspect when it to encounters Darth Vader or some elements of the Death Star.

It turns out, much of the data needed to properly image and interact with these things resided below the execution point of the program and was not included in the scope of the disassembly.

Mea Culpa.

 

[plus10db]

The attached ZIP is the Star Wars image rolled into an Arduino project that runs on the RP2040 Feather DVI with the Adafruit 800x480 HDMI Backpack.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

... I was pretty confused by the screenshots in the MobyGames article, because the graphics looked to be far too high resolution to be a Chromeco Dazzler, but reading the source code solved that mystery.

It turns out, much of the data needed to properly image and interact with these things resided below the execution point of the program and was not included in the scope of the disassembly.

Mea Culpa.

Is the version included in the RP2040 project complete, or is it also missing the full game data?

 

[plus10db]

The RP2040 Arduino code uses the ASM image I created years ago that is missing literally half the data needed for the game to play properly.
I thought the VDM-PCG solution would be of interest in any case and the partial game code a good demonstration of how it works.
The VDM emulation in particular is not complete. The scrolling and blanking logic is not emulated. The game doesn't use those features and most of the CP/M code that used the VDM didn't either.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

The VDM emulation in particular is not complete. The scrolling and blanking logic is not emulated. The game doesn't use those features and most of the CP/M code that used the VDM didn't either.

That doesn't surprise me, given the manual for the PCG says it also works with the Solid State Music and Polymorphic video cards that are broadly similar to the VDM (1K of VRAM arranged into 64x16 characters) but lack those VDM specific features. (They're just simple memory arrays, similar to the TRS-80.) By ignoring those features the same game should run on all of them.

 

[plus10db]

I hope (against hope) that somewhere in the world there is a complete copy of the game and it makes its way into our hands.