MAME ROW #4: 4-D Warriors

meleu

Info for 411
Game Name: Depthcharge
Company: Gremlin
Year: 1977
ROM file name: depthch.zip
BIOS: -

Wow! What an old game!

Please vote: http://www.strawpoll.me/11449932

There was one vote for 4-D Warriors in the previous poll. Hey you that voted, please, do it again!

meleu

My feeling is that American Speedway should not even be on the list, due to it's need for analog controls. I had proposed a rule about disqualifying such games, but I guess it didn't get much interest.

Hey man, I agree with you and I'm really interested on do the things this way. But the compatibility list have no info about this kind of issue. I would filter this if it had this information there.

Usually I pick the numbers and write these MAME ROW posts when I'm away from my RetroPie, so I can't test all the games before posting.

dankcushions

again there's literally no issue with american speedway. if you have an ipac setup it should already work. if you don't, you need to rebind the left/right keys with the mame TAB menu. it takes 10 seconds...

mediamogul

@dankcushions said in MAME ROW #4:

very few MAME games have an actual analog requirement

They're in the minority for sure, but I wouldn't say "very few".

dankcushions

@mediamogul said in MAME ROW #4:

@dankcushions said in MAME ROW #4:

very few MAME games have an actual analog requirement

They're in the minority for sure, but I wouldn't say "very few".

i mean actually require an analog setup to be playable. most have workable translations to the joystick, etc, programmed into mame. you can configure the sensitivity of this through the TAB menu.

i've worked on this stuff quite a lot ;)

mediamogul

@dankcushions said in MAME ROW #4:

i mean actually require an analog setup to be playable. most have workable translations to the joystick

Ah, I gotchya. You're also right about 'American Speedway' being perfectly playable. I've been playing it for quite a while before today using digital controls. After you added mouse support, I've even been able to play it with full analog control from the joystick. It's a great game.

meleu

Hey guys, I'm sorry for the mess. I'm at work since I started this topic and I'm not able to make any tests here.

I decided to delete American Speedway as early as possible to avoid having to restart the poll and committing some injustice with the votes already made.

If you agree I'll pick only 2 numbers for the next week and include American Speedway.

mediamogul

@meleu said in MAME ROW #4:

Hey guys, I'm sorry for the mess.

Like the man says, there's no problems, only solutions.

Depthcharge:

GtBFilms

Space Duel was a minor pain to get running, the 'select' key is mapped to '2' which isn't a mapped key on my cab. I used advmame1. 4 and in the settings (TAB) remapped the select key for just this game only and it now works fine.

Just a suggestion if anyone else has a similar issue.

meleu

@mediamogul I played Depthcharge. I liked it as a history class, but I almost slept while playing... :)

GtBFilms

@meleu

Yeah, you certainly got good value for your inserted coin back in those days!

I played it until my first ship sank. As you say, interesting, but not exactly riveting!

4-D Warriors was interesting, but as a big Asteroids fan, I had to vote for Space Duel, yeah, I guess Atari were milking the franchise a bit by 1982 (that's when the International Arcade Museum reckons it was released - http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9647)

Edit: Actually no, you are correct, they are wrong - that MCMLXXX on the title screen proves it was 1980, not 1982!

I appreciate their attempts to add a bit more variety with the 2 simultaneous player game, and that odd '1 player with 2 tethered space ships' concept, but I still prefer the simple 1 player, 1 ship option.

Anyway, it gets my vote!

obsidianspider

I realize that Depthcharge is from 1977, but did it have sound? Mine doesn't seem to have any.

meleu

@obsidianspider said in MAME ROW #4:

I realize that Depthcharge is from 1977, but did it have sound? Mine doesn't seem to have any.

Same here. I think it doesn't have sound.

meleu

"4-D Warriors" won

It doesn't have "continue". So it's a good game to post hi-scores. :-)

dankcushions

@obsidianspider said in MAME ROW #4:

I realize that Depthcharge is from 1977, but did it have sound? Mine doesn't seem to have any.

it uses samples

obsidianspider

@dankcushions said in MAME ROW #4: 4-D Warriors:

@obsidianspider said in MAME ROW #4:

I realize that Depthcharge is from 1977, but did it have sound? Mine doesn't seem to have any.

it uses samples

Awesome! That helped a lot. I never would have thought of something like that.

I have to say, that while I love discovering these "new" games, learning more about how MAME works is probably my favorite part of this series.

dankcushions

no problem :) the sounds are actually kinda cool! wonder how they achieved those on 1970s hardware...

obsidianspider

This game is kicking my butt!

obsidianspider

Whew, finally got to six digits.

You get an extra life at 30,000 and 100,000 points. I still don't know how to get past "AREA.1"

meleu

@obsidianspider Wow! nice score man!!!

There's a kind of boss that keeps changing the plane. You have to press up until the top of the "wall" to go after it. See

.

I could get to the AREA.4, but to be honest I didn't notice when I passed from one to another :P