STAR WARS
HIDDEN MESSAGE: After fighting the TIE fighters, when you are flying towards the Death Star, the yellow lines on the Death Star spell out either "MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU" (odd-numbered waves) or peoples' names (even numbered waves, photos #1 and #2). They also appear after hitting the exhaust port. The names are:
Norm AVELLAR
Programmer
Earl VICKERS Audio Engineer
Erik DURFEY Technician
Mike HALLY Designer
Greg RIVERA programmer
Jed MARGOLIN Engineer/Programmer
HIDDEN MESSAGE: The names JANE, JED, and JOE (for Jane Rogers, Jed Margolin, and Joseph Dieu) can be found on the bottom of the AR3 board (picture #3).
Started as a game called Warp Speed, by Ed Rotberg, who also designed the controller (it was first used for Army Battlezone). It was originally to be a split-screen, head-to-head game.
In the trench you can "use the force" and get bonus points by not shooting anything except the exhaust port (the text "USE THE FORCE" will be at the top of the screen until you shoot). You get 5k for the first wave, 10k for the second and 100k on every level from 3 up! The bonus is actually awarded just before you have to shoot the exhaust port, so it's possible to take out some of the gun turrets at the end, too.
After wave 12, the red tanks on the tower stage stop firing.
The score counter rolls at 99,999,999. The wave counter will freeze at 99.
The control yoke for Star Wars was a downsized version of the control from Army BattleZone (minus the palm switches), which came directly from an actual Bradly Fighting Vehicle (it was the Gunner's control). {Jed Margolin}
An FAQ for playing strategies can be found HERE.
BUG: There's a bug in the code that doesn't correctly update the displayed shield count during the adding of the bonus after each completed level. On rare occasions you can get 255 shields!
BUG: In the tower scene, you can shoot fireballs that are hidden behind the towers.
BUG: In the trench scene, you can shoot fireballs through the catwalks.
BUG: You might have noticed that the centering of the Star Wars control yoke is funny at times. Star Wars originally used a POKEY to read the pots. At that time, people either made their own A/D converter with a counter, a comparator, and a ramp, or they used POKEY. The POKEY was a full custom IC designed for the Atari 800/400 to read pots and keys, which gave it its name, POts and KEYs. There was some room left over so they put in some crude square wave sound generators as well as a UART. Unfortunately, POKEY does a really awful job of reading pots; it is guaranteed to produce occasional wrong values. The software to deal with it is pretty nasty. After Greg Rivera brought this to my attention, I took the daring step of actually putting in a real A/D (Gasp!), the ADC-0809. Unfortunately, many people continued to use the original code to treat the A/D values as though they had come from a POKEY. That is why the Controller in Star Wars keeps getting re-centered, usually badly. {Jed Margolin}
On the Star Wars schematics (sheet 16A) with the POKEY at 2D, the signal "DRCV" is connected through R8 to SID on pin 24 and the signal "DXMT" is connected through R9 to SOD on pin 28. The spots for R8 and R9 are present on the board, but not populated. They connect to the unused 'P3' edge connector as shown on sheet 16B (in the Output and Summing box) but they do not, in fact, connect back to the POKEY. This is likely a vestige of when the game designers were thinking about allowing two machines to be linked together. From Jed Margolin: In Star Wars I brought the Pokey's Serial I/O Ports out to the edge connector, hoping to get people interested in linking games. It didn't happen." There's also a thrust input still on the schematics that was not implemented in the game.
RUMOR: If you shoot Darth Vader more than 30 times, you get extra shields. Don Hodges proved conclusively that this is not possible (LINK).
RUMOR: There are unused audio clips in either Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back.
