Star Castle Arcade Machine
Our Cocktail Table Arcade Machine™ provides AUTHENTIC sound, graphics and action transporting you back in time, just like you remember it from your local arcade. This is one of our most popular arcade machines for sale since it has the ability to play all your favorite arcade games on one machine. Black and white 1 download. Our cabinets are compatible (via a Jamma PCB. The Star Castle original Sylvania CRT was 19VARP4. The perfect replacement is M47EAA19WS. The Atari GO5-802 original CRT was also 19VARP4 and the recommended replacement was M47EAA7WS. The new replacement for the M47EAA7WS is the M47EAA19WS, the same as for Star Castle. They are all the same.
Star Castle Arcade Machine Reviews
Software and .ISO image of the complete Star Castle 2600 Project by D. Scott Williamson.
From http://starcastle2600.blogspot.com/p/star-castle-2600-story.html:
THE CHALLENGE
In 1981 a young Howard Scott Warshaw, left his first programming job at HP for a more interesting job at Atari. His first assignment was to create an Atari 2600 conversion of the vector coin op game Star Castle. In this game, you pilot a ship around the screen trying to defeat the Star Castle by shooting the Energy Cannon, but first you must blow holes its rotating shields while avoiding the ever pursuing Space Mines and beware, the Energy Cannon will blast back through openings in the shields! After evaluating the arcade game and the console hardware he came to the conclusion 'that a decent version couldn’t be done', and 'that this conversion would suck on the VCS system'. So he reorganized the core game-play elements into a new game designed specifically for the 2600. That game became Yars' Revenge, the most successful original Atari game ever for the Atari 2600.
I love video game history, and I love this story in particular, but when I read about it in MIT Press's excellent historical Atari 2600 book 'Racing the Beam' in 2008 something stuck with me. I thought surely Star Castle could be done, there must be some way, so I set out to try.
Every engineer, no matter the discipline, is drawn to some particular project. This project becomes the nagging pull that draws an engineer ever-onward. For me, that project was Star Castle. I'm an Atari fanatic; I always have been. I'm also a Star Castle fan. I used to pump quarters into that machine at the local bowling alley every day after school. It's no surprise that I ended up becoming a video game developer. My first job in the game industry was also at Atari where I worked on the 2600, though six years after Yars' Revenge was made.
THE WORK
I dug deep into my crawl space and excavated the documentation and samples I had from when I worked for Atari and cobbled together a 2600 development environment.
The Atari 2600 only has 128 bytes of RAM (variables start at the bottom, the stack comes down from the top, and you pray they never meet), and you have to build the display line by line using a handful of hardware registers while the electron beam is scanning the TV screen. You have to use a lot of 'tricks' to get more graphics and colors on the screen and you still need to handle input, sound, and make a playable game, all in a little less than 8192 (8K) bytes of ROM in my case. To be fair, Yars' Revenge used a 4096 (4K) byte cartridge which is a marvelous feat, but another similar game, Asteroids was released on an 8K cartridge the same year. My goal was to make a Star Castle game that could have been made in 1981 which meant I had to stay within 8K.
I started with a lot of ego and confidence that was soon dashed, the first couple of attempts were miserable humbling failures. It quickly became clear that if possible it was going to be a terrific challenge. I hit timing and space limitations one after another until, several months later, I was able to draw rotating shields, after that, the enemy cannon, then the space mines, and the players ship, the players bullets, and the cannons dreaded energy blast, and then AI, collision, sound.. and by early 2010 I had done it. I had created a faithful reproduction of the game experience on the Atari 2600 in 8K.
I was so proud, I showed the game at the Video Game Summit, a local video game conference where it was received with surprising enthusiasm so I kept working on the project. By 2011 I had made improvements to the AI, collision, level progression, and designed my own cartridge. It's all original from the circuit board to the programmable logic chip to the lights inside the cartridge that actually flash with the gameplay - something I NEVER would have expected to find in an Atari cartridge as a kid.
THE RESULT
This is one of the coolest things I have ever done and I've been making video games for 25 years. It's a technical accomplishment and it's really really fun! It took nearly three years of software, electronic, and hardware engineering to get this project this far. So, you may be wondering why anyone would bother to make a version of a 30 year old vector arcade game on an arcane 33 year old platform? I was inspired by one of the greatest and most influential game programmers of all time to make something that he said was impossible. I don't consider this a game development project, rather an alternative history art piece*, a demonstration that it could indeed be done.
* I have nothing but the greatest respect and admiration for all of Howard Scott Warshaw's work. I in no way mean to discredit or demean his magnificent ground breaking accomplishments in Yars' Revenge or any of his other titles. Also, if you really want a great insider view into the early days at Atari, you need to check out his excellent candid documentary DVD Once Upon Atari.
From http://starcastle2600.blogspot.com/p/star-castle-2600-story.html:
THE CHALLENGE
In 1981 a young Howard Scott Warshaw, left his first programming job at HP for a more interesting job at Atari. His first assignment was to create an Atari 2600 conversion of the vector coin op game Star Castle. In this game, you pilot a ship around the screen trying to defeat the Star Castle by shooting the Energy Cannon, but first you must blow holes its rotating shields while avoiding the ever pursuing Space Mines and beware, the Energy Cannon will blast back through openings in the shields! After evaluating the arcade game and the console hardware he came to the conclusion 'that a decent version couldn’t be done', and 'that this conversion would suck on the VCS system'. So he reorganized the core game-play elements into a new game designed specifically for the 2600. That game became Yars' Revenge, the most successful original Atari game ever for the Atari 2600.
I love video game history, and I love this story in particular, but when I read about it in MIT Press's excellent historical Atari 2600 book 'Racing the Beam' in 2008 something stuck with me. I thought surely Star Castle could be done, there must be some way, so I set out to try.
Every engineer, no matter the discipline, is drawn to some particular project. This project becomes the nagging pull that draws an engineer ever-onward. For me, that project was Star Castle. I'm an Atari fanatic; I always have been. I'm also a Star Castle fan. I used to pump quarters into that machine at the local bowling alley every day after school. It's no surprise that I ended up becoming a video game developer. My first job in the game industry was also at Atari where I worked on the 2600, though six years after Yars' Revenge was made.
THE WORK
I dug deep into my crawl space and excavated the documentation and samples I had from when I worked for Atari and cobbled together a 2600 development environment.
The Atari 2600 only has 128 bytes of RAM (variables start at the bottom, the stack comes down from the top, and you pray they never meet), and you have to build the display line by line using a handful of hardware registers while the electron beam is scanning the TV screen. You have to use a lot of 'tricks' to get more graphics and colors on the screen and you still need to handle input, sound, and make a playable game, all in a little less than 8192 (8K) bytes of ROM in my case. To be fair, Yars' Revenge used a 4096 (4K) byte cartridge which is a marvelous feat, but another similar game, Asteroids was released on an 8K cartridge the same year. My goal was to make a Star Castle game that could have been made in 1981 which meant I had to stay within 8K.
I started with a lot of ego and confidence that was soon dashed, the first couple of attempts were miserable humbling failures. It quickly became clear that if possible it was going to be a terrific challenge. I hit timing and space limitations one after another until, several months later, I was able to draw rotating shields, after that, the enemy cannon, then the space mines, and the players ship, the players bullets, and the cannons dreaded energy blast, and then AI, collision, sound.. and by early 2010 I had done it. I had created a faithful reproduction of the game experience on the Atari 2600 in 8K.
I was so proud, I showed the game at the Video Game Summit, a local video game conference where it was received with surprising enthusiasm so I kept working on the project. By 2011 I had made improvements to the AI, collision, level progression, and designed my own cartridge. It's all original from the circuit board to the programmable logic chip to the lights inside the cartridge that actually flash with the gameplay - something I NEVER would have expected to find in an Atari cartridge as a kid.
THE RESULT
This is one of the coolest things I have ever done and I've been making video games for 25 years. It's a technical accomplishment and it's really really fun! It took nearly three years of software, electronic, and hardware engineering to get this project this far. So, you may be wondering why anyone would bother to make a version of a 30 year old vector arcade game on an arcane 33 year old platform? I was inspired by one of the greatest and most influential game programmers of all time to make something that he said was impossible. I don't consider this a game development project, rather an alternative history art piece*, a demonstration that it could indeed be done.
* I have nothing but the greatest respect and admiration for all of Howard Scott Warshaw's work. I in no way mean to discredit or demean his magnificent ground breaking accomplishments in Yars' Revenge or any of his other titles. Also, if you really want a great insider view into the early days at Atari, you need to check out his excellent candid documentary DVD Once Upon Atari.