"Space Wars" Questions/Thoughts

Klankster

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One game I'd love to get my hands on is one of the old "Space Wars" machines from Cinematronics. I loved it in the arcade back in the day. Just thinking about it a bit, the first thing that came to mind is, just how hard would one of these be to restore, if I could get one? It's a B&W vector game, and owning a couple of Atari color vector games, I know how touchy those color vector displays are. Maybe someone who is familiar with the "Space Wars" hardware can comment on just how hard they are to keep running. Are they as bad as the color vectors? Worse? Any real gotchas?

But here is a kind of wild thought -- The controls on my "Space Duel" upright would be perfect for a version of "Space Wars", since they accommodate two players with rotate left, right, thrust, fire and shields(hyperspace?) buttons. I've written a lot of 6502 code over the years (and recently have been working on a personal project revisiting some old 6502 assembly-language video games I wrote in the early 1980s, using a modern version of the old MAC/65 macro assembler); I think it would be a blast to write up code for a new set of ROMs in a Space Duel cabinet to emulate the old "Space Wars" play, but in color.

This would, of course, require a thorough understanding of the hardware registers of the Space Duel motherboard, but should be doable given enough information. The fact that the control panel would work for both games without modification is a really attractive thing.

Does anyone know if someone has been able to hack one of these vector games and substitute custom code and get it to display what they want? I'd sure love to get the information necessary to do so, because creating a version of Space Wars using this awesome hardware would be a lot of fun. And I'd share it when done! :)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
 
Well, after writing this I started doing some more research and found out that a guy named Jeff Hendricks actually did just this back in 1999 - created a version of Space Wars that runs on Space Duel hardware! I have the ROM images and might try burning a set to try out on my spare Space Duel PCB.

I tried it on my Android phone MAME app and it appears to run.

Does anyone have contact information for Jeff? I'd love to get in touch with him, if possible.
 
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