How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by ggambetta on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @11:16AM (#18176595)

> And then for the rest of the year spend all my after-school time trying to build rather poor impressions of those arcade games on my home computer, not unlike a cargo-cult worshipper on a post-WWII pacific island trying to build a US military radio station from wooden sticks.

Hahaha, this matches my own experience exactly :) Playing the likes of Dragon Ninja / Bad Dudes and then trying to reproduce them on the Spectrum. The few arcade games that did have Spectrum versions were disappointing - thinking of Green Beret for example.

Best memory might be finding a POKE for infinite lives in Commando, playing it for 3 days straight until level 70-something (the levels just looped every 5 or 10 stages, I think?), and ending up with a burned CRT. I'll never know whether the infinite lives POKE also made the game loop, or the developers never thought of including an ending in the Spectrum port.

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by jandrese on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @12:48PM (#18177534)

It was a little rare to have an "end" to the games in those days. Generally there wasn't much space for something so extravagant. More often you would overflow a value somewhere and semi-crash the game.

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by scarface74 on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @04:58PM (#18179760)

Unless you finally got to the end of Karateka and you walked to the princess....

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by lerno on Sunday October 14, 2018 @06:32PM (#18215904)

Commando on the C64 didn’t have an ending. It just continued. I know since once you got good enough you could complete the stages effortlessly. My longest play was a couple of hours straight - enough to restart the highscore counter from zero again at least once. We stopped playing not due to running out of lives, but deciding to end playing.

Other games would get faster and faster, eventuallt ending up impossibly difficult.

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by callmekit on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @01:04PM (#18177707)

What's wrong with the Spectrum's Green Beret? And R-Type Spectrum conversion was very good.

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by ggambetta on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @06:07PM (#18180234)

Nothing wrong with it, I spent endless hours playing it. But I saw the arcade version only afterwards, and I went "oooooh, colours!"

The "native" Spectrum games were better IMO. Sir Fred comes to mind. Pentagram, Gunfright, Knight's Lore, Abu Simbel Profanation. These worked with the limitations of the hardware (most notably the colour clash), not against it.

I mean, there even was a Spectrum version of Operation Wolf, and it was kind of atrocious (but still unbelievable that they made it work on such modest hardware!)

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by callmekit on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @12:14AM (#18181910)

Funny you mentioned Operation Wolf, this is a game I really like and still play in the emulator from time to time.

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by ggambetta on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @10:48AM (#18185376)

Definitely not the same without the light gun :(

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by jacobush on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @01:35PM (#18178036)

It didn't magically make the Spectrum have more colors or better sound, like the arcade game had.

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Re:How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8... by pjmlp on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @04:32PM (#18179592)

Maybe but I did "waste" countless hours with it.

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