Happy Easter !
Namco’s Rally-X from 1980 was an impressive arcade game for technical reasons: it uses smooth scrolling in a subset of the screen complete with clipping of all objects – but was too hard and frustrating to play. This luckily was fixed a year later by Namco with a ‘New’ Rally-X romset. This game is obviously inspired by the arcade game Head-On, only for Rally-X the Pac-Man-like gobbling down of dots is dialed down game-wise and here enemy cars are hunting you in a labyrinth a lot larger than the visible screen. Vectrex-wise it was an interesting case for a larger maze and how well this would work at all… and it looks better than expected (by stabilizing every darned single line of the maze individually).
Namco’s Bosconian from 1981 now is an interesting game, conceptually the hardware uses a Galaga CPU setup (improved by using a second security chip and speech output) and the video output from Rally-X. So it has quite a bit of CPU performance plus a smoothly scrolling, tile-based video hardware which Namco used to implement quite an elaborate shooter for the time: you need to destroy up to eight large enemy bases per stage which consist of a central reactor surrounded by six cannons. The Midway licensed romset here is quite a bit harder so I recommend playing the original Namco version first to get to know the game. Anyways, really nice shooter, this.
With this update the last internal rearrangement to simplify the setup is now implemented: the localization text files from now on are all compiled into the applications and only loaded as an expert option, if enabled. So almost noone needs these texts anymore separately under System/Text/.
v2.62
- added: Bosconian and Bosconian (Midway)
- Pooyan: increased music volume
- Asteroids DX: easy/hard skill dip switch behavior now in-line with Atari revision doc.
(and not w/ current MAME anymore)
v2.61
- added: Rally-X and New Rally-X
- reset vf.lib versioning system:
apps for previous systems now only called 'incompatible version'
but newer ones will be again classified as too new/too old
- atan2_fast() function for analog joy. conversion for asteroids
v2.60
- rocksdx store/load unmangled from rns
- fix: elusive crash/exit behaviour exposed by wwvi (started in v2.50)
- added rev.2 localization text file format
- all localization texts are now automatically compiled into the binaries using them
- loading localization texts from /System/Text now 'general' expert option, default off
- changed 192k/vectorblade bus timing (some vf/vectrex combo. showed problems w/ v2.59)