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CX-5219. Prototype. North America NTSC. 1 player or 2 players alternating.
Stargate was renamed "Defender II" during 1984 due to intellectual property crap. Some enemies, larger cargo, short period of invincibility. and other abilities and were added in this sequel. But, Stargates were the main addition, allowing one to warp from one part of the screen to another or even to a new level under certain conditions. Steve Baker took the 'arcade' part of 'Personal Arcade Machine' very seriously; he owned a Stargate coin-op he kept at home. This game was recreated so accurately, it is often mistaken for a port of the arcade version. But, no code or data was used from the arcade version. Two prototypes dated 1983-11-21 and 1984-01-05 have been located. The second of these is nearly ready for release and manages to use all the 5200 processors in parallel (an extremely rare occurrence in Atari 8-bit machines.) This second version sufferers from slowdown but a later prototype was created without slowdown and ready was for production. Steve Baker created the 3rd prototype but has currently misplaced it. The technically minded may notice that this game seems to be hi-res and full color and has a screen filled with sprites. The hi-res mode is limited to 3 colors, full color can only be obtained using bitmaps, sprites are neither hi-res nor full color. So how is this game possible? It uses all three techniques at once. A little used feature of the Atari 5200 (and Atari 8-bit computers) is it's ability to have a graphics mode exist on only part of the screen, with other parts of the screen using other modes. The different graphic modes are shuffled around the screen as needed to accomplish the end look.

Zerothis - 2007-09-19 02:26:11