[vox] [OT] LED arcade game resembling "Braid" screensaver

[Bill Kendrick]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 03:35:18PM -0400, David Hummel wrote:
> Very OT (my apologies), but I know there are some gamers on the list.
> 
> I'm trying to remember the name of an arcade game that was popular in
> the early to mid 80's.  You are in a small ship and the goal was to
> shoot at and penetrate a multi-layered (round, I think) energy shield in
> the middle of the screen, while dodging other hostile ships and
> projectiles.  Everything was LED-like (ala Star Wars and Asteroids).

I'm _pretty_ sure what you've described is "Star Castle."

It was actually vector-based, not LCD.  (As opposed to a normal CRT
which displayed rasterized images using pixels, like a TV screen.  Other
famous vector arcade games included BattleZone, Asteroids, Lunar Lander,
and the original Star Wars arcade game.)


> The X screensaver called "Braid" reminds me of the energy shield thingy.

(Digging up a screenshot via images.google.com...)  Hey, so it does!


> Does anyone remember the name of this game?

"Star Castle" by Cinematronics.  There's an X-Window clone that's
available as Open Source called "XSC".  I ported it from X to SDL for
play on the Zaurus PDA, and added sound effects.  With slight
tweaking, it should run nicely on a standard desktop system (Linux,
Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, etc.).

XSC can be found here:
  http://www.panix.com/~mbh/projects.html

My port to SDL, ZSC, is here:
  http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/lab/zsc/

And the KLOV (Killer List Of Videogames) entry for the original "Star Castle"
arcade game can be found here:
  http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9754


As an interesting note, the vectors were actually white-on-black, but
a transparent colored overlay gave the impression of colored rings.
(Similar to the original Space Invaders arcade game.)

Enjoy

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