Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game (opens in new tab)

Really nice work! From skimming it, it seems really well written. I'm looking forward to reading through the whole thing. I like how you contextualized how the different versions of the game were written and included primary source documents. The visual diagrams are also neat and help your explanations. If you're interested in even more Tempest source code, the code for the MS-DOS version of Tempest 2000 is publicly available here. https://archive.org/details/tempest-2000-dos-source-code I haven't tried building it myself, but from skimming through the files it seems to be intended for Borland Turbo Assembler in ideal mode.

If you’re looking to play an official Tempest 2000 where some money (presumably) makes its way to Jeff Minter, then Digital Eclipse have published an “interactive documentary” bundle of his games and the surrounding history, available on pretty much every current platform: https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/llamasoft

The vector graphics are why I always seek this game out first in any arcade.

I bought and maintain 2 Atari Jaguars just to play Tempest 2K, which is my all time favorite game. And also have a number of Tempest 2K emulators.

Had the privilege of meeting Jeff "Yak" Minter in Singapore, and also attended his presentation. Another legendary game developer, in the same league as David Theurer

This is fantastic, thank you for doing this. I hadn't thought of the poor Jaguar in ages! Heh.

Found a tiny typo, this sentence from quite early (page 17):

Notice how apparently wasteful this file format is: some of the triplets contain only byte.

I think the word "one" is missing before the final "byte".

This doc is great, I love this game. So much so that I built a Tempest-insipred audio visualizer [0] for the EYESY platform as one of my first projects on the platform.

[0] https://signalfunctionset.com/projects/tempestuous/

That's so cool. I remember loving this game in the arcade but then being annoyed when I had to also buy a paddle wheel to play it on my 2600, which was then useful for exactly 0 other games.

I just pulled my 1981 Tempest out of storage yesterday. Hope it still works!

These are great. Anyone who can interpret Minter deserves our support and praise.

(Would love one about Space Giraffe / NEON but I appreciate they're on much more complex systems than Tempest and Psychedelia.)

- does anyone know of a book that breaks down how the quake game or counter strike works?

Great work and detail. It gets quite technical at times; simplifying a bit would make it more accessible.

Worked with Dave Theurer some years ago, nice guy.

gold mine