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Sinistar
''Sinistar'' is a 1983 multidirectional shooter arcade game developed and manufactured by Williams Electronics. It was created by Sam Dicker, Jack Haeger, Noah Falstein, RJ Mical, Python Anghelo, and Richard Witt. Players control a spacecraft pilot who battles the eponymous Sinistar. In addition to the game's use of digitized speech for its antagonist, ''Sinistar'' is known for its high difficulty level. Gameplay The player pilots a lone spacecraft, mining drifting planetoids and catching the crystals which are released. Shooting a planetoid too rapidly destroys it without releasing any crystals. Each collected crystal turns into a "Sinibomb", which is needed to defeat the game boss, Sinistar, an animated spacecraft with a demonic skull face. Sinistar does not exist at the start of the game, but is constructed by enemy worker ships. Enemy worker ships collect crystals which they use to construct the Sinistar. Enemy warrior ships can directly attack the player's ship, shoot pla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Noah Falstein
Noah Falstein (born June 1957) is a game designer and producer who has been in the video game industry since 1980, winning "Game of the Year" titles for multiple games such as '' Battlehawks 1942'' and ''Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis''. He has designed games for multiple platforms, including arcade video games, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS. He was one of the first 10 employees at Lucasfilm Games, joining them in 1984; the third employee at DreamWorks Interactive in 1995; and also one of the early employees at The 3DO Company. He was the first elected chairperson of the International Game Developers Association, which he chaired from 1997 to 1998. He wrote the "Better by Design" column for '' Game Developer'' magazine from 2002–2007. From 2013–2017 he was Chief Game Designer at Google. As of 2021 he works for the game consulting company The Inspiracy, which he founded in 1996. Early life Falstein was born and raised in Chicago, the youngest of three children t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Williams (gaming Company)
WMS Industries, Inc. was an American electronic gaming and amusement manufacturer in Enterprise, Nevada. It was merged into Scientific Games in 2016. WMS's predecessor was the Williams Manufacturing Company, founded in 1943 by Harry E. Williams. However, the company that became WMS Industries was formally founded in 1974 as Williams Electronics, Inc. Williams initially was a manufacturer of pinball machines. In 1964, Williams was acquired by jukebox manufacturer Seeburg Corp. and reorganized as Williams Electronics Manufacturing Division. In 1973, the company branched out into the coin-operated arcade video game market with its ''Pong'' clone ''Paddle Ball'', eventually creating a number of video game classics, including '' Defender'' and '' Robotron: 2084.'' In 1974, Williams Electronics, Inc. was incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Seeburg. Williams Electronics was sold off as an independent company during the bankruptcy of Seeburg in 1980. In 1987, the company went ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Newcomer
John Newcomer is an American game designer, best known for being the designer and lead developer of the 1982 pioneering arcade game ''Joust''. He designed, animated, and produced multiple games for Williams Electronics, Midway Games, Cybiko, and MumboJumbo. Biography Newcomer is the second of two children. His father, Robert, was a milkman and then a maintenance worker at University Park East movie theater. His mother, Beverly, was an administrative assistant and office manager. Newcomer attended Clay High School in South Bend, Indiana, where coincidentally one of his friends in the school chess club was Franz Lanzinger, who also ended up in the coin-op industry, working for Atari and designing games such as ''Crystal Castles''. Newcomer attended the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1977 with a degree in industrial design. His first job was at Gordon Barlow Design in Skokie, Illinois, the company known for famous games and toys such as Mouse Trap and ''Toy Bomb''. Newcome ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits
''Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits'' is a video game anthology for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, PlayStation, Sega Genesis, Saturn, Game.com, Dreamcast, MS-DOS, and Microsoft Windows. The IBM PC compatible and game.com versions are titled ''Williams Arcade Classics''. The 2000 release '' Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Vol. 1'' contains much of the same content. Gameplay The anthology includes emulated arcade games originally released by Williams Electronics between 1981 and 1983: #'' Defender'' #'' Defender II'' #''Joust'' #'' Robotron: 2084'' #''Sinistar''''Williams Arcade Classics'' at MobyGames #'' Bubbles'' ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Python Anghelo
Python Vladimir Anghelo (January 1, 1954 – April 9, 2014) was a graphic artist best known for his work on Video game, video games and pinball machines. Anghelo was born in Transylvania, Romania, and moved to the United States when he was 17. Career After studying art and animation in Romania and the US, he worked as an animator for Disney until 1979. He then moved to Williams Electronics to create the artwork for ''Joust (video game), Joust'', taking a 50% pay cut in the process because he believed video games had more potential than traditional animation. He continued to work for Williams (and, later, Midway Games after it merged with Williams) for 15 years until 1994, when his most ambitious project, ''The Pinball Circus'', was discontinued. In April of 1994, Anghelo released his first project with Capcom Coin-Op, Capcom; Goofy Hoops. While sold under the Romstar name, a co-financier of Capcom Coin-Op, it used Capcom's hardware. He then designed ''Flipper Football'', his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Continuously Variable Slope Delta Modulation
Continuously variable slope delta modulation (CVSD or CVSDM) is a voice coding method. It is a delta modulation with variable step size (i.e., special case of adaptive delta modulation), first proposed by Greefkes and Riemens in 1970. CVSD encodes at 1 bit per sample, so that audio sampled at 16 kHz is encoded at 16 kbit/s. The encoder maintains a reference sample and a step size. Each input sample is compared to the reference sample. If the input sample is larger, the encoder emits a ''1'' bit and adds the step size to the reference sample. If the input sample is smaller, the encoder emits a ''0'' bit and subtracts the step size from the reference sample. The encoder also keeps the previous ''N'' bits of output (''N'' = 3 or ''N'' = 4 are very common) to determine adjustments to the step size; if the previous ''N'' bits are all 1s or 0s, the step size is increased. Otherwise, the step size is decreased (usually in an exponential manner, with \tau being in the range ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Doremus
John Doremus (August 3, 1931 in Sapulpa, Oklahoma – July 6, 1995 in Naperville, Illinois) was an American radio personality, best known for his radio syndication of ''The Passing Parade'', a series of short stories of remarkable but relatively unknown episodes throughout history. In the late 1950s he acquired the rights to the series, which until then had been a television series, and syndicated it for radio. The stories chronicled such diverse topics as the first white man to discover the mountain gorilla to the espionage and intrigue during wartime. During the mid 1960s he produced ''Patterns in Music'' for WMAQ in Chicago. Original recordings of ''Patterns in Music'' were being aired by KNXR (FM 97.5 MHz), in Rochester, Minnesota until January 31, 2015, when the station was sold and the station's format was changed. The series is now heard on 97Five, an internet re-birth of those first 50 years of KNXR. In 1964, his company pioneered the idea of in-flight music for ai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motorola 6809
The Motorola 6809 ("''sixty-eight-oh-nine''") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes. Among the most powerful 8-bit processors of its era, it was also much more expensive. In 1980 a 6809 in single-unit quantities was compared to for a Zilog Z80 and for a 6502. It was launched when a new generation of 16-bit processors were coming to market, like the Intel 8086, and 32-bit designs were on the horizon, including Motorola's own 68000. It was not feature competitiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Super Nintendo Entertainment System
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), commonly shortened to Super NES or Super Nintendo, is a 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan and South Korea, 1991 in North America, 1992 in Europe and Oceania, and 1993 in South America. In Japan, it is called the In South Korea, it is called the Super Comboy and was distributed by Hyundai Electronics. The system was released in Brazil on August 30, 1993, by Playtronic. Although each version is essentially the same, several forms of regional lockout prevent cartridges for one version from being used in other versions. The Super NES is Nintendo's second programmable home console, following the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The console introduced advanced graphics and sound capabilities compared with other systems at the time. It was designed to accommodate the ongoing development of a variety of enhancement chips integrated into game cartridges to be competitive into the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atari 8-bit Family
The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 as the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The series was successively upgraded to Atari 1200XL , Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, Atari 800XE, and Atari XEGS, the last discontinued in 1992. They differ primarily in packaging, each based on the MOS Technology 6502 central processing unit, CPU at and the same custom coprocessor chips. As the first home computer architecture with coprocessors, it has graphics and sound more advanced than most contemporary machines. Video games were a major draw, and first-person space combat simulator ''Star Raiders'' is considered the platform's killer app. The plug-and-play peripherals use the Atari SIO serial bus, with one developer eventually also co-patenting USB. While using the same internal technology, the Atari 800 was sold as a high-end model, while the 400 was more affordable. The 400 has a pressure-sensitive, spillproof membrane keyboar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atari 2600
The Atari 2600, initially branded as the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS) from its release until November 1982, is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977, it popularized microprocessor-based hardware and games stored on swappable ROM cartridges, a format first used with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976. The VCS was bundled with two joystick controllers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a game cartridgeinitially '' Combat'' and later '' Pac-Man''. Atari was successful at creating arcade video games, but their development cost and limited lifespan drove CEO Nolan Bushnell to seek a programmable home system. The first inexpensive microprocessors from MOS Technology in late 1975 made this feasible. The console was prototyped as codename Stella by Atari subsidiary Cyan Engineering. Lacking funding to complete the project, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976. The Atari VCS launched in 1977 with n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flux (magazine)
''Flux'' was a short-lived magazine in the mid-1990s which focused on music (mostly hard rock and hip-hop), comic books and video games. History and profile The magazine was bi-monthly and lasted for seven issues. The headquarters was in New York City and the publisher was Harris Publications. It was presented as an edgier alternative to magazines such as '' EGM'' and ''GamePro''. Notable recurring departments included "Don't Ever Do This," which offered explicit instructions for pranks and antisocial behavior, and "Babewatch," which was merely photos of attractive women from TV shows, movies, and comic books. Starting with issue #4, the publisher began releasing two different editions of the magazine, one for the newsstand and the other for the direct market / comic bookshops. The covers of the newsstand issues would often focus more on popular video games at the time such as Mortal Kombat 3, while the direct market editions would focus more on popular comic books at the time ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
