But back before Elite..

[NigelJK]

Also grew up on coast. Remember hating Space invaders. Addicted to Asteroids and could eventually clock it. Addicted to (the impossibly hard in the first version) Missile command. Blown away by the original (Colour) defender.
All of these later found a home in the sideways ROM of a BBC 'B'.

[Killer Wolf]

i remember a helicopter game where you had to shoot buildings to free people and carry them back to base etc, can't recall a space version tho.
i used to go to the Spanish City up here, it had some great arcades, there were some crackers you never hear about nowadays like Tail Gunner, I, Robot, Vulgus, Zaxxon, Phoenix, Exerion, Space Firebird etc. One of my faves i only ever saw in one place till i got the MAME rom about two years ago, Scorpion ~ had spiders as enemies. There was a good laserdisc one that i can't fricking recall the name of, and the Firefox laserdisc was canny too if you took the low-level option, had some good scenes flitting over treetops. I loved the look of Asteroids (never did figure out how they made the bullets so bright!) and the Deluxe sequel blew me away, the way it was projected onto glass. Loved Berzerk too, worked well on the VCS cos the graphics were basic anyways, lol.
one of the cutest i ever saw was Golly Ghost, lovely little jap thing w/ a house that had real opening doors etc - the ghosts were projected onto glass in front of it to give a lovely spook effect to them. oooh, vid : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMrumOaunS4
think the majority of my money went on Xevious and the 194x series, they did some good vertical scrollers back in the day. One of the best for the Amiga was SWIV, was a similar arcade game but i'm pretty sure it wasn't SWIV itself.
edit - Time Pilot too, that took its fair share of my 10ps! Just remembered they did a "defender w/ knobs on" called Stargate.
liked Moon Crest and Moon Patrol too. damn, the more i write,the more i remember!

man, nostalgia. gonna have to get a joystick and load MAME up again!

[DaddyHoggy]

i remember a helicopter game where you had to shoot buildings to free people and carry them back to base etc, can't recall a space version tho.
i used to go to the Spanish City up here, it had some great arcades, there were some crackers you never hear about nowadays like Tail Gunner, I, Robot, Vulgus, Zaxxon, Phoenix, Exerion, Space Firebird etc. One of my faves i only ever saw in one place till i got the MAME rom about two years ago, Scorpion ~ had spiders as enemies. There was a good laserdisc one that i can't fricking recall the name of, and the Firefox laserdisc was canny too if you took the low-level option, had some good scenes flitting over treetops. I loved the look of Asteroids (never did figure out how they made the bullets so bright!) and the Deluxe sequel blew me away, the way it was projected onto glass. Loved Berzerk too, worked well on the VCS cos the graphics were basic anyways, lol.
one of the cutest i ever saw was Golly Ghost, lovely little jap thing w/ a house that had real opening doors etc - the ghosts were projected onto glass in front of it to give a lovely spook effect to them. oooh, vid : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMrumOaunS4
think the majority of my money went on Xevious and the 194x series, they did some good vertical scrollers back in the day. One of the best for the Amiga was SWIV, was a similar arcade game but i'm pretty sure it wasn't SWIV itself.
edit - Time Pilot too, that took its fair share of my 10ps! Just remembered they did a "defender w/ knobs on" called Stargate.
liked Moon Crest and Moon Patrol too. damn, the more i write,the more i remember!

man, nostalgia. gonna have to get a joystick and load MAME up again!

Spanish City! Wow! All my family is from South Shields - I spent most of my summers either down at Sunderland or up and across the water at Spanish City - I rode my first loop the loop coaster at Spanish City.

I too had SWIV on the Amiga - played it inside out!

[Killer Wolf]

good old days eh, DH? all the kids would run to play in the sun and sand, i'd head off for the dimness and burbly sounds of the video games
sadly, the City is all derelict now. guess the writing was on the wall when the first home gaming systems came out. was always summat special about the games in those days, i think because you didn't see them very often they always looked fresh and special.
still manage to keep a smallish arcade area in the Metro Centre but a lot of it is fruit machines, last i looked in, but i guess most of the major arcade stuff is a dying breed.

just put "arcade machine" into ebay, some big cabinet things there. put a search for Xevious in, wahey, http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Xevious-Classic-A ... 3a66065d33
think the shipping andcustoms charges would be a bit much tho!

[DaddyHoggy]

last time I went up to visit my folks when my dad was running the GNR I nipped across to North Shields, only to discover that the gleaming white walls of Spanish City were no more and that it was boarded up and covered in graffiti.

My wife is from Seaton Carew (just outside Hartlepool (where I grew up)) and two of it's four Arcades still survive but I went in last time I was there and it's almost entirely given over to a hundred variations of slot machines - a few racing games (Sega Rally - oooollllddddd, Fast and Furious) and First Person Shooters and pretty much nothing else. "Las Vegas" the smallest of the four closed some time ago which broke my heart because they had the sit down version of the Star Wars game - I was so distraught that I found one on eBay for £1500 - it was only my wife pointing out that irrespective of the cash - I didn't actually have anywhere to put it in our small 3-bed semi with (at the time) a 2nd baby on the way...

I still look for one occasionally, even though we're in the same house!

[Killer Wolf]

the MAME version of that is cracking, has the speech and everything. all you need is some plywood...!
i remember seeing a similar one of return of the jedi, but it had proper texturey stuff rather than the lines. never did get to play it, and never saw it anywhere else :-/

kids today - they'll never get that thrill of walking in w/ your carefully saved 10ps (or the 50p, to get multiple plays!) and wandering the ranks of the cabinets, wondering which one to feed, or the thrill of seeing a brand new game appear one week.

[CommonSenseOTB]

the MAME version of that is cracking, has the speech and everything. all you need is some plywood...!
i remember seeing a similar one of return of the jedi, but it had proper texturey stuff rather than the lines. never did get to play it, and never saw it anywhere else :-/

kids today - they'll never get that thrill of walking in w/ your carefully saved 10ps (or the 50p, to get multiple plays!) and wandering the ranks of the cabinets, wondering which one to feed, or the thrill of seeing a brand new game appear one week.

Perhaps today they have the thrill of seeing a new oxp appear one week.

[DaddyHoggy]

the MAME version of that is cracking, has the speech and everything. all you need is some plywood...!
i remember seeing a similar one of return of the jedi, but it had proper texturey stuff rather than the lines. never did get to play it, and never saw it anywhere else :-/

kids today - they'll never get that thrill of walking in w/ your carefully saved 10ps (or the 50p, to get multiple plays!) and wandering the ranks of the cabinets, wondering which one to feed, or the thrill of seeing a brand new game appear one week.

I keep hearing this MAME thing and I guess I could Google it, but in layman's terms what does it mean? The original ROM ripped as an image into a PC program that can play it back as though it was on the original hardware is how I imagine it working? If somebody could enlighten or post suitable links it would be greatly appreciated.

[Thargoid]

It's the multi arcade machine emulator. Basically yes, it's a program that allows ROM images from the arcade games to run on a PC or Mac etc. So rather than being a conversion, it's the actual game engine itself so it's a totally true experience (aside from the controls and cabinet of course). My other post has a link in it for where to get it, and there are various sites around the net that have ROM images (some legit and legal, some less so).

Just to save going back, the link is here. For the ROMs, google "mame roms" or something similar and enjoy...

[CommonSenseOTB]

It's the multi arcade machine emulator. Basically yes, it's a program that allows ROM images from the arcade games to run on a PC or Mac etc. So rather than being a conversion, it's the actual game engine itself so it's a totally true experience (aside from the controls and cabinet of course). My other post has a link in it for where to get it, and there are various sites around the net that have ROM images (some legit and legal, some less so).

Just to save going back, the link is here. For the ROMs, google "mame roms" or something similar and enjoy...

Think I'm gonna have a gauntlet break, thanks Thargoid.

[DaddyHoggy]

It's the multi arcade machine emulator. Basically yes, it's a program that allows ROM images from the arcade games to run on a PC or Mac etc. So rather than being a conversion, it's the actual game engine itself so it's a totally true experience (aside from the controls and cabinet of course). My other post has a link in it for where to get it, and there are various sites around the net that have ROM images (some legit and legal, some less so).

Just to save going back, the link is here. For the ROMs, google "mame roms" or something similar and enjoy...

Thank-you - if I can find the Star Wars game - I'll build myself a cabinet!

[Killer Wolf]

http://www.retrocpu.com/mame/roms/s/star_wars_rev_2

[NigelJK]

I still remember the day when I had been playing Asteriods for about 3 hours. There had been quite a bit of activity behind me. Then there was this LOUD weird noise, I turned around and they'd just installed 10 brand new Defender machines and switched one on. From the factory they used to leave them on max volume.

[DaddyHoggy]

http://www.retrocpu.com/mame/roms/s/star_wars_rev_2

The links to the zips don't work...

[Killer Wolf]

bah. got the official banners that you can copy for the homemade cabinet tho!
http://www.romnation.net/srv/roms/mame/s.html <--- those seem to, i tried the revision 1 and Arcade ones.
if that don't work for you, try just somethig like "MAME roms" or "mame +star wars rom" (like i just did) and there's hods of hits.
failing that, i've got MAME (be an old version now) and loads of roms on a backup disc somewhere, i'll email the roms or whatever if you like. you'll laugh when you start d/ling stuff like - in this day of 1~2gig instals, the early ROMs are like 15k each