Re: New SW/ESB kit-- input needed

Ratings are below...

claycowgill@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hey All,

Long time. (I'll avoid the temptation of the obvious "a long time ago
in a..." intro. ;-)

I've been digging through some old Atari goodies and some stuff I
found has motivated me to do a new version of the old SW/ESB kit. I
had redesigned the hardware a while ago (I had planned on a 10th
anniversary release) and done the obvious (nothing too surprising
there-- got rid of the old NOVRAMs, added more memory, packed the
logic down into a lower parts count, eliminated the PROMs, all pre-
wired installation, no loose chips to install, etc.), but with my
other businesses picking up at the time I didn't have time to dedicate
to it.

Now I've made some time availble and I have some feature questions I'd
like to ask to see what all you think... (I'm not sure if what I
think is neat is tuned in to what the rest of the Star Wars owners
think is neat!)

So, if you're interested, please rate these features from 1 to 5 (five
being "want badly" and 1 being "dont' want") and let me know! In all
these cases-- assume that you can turn the feature on and off at
will...

1) If this kit were to eliminate some of the 'slowdown' in Star Wars
and ESB gameplay (like when things get really busy), would you like
that? (Yes, it would play a little differently, and no it wouldn't be
appropriate to play for world-record attemps, etc. ;-)

4

2) If you could save a game in progress and resume it later, would you
use it? (survives power-off)

2

3) If you could have an on-screen menu to choose games instead of just
a switch?

5

4) If you could switch games and/or return to a menu through a
combination of button presses on the flight yoke? (assuming it's not
possible to "accidentally" trigger)

5

5) If other game play parameters were alterable (speed, bonuses,
etc.)?

4

6) If game levels were alterable (trench sequence barriers, towers,
etc.)?

3

7) If the speech circuity was revised for better audio quality?

3

8) If there were new digitized voice effects restored from the
original source code? (They were left out of the 'official' release
due to space limitations in the Sound board EPROMs.)

5

Personally I'm most excited about the 'lost' audio samples. That was
pretty cool to find in the source code. ;-) I'm also intrigued by
"fixing" the game slowdown, but I'm not sure many people notice or
care?

I consider it something of a "director's cut" version-- basically what
Atari would have done had they not needed to watch the hardware budget
back in the day.

Anyway, since I'm perpetually swamped anymore this would just be a one-
time prodution run of a fixed number of kits. I wouldn't have time to
handle a large quantity of shipping all at once, so they'd just be
sold/fulfilled through someone with a regular website/business selling
arcade stuff-- there wouldn't be any waiting on me to build a few
units here and there.

Thanks,
-Clay
.