Game:

Star Cruiser (1988)

Duration: 1:30

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9

This is a video to demonstrate the new netlist-based audio implementation in MAME for the audio board used by Ramtek's "Star Cruiser" arcade machine from 1977. Unlike Star Fire, which is clearly inspired by (or, less charitably, directly ripped off from) Star Wars, Star Cruiser seems to be based on the original series of Star Trek.

The game itself is as basic as they come, with no text other than score values which disappear when a shot is on-screen due to lackluster hardware capabilities. Indeed, the addition of proper audio simulation does very little in terms of redeeming the game from its painfully simplistic play experience. Contemporary machines from Atari, Namco and Nintendo were already dabbling with gray-scale or even color graphics, and generally provided a play experience much more compelling than something scarcely more complex than Pong.

Boilerplate netlist description:

Prior to the advent of commodity sound-generator chips in the early 80's, arcade machines tended to rely on bespoke collections of analog parts, arranged to generate sound effects when triggered by the main CPU (if indeed the arcade machine had one). Thanks to years of effort by MAME contributor "couriersud", MAME can now simulate these circuits at a component level in order to generate sound effects in real-time or almost real-time. It's broadly similar in principle to circuit simulators such as SPICE and its derivatives, but can be made orders of magnitude faster.

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