Atari's Battlestar Galactica prototype!

DaveAS

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Footage from Atari's Battlestar Galactica prototype: :)


There's a bit of history behind this effort. Alpha1 put me in touch with Ken Van Mersbergen in 2013. Ken had rescued the tape backups of BSG before they were junked. We had a go at making it run and couldn't progress because some of the data on the tapes was unrecoverable. Fast forward to 2025, and Alpha1 got in touch to say Ken had posted binaries on KLOV. It turns out he'd recently reread the tapes and managed to get a clean image. A few hacks were needed to bypass development system code and the game was running! Since then, Ken has managed to rebuild the binaries from source with the development code turned off.

Parts where the video goes crazy are where the code is trying to use unmodified clips from Firefox. A possible exception is the docking bay sequence, and I'm looking into whether that can be cleaned up.
 
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Fantazia2

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Bods said:
Tapes? whats that about
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Data backup storage in the 80s I would say.

Tapes were still being used to backup servers into the early 2000's, even from my experience at work into the 2010's.

I remember at some point installing a mecanised multi tape backup device in a school sometime in the 2010s.
 
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Fantazia2 said:
Data backup storage in the 80s I would say.

Tapes were still being used to backup servers into the early 2000's
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Ah yeah of course, used to see them all the time just didn't think about them using em to back up stuff like this, assuming it was going to be a Laserdisc Game, did they not get to that stage then?
 
DaveAS

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Bods said:
Ah yeah of course, used to see them all the time just didn't think about them using em to back up stuff like this, assuming it was going to be a Laserdisc Game, did they not get to that stage then?
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Yes, it was a laserdisc game. The video was grabbed from here and made into a CHD for Mame:
 
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Bods said:
Ah yeah of course, used to see them all the time just didn't think about them using em to back up stuff like this, assuming it was going to be a Laserdisc Game, did they not get to that stage then?
Click to expand...

Lurch666 said:
I presume the game code was stored on tapes as it never got past development thus no eproms burned to go into the firefox PCBs.
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Video on Laserdisc yes but code would have all been written on computers and backed up, and then compiled and burned to ROMs.
 
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It should be fairly easy to create a CHD from the video if in the correct AVI format, its all documented out there in the internets. But the problem may lie in the fact the video image is cropped to just the video data and not the full laserdisc frame output. There is extra detail in the full frame output from the Laserdisc player with time code and other stuff in it that you dont normally see on a TV set, and mame crops it out when playing the game, when viewing the video its like a band of untuned TV static along the top (or bottom, cant remember), I think it also holds stuff like subtitles etc.

I found this out after extracting the video from the Sega Time Traveller CHD to de-interlace the video so it would work better on an LCD, at first I de-interlaced the entire video file but then found that when I created the new CHD (and telling Mame to ignore the CHD checksum being wrong, later I built a custom version of mame with a the new checksum in it) I got no video shown at all. What I had to end up doing was crop the deinterlacing so it only applied to the video portion of the image so all the timecode stuff was still in the correct format.

I dont have to hand what the full frame actually looks like in a video editor as the video files were pretty large and I ran out of disc space so got rid of them and only kept the deinterlaced CHD file.

Tried to do the same with Firefox as well but found that was captured quite early using a different method and found it wouldnt deinterlace as well. Time traveller I think was one of the first titles done using the Domesday project thing to get a better quality output as it captures the RF signal directly instead of just using capture on just the video output. I would have to extract the CHD for firefox again to confirm this.
 
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Amazing work @DaveAS !

Ken has also released the roms for the following games from recovered data from Vax backups.

Laserdisc Road Runner
Jammin'
Atari System1 Relief Pitcher
Atari System2 Garfield
Atari System2 Gremlins (but sound roms only so far..)
Unknown 1985 6502 game using trackball
Prototype build of Empire Strikes Back
 
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luis quinto1981 said:
Ah ok
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Any idea what hardware cops runs as it isnt in mame yet is it, or how you were going to try and run the rom in mame? A google search suggested in ran on GX2 hardware but theres no mention on System16 of cops using that, but then again its Google AI which isnt always that accurate.

EDIT - Actually looks like there is some source code in mame for it.
 
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