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beathead: MAME ROM Information.

History:

Beat Head (c) 1993 Atari Games.

Jump on the tiles that match your color or that have your color and your opponent's color. Jump on enough to fill your spaces before your opponent fills his.

- TECHNICAL -

Main CPU : ASAP (@ 14.31818 Mhz), M6502 (@ 1.7895 Mhz)

Sound Chips : YM2151 (@ 3.579 Mhz), OKI6295 (@ 9.037 Khz)

Screen orientation : Horizontal

Video resolution : 336 x 240 pixels

Screen refresh : 60.00 Hz

Palette colors : 32768

Players : 2

Control : 8-way joystick

Buttons : 2

Beat Head has nothing remotely resembling Sprites or M.O.s., the hardware is a fairly naive bitmap, although it is implemented in VRAM, which allows, e.g. fast copies to reduce the CPU needed for static content.

Beat Head is the only Atari Coin-Op game to derive its 'time base' from the audio, and to do so uses a rarely used feature of CPU/Audio communication. A bug there would not affect any other game, and would manifest in Beat Head as timeouts and 'jerks' as the video was re-sync'd to the audio.

- TRIVIA -

At the time, Atari were very keen to fund 'unusual' game concepts, such as "Toobin'" and Beat Head was one of those chosen. However, the game mechanic was incredibly repetitive and once you'd beaten 5 opponents, not much really changed. The reason for the very limited number of 'waves' is that the game did not get past a 'short field-test' stage. It was intended to be out only a few days. Atari had a pretty bad rep in those days, which showed in the cash box. And Beat Head had fairly powerful enemies within Atari, so it was killed at a very preliminary stage of the program. It certainly was never intended to be so limited.

The phrase 'Stella on Steroids' on the POST screen is a reference to the old Atari VCS, codenamed 'Stella'.

- SOURCES -

Game's rom.

MAME Info:

0.37b10 [Aaron Giles]

WIP:

- 0.143u4: Changed ASAP CPU1 clock speed to 14318181 Hz.

- 0.139u2: Aaron Giles moved BeatHead's read/write handlers into members of beathead_state as an example of using the new delegates. This provides examples of both static (via an address_map) and dynamic (via install_handler calls) mapping using delegates. Updated BeatHead to use new virtual functions instead of specifying callbacks in the MACHINE_DRIVER.

- 0.139u1: Aaron Giles changed atarigen_state to be a base class from which all the related Atari drivers derive their state from.

- 0.135u4: Some more Atari driver shuffling [Aaron Giles]: Added atarigen_init() function which allocates all timers and registers for save states. Updated all drivers to call it. Converted some drivers to use device timers.

- 0.135u3: Aaron Giles converted atari drivers over to using driver_data for the most part. Some shared systems still exist with globals, but this tackles the atarigen module and the variables local to each driver.

- 0.132u4: Fixed ADPCM roms addresses.

- 0.123u2: Zsolt Vasvari changed Beathead driver to use partial updates instead of caching scanline level information.

- 0.122u4: Changed M6502 CPU2 clock speed to 1789772 Hz, YM2151 to 3579545 Hz and OKI6295 to 1193181 Hz.

- 0.114: Couriersud added general save state support to the atarijsa and atarigen modules.

- 0.100: Aaron Giles fixed crashes (video update) in BeatHead.

- 0.37b15: Changed M6502 CPU2 clock speed to 1789500, YM2151 to 3579000 and OKI6295 to 9037 Hz.

- 0.37b10: Aaron Gile added BeatHead (prototype) (Atari Games 1993).

- 17th November 2000: Aaron Giles sent in a driver for an Atari prototype game called BeatHead.

LEVELS: 37 (endless)

Romset: 4672 kb / 13 files / 2.81 zip

MAME XML Output:

<description>BeatHead (prototype)</description>

<manufacturer>Atari Games</manufacturer>

</input>

</dipswitch>

</game>

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