Play your favorite classic games and more with the GameEx front end. Read more.

laststar: MAME ROM Information.

History:

The Last Starfighter (c) 1984 Atari.

An alien entrepreneur has placed Starfighter games machines on Earth as a test for prospective Starfighters. Although Starfighter appears to be another arcade game, it contacts the alien when the high score record is broken.

Alex, a 19-year old who lives in a trailer park, is an ace at Starfighter and gets whisked off to the planet Rylos as a draftee to combat the evil Xur and the Ko-Dan armada. Having been fooled into coming, Alex refuses and is returned to Earth. While Alex is gone from Rylos, a Ko-Dan attack destroys all the Gunstar ships (Starfighters) and crews, except for a prototype equipped with a special weapons system called Death Blossom.

Alexis, meanwhile, changes his mind and, with the help of the alien, returns to Rylos where, with Navigator/Pilot Grigg, he takes off in the last Gunstar to take on the whole enemy fleet. Fighting through a series of space battles, Alex and Grigg succees in saving the universe and then return to earth to pick up Alex's girlfriend before assuming the role of commander of Rylos armed forces and being given the hero treatment on Rylos.

BASIC GAMEPLAY:

Player controls weapons on Gunstar and orientation of Gunstar chair; he is not piloting ship. Player's head-up display shows information on weapons system and coolant (shields), as well as on currently targeted enemy, surrounding enemy positions and Gunstar chair orientation. Not all information is available in each round.

Each of the enemy ships takes a different amount of energy to destroy. Enemy condition is shown by the 'Target temperature gauge'. When the enemy temperature hits max, it will explode. The rate at which the gauge rises is determined by the type of ship. Temperature rises while player's lasers are contacting enemy ship and may fall if this ceases before destruction.

The condition of the Gunstar is shown by the 'Hull temperature gauge'. When the Gunstar is being hit by the enemy fire, the hull temperature increases. When the hull temperature gets high, coolant flows in (around the gauge on screen from the on-screen reservoir) to coll the hull. This depletes the reservoir of coolant. If no coolant remains, the hull temperature will reach maximum and the Gunstar is destroyed. A coolant recharge is given at the end of a complete round.

LASERS:

Player's laser energy is shown for each side laser. Laser energy decreases with time of laser use and increases far more slowly. This encourages short bursts of fire from one laser at a time. If both lasers are fired simultaneously, a third laser also fires from below without additional depletion of energy, but with additional effect on the target. This contradictorily encourages use of both lasers simultaneously. As players increase in skill, they will learn to use shot, single laser bursts on small targets and twin laser bursts on large targets. This combination will ensure best energy usage and maximum destructive effect. It is possible for a player to be stranded with inadequate energy and be destroyed of insufficient ability to retaliate, but this cannot happen on beginner rounds where energy drain is very low.

Death Blossom (laser blossom) is fired with rear buttons on Star Wars controller. The central circle will light up on screen to show when Death Blossom is charged and usable. Activation causes the screen to be blanketed with laser fire destroying (or greatly heating up if mother ship) all targets on screen. Does not destroy Control Tower and Xur's transport.

- TECHNICAL -

Atari System IV hardware

CPU: 68000, TMS32010

- TRIVIA -

In 1984 a movie called 'The Last Starfigter' (from now called TLSF). It was a Sci-fi adventure movie. It was the first movie ever to be made were all the special effects (except explosions and make up) was made on a computer. The computer was a Cray X-MP. This and the fact that space movies were very popular in this time made everyone expecting this movie to be a big blockbuster like Star Wars. This is why Atari bought the rights for the movie so they would be able to make a game based on it. It was going to be released on both home consoles and on an arcade. The arcade was never finished.

The production of the game was started in Atari's arcade division. The original project team was made up of Chris J. Horseman (Project leader), Jim Morris (Project engineer (software)), Jack Ritter (2nd project engineer (software))

and Barry Whitebook (Animation). Ted Michon and Mike Albaugh came onboard on this project later in the development. Prior arcade games to use 3-D was only vector games. Atari had for several years worked on a general purpose 3-D arcade system, but it was always 'a few years away' every time they wanted to use it (an arcade game called "I, Robot" was actually released in 1983, and this game had solid 3-D but this game was hard coded and was very different from TLSF, this was actually the first game developed by Atari that was programmed with C). This is where Ted Michon comes into the picture. Ted worked as a consultant for Atari and developed a super high bit mapped system with a polygon fill engine. Atari decided to use this to on the TLSF arcade. They also had to use the systems expanding capabilities to implement a math box that could handle the 3-D transformations. The programming of the math box was done by Mike Albaugh.

The programming of the arcade was done mainly by Jim Morris. The additional programming with the cave sequence on the game was done by Jack Ritter. Jack came onboard from Cinematronics.

In the programming process Jim used a 68 000 Motorola 16bit CPU, the first to ever be used at Atari. The programming language was C. It was also used several 3-D tools that later also were used in other games. TLSF became a pioneer in using the 68 000 CPU. Earlier most games were made with the 6502 CPU. The arcade games "Hard Drivin" (1988) and "Stun Runner" (1989) have a very similar graphics with TLSF game, even though another graphic engine was used on these games.

The gameplay in the game was taken right from the gameplay in the movie and scenes from the movie; this was often done with spinoff games like this. The game was actually very similar with what you see in the movie, at least regarding the graphic. The controller on the game was a controller

from the "Star Wars" vector games that Atari made. When Atari choosed to drop the game is was about 75% finished. There was no cabinet for the game, but the game worked and it could be played on a test bench. It was also made some simple sound effects for the game.

The reason behind Atari's decision to cancelled the game so far into production was several. Atari had for some years pay'ed much money to the movie companies for the rights to produce games with themes taken from movies. This rights costed Atari a lot of money over a long time. Atari gambled on the movie to become the success that everyone predicted, but this did not happen. The film didn’t fail, but it wasn't a success either. In the production of the arcade they found out that the machine would have a sell price of 10 000$, and this was a lot of money back in the 80's. If the movie had been a big success this price could have been defended. The vice president in Atari thought that no one would buy a game for 10 000$. And not long after the project team got the message that the game was cancelled. On the same time Atari was in deep financial problems that was caused by Atari's consument division. On the top of all this came the big video game crash. The result was that Atari started to fall and fall, until it was closed in the end. The original arcade division of Atari was shutdown in 2001 when Midway choose to shutdown Midway West (Midway had bought Atari Games (Atari`s arcade division) and changed name to Midway West). Prior to this Atari had been sold a couple of times, and the leaders had also been changed more than once. But Atari never became the company it was prior to the crash. Some ears after Atari cancelled TLSF arcade game, the arcade game Hard Drivin was released. This game sold for the same price that TLSF had (10 000$).

- SCORING -

Ships destroyed increases score by ship value, multiplied by a distance bonus; i.e., if an expert can hit a ship while distant, he will receive more points than a novice who hits when close.

Each round ship scores increases.

- TIPS AND TRICKS -

Hitting two ships at one scores 4 times the single ship value.

- STAFF -

Project leader : Chris Horseman

Project Engineer (Software) : Jim Morris

3-D Hardware : Ted Michon

Math Box Programming : Jack Ritter, Mike Albaugh

Animator: Barry Whitebook

- SOURCES -

Machine's picture.

Håkon Galstad information

Game's ROM.

MAME Info:

0.139u1 [Phil Bennett, Ken Van Mersbergen]

WIP:

- 0.139u1: Phil Bennett and Ken Van Mersbergen added The Last Starfighter (prototype) (Atari Games 1984).

- 31st July 2010: Phil Bennett - Here's an interesting pair which never saw life outside of the Atari labs. The Last Starfighter is of course, Atari's aborted game adaptation of the film/game within the film. If you haven't already done so, I recommend checking-out the proposal for the game (http://www.atarigames.com/page5/files/page5_8.pdf). On show here is an unfinished cave-chase sequence. You can shoot and destroy the enemy ships in the cave but that's pretty much it (there's no end to the enemies nor the cave). A dogfight sequence was also programmed and can be seen in this game footage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghjjeZpoKLI). The unsightly coloured-blocks are due to missing graphics data for the text and HUD. Air Race is a slightly more advanced prototype where you pilot a ship around a futuristic indoor race course. Very impressive-looking stuff for 1985. Perhaps too impressive as the high cost of the hardware was the main factor that kept the games from market. Both games ran on System IV hardware (whatever happened to System III?), comprising a 68000 and a TMS32010 DSP for geometry calculations (an extra DSP was added for Air Race). Rasterization is performed by custom hardware (Hard Drivin' and later games used a software approach). AFAIK, the hardware for these games no longer exists. There are no ROMs - we're running the binaries that were uploaded to the RAM of the development hardware. You could go as far to say that these games are MAME-exclusives.

Movie: The Last Starfighter

Genre: Sci-Fi

Year: USA 1984

Director: Nick Castle

Studio: Universal Pictures / Lorimar

Cast: Lance Guest, Robert Preston, Dan O'Herlihy, Barbara Bosson, Catherine Mary Stewart

Romset: 151 kb / 3 files / 41.8 zip

MAME XML Output:

<description>The Last Starfighter (prototype)</description>

<manufacturer>Atari Games</manufacturer>

</input>

</game>

Developed by: Spesoft Headsoft Terms of use Privacy Advertise