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redbaron: MAME ROM Information.

History:

Red Baron [Upright model] (c) 1980 Atari.

Red Baron is a realistic flying simulation. Your player is a WW1 fighter pilot searching the skies for the enemy. The horizon shifts and tilts as he maneuvers the joystick. Three dimensional hills and valleys sweep by below.

Suddenly out of the horizon, an enemy biplane appears. The pilot dives, climbs, lines up the plane in his sights! He fires a deadly hail of tracers and the enemy airplane tumbles to earth.

But watch out, there are more coming. The first four planes are relatively slow. As time progresses, the player moves more quickly and the enemy planes take more evasive action, adding to the difficulty and challenge.

Next the player faces ground targets. An observation blimp floats into view over a low rise of hills. Bright ground objects start to appear, a tank, a pill-box, then dimmer targets, a pyramid, a building. They make good targets for strafing runs but danger can appear at any time.

As the game progresses, tanks, pill-boxes and blimps will begin shooting back. The game is composed of randomly alternating series of ground and plane phases. Finally, the planes will also shoot at the player.

There are other dangers too. Dive too low and the player can crash and explode on a mountain. Squeeze the trigger too long and the guns overheat. And an enemy plane can get on the pilot's tail, almost certain death unless the player is a flying ace.

When a player is hit by a returning plane, bullet holes and cracks appear on the screen, his plane plummets to earth and explodes. If an enemy shell finds its mark, the result is the same but the shell remains visible.

- TECHNICAL -

Game ID : 036995

Main CPU : M6502 (@ 1.512 Mhz)

Co-processor : Math Box

Sound Chips : POKEY (@ 1.512 Mhz), Custom (@ 1.512 Mhz)

Screen orientation : Horizontal

Video resolution : 256 x 231 pixels

Screen refresh : 45.00 Hz

Palette colors : 32768

Players : 1

Control : stick

Buttons : 1

- TRIVIA -

Even if the titlescreen says 1980, the Upright model was released in May 1981. It was sold $2795 at its release. Only 504 units were produced.

Also released as "Red Baron [Cockpit model]" (June 1981).

Red Baron was designed to accurately recreate World War I aerial combat. It was definitely the first flight simulator available to the public back in 1980. Red Baron was a lot like "Battlezone" in the air. Which made a lot of sense, because Red Baron ran on almost exactly the same hardware as Battlezone (more information below), and most Red Baron Upright machines shipped in factory converted Battlezone cabinets (they usually even have Battle Zone sideart underneath the red 'Iron Cross' sideart). Unfortunately this game never did as well as Battlezone did, the game did poorly in the arcades. Maybe the world just wasn't ready for a 3-D flight simulator?

Red Baron used almost the exact same hardware as Battlezone, but not quite. Battlezone will run on Red Baron hardware with a few minor modifications, but Red Baron will not run on Battlezone hardware without a Red Baron 'auxiliary board', as the Battlezone auxiliary board did not have enough sockets for all the Red Baron ROM chips. The 2 games control completely different though.

- SCORING -

Enemy Fighter : 300 to 10 points. When the enemy fighter first appears, it is worth 300 points. The closer it gets to your plane, the less the enemy plane is worth.

Blimp : 200 points

Tanks : 250 points

Pillboxes : 250 points

Pyramids : 100 points

Buildings : 100 points

- TIPS AND TRICKS -

* When you start the game, you will be put into a surrealistic landscape. The view is from the cockpit of your bi-plane. Immediately, you will be jumped on by enemy units. You will know an enemy unit has appeared because of the sounds the game makes. The joystick is pretty sensitive. This basically means you don't have to push it hard in order to get your plane to move around. Also, remember that the game is set up like an actual plane.

* Try to keep your altitude as high as possible. This gives you a better chance at 'jumping' enemy air units. In addition, it will allow you to be able to keep with them longer ensuring a better chance at a kill.

* If there are no enemy planes around, you can go on strafing missions to take out a few of the enemy ground units. Be very careful when you are doing this since the terrain is pretty mountainous.

* At the beginning, you will only encounter one enemy plane. As you progress through the game, don't be surprised when you get attacked by three or even four enemy planes at one time.

* Learn how to do deflection shooting. Deflection shooting is a method of shooting where you fire your shots in front of the projected path of the object you are trying to hit. In essence, it forces that object to ''run'' into your fire.

* Practice doing evasive maneuvering starting with the basic dives and climbs. Then add turns to these moves. This will definitely come in very handy later on in the game when you are confronted with a large number of enemy units (both ground and air).

* You will see the enemy fire that is aimed at your plane. The bullets look like diamonds. They are easy to evade but you may have to do some tight turns if there is a heavy volume of enemy fire coming at your plane.

* If you don't take out an enemy plane while it is heading for your plane, it will get behind you. This presents a very dangerous situation since you will only have a couple of seconds before you are shot down. You can evade the enemy plane :

a) If you are too close to the ground, immediately climb and roll to the left or right. By doing this, you actually cause your plane to slow down and the enemy plane flies under you giving you another opportunity to shoot him down.

b) If you are too high, then you can power dive and roll left or right. Just watch out for the ground (which will be coming at you fast). Before you get to the ground, do a power climb and follow the advice in the first part.

* Blimps present a unique challenge since they don't move very fast. This means you will need to take them down on your first pass since you travel much faster then them. Sometimes the blimp will present you with a ''head-on'' look. This makes it harder to hit since it makes itself into a smaller target.

* While 'hunting' for enemy air units, it's usually a good idea to do a gentle roll from side-to-side. The reason for this is if you get multiple enemy air units, you can fire off a burst and knock more then one out of the sky. This helps even the odds up considerably.

* Don't keep your finger on the gun trigger too long. Your guns will overheat and it takes a couple of seconds for them to cool off again. That couple seconds could be the difference between life and death.

- STAFF -

Programmer & Designer : Rich Moore

Hardware & Producer : John Ray

Math Box : Jed Margolin

Technician : Joe Coddington

- PORTS -

* Consoles :

Sony PlayStation 2 (2004, "Atari Anthology")

Microsoft XBOX (2004, "Atari Anthology")

* Computers :

PC [MS Windows, CD-ROM] (2003, "Atari - 80 Classic Games in One!")

* Others :

Nokia N-Gage (2005, "Atari Masterpieces Volume 1")

Apple Store (2011, "Atari Greatest Hits")

Android Market (2011, "Atari Greatest Hits")

- SOURCES -

Game's rom.

Machine's picture.

F.A.Q. by Kevin Butler A.K.A. War Doc

MAME Info:

0.26 [Brad Oliver, Bernd Wiebelt, Allard van der Bas, Al Kossow, Hedley Rainnie, Eric Smith]

Artwork available

SETUP:

- Red Baron tries to calibrate its analog joystick at the start, so you'll have to move the 'joystick' a bit before you can fly in all four directions.

Bugs:

- Sound effect reversed. Gyrovision (ID 03482)

WIP:

- 6th September 2010: Mr. Do - Some time ago, Vintage Arcade had a Red Baron cockpit. Jcroach finished up the bezel awhile ago, but I hadn't gotten around to fixing up the pics I took of the shroud. I passed them on to Kiltron, who was kind enough to finish it off (btw... if anyone knows where the gunsight used in the artwork in this game came from, please let me know; all I know for sure is that it wasn't part of the real game).

- 0.131u2: Smitdogg removed "BAD_DUMP" from the Red Baron AVG BPROM, it has been verified correct (contents and label) by the Dumping Union.

- 0.129u4: Changed Custom sound to Red Baron Custom.

- 12th August 2007: Mr. Do - We got the outer bezel of Red Baron, vectored by Jcroach and with color correction by Ad_Enuff.

- 0.117: R. Belmont added save state support to Red Baron.

- 0.115u1: Mathis Rosenhauer moved Atari vector PROMs into separate regions. Added user2 rom (036174.01) and the user3 Mathbox PROMs (36175/76, 036177/78, 036179/80 - low/high nibbled). Changed region proms to user1.

- 0.108u5: Mathis Rosenhauer rewrote the Atari vector generators, using the schematics and actual state machine PROMs. The state machine is now emulated so timing should be much more realistic. Clipping hardware in bzone and others is emulated instead of hardcoded. Improved accuracy of clocks and various other bits of cleanup. Changed M6502 CPU clock speed to 1512000 Hz, VSync to 60Hz. and added prom ($0 - AVG PROM).

- 22nd January 2004: Aaron Giles fixed problems in Red Baron, Asylum and Tiger Heli, caused by the memory system changes.

- 0.58: Changed palettesize from 33024 to 32768 colors.

- 0.57: Changed palettesize from 256 to 33024 colors.

- 0.36RC1: Added Custom sound. Samples are no longer needed in Red Baron [Juergen Buchmueller].

- 12th February 2000: Juergen Buchmueller added preliminary analog sound simulation to Battle Zone and Red Baron.

- 8th February 2000: Mathis Rosenhauer fixed Red Baron graphics.

- 0.33b7: Inspired by Retrocade and Vector Dream, Bernd Wiebelt changed the vector games to use translucent vectors. Color intensities had to be lowered, if it feels to dark for you now, increase the gamma correction value.

- 0.27: Trackball support for Red Baron. Red Baron tries to calibrate its analog joystick at the start, so you'll have to move the "joystick" a bit before you can fly in all four directions. Thanks to [email protected] for his suggestions.

- 0.26a: Some credits that were left out last time: Thanks to Al Kossow, Hedley Rainnie and Eric Smith for the code to their vecsim emulator which had emulated these games previously on the unix and the mac, and thanks to Neil Bradley for pointing out the critical bug in the vector generator engine which prevented Tempest from working.

- 0.26: Added Red Baron (Atari 1980). The game accept coins, but doesn't start. Thanks to the outstanding combined efforts of Brad Oliver, Bernd Wiebelt and Allard van der Bas, MAME entered in vectorial emulation world! All in a time, we have support for Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Black Widow, Battlezone, Gravitar, Lunar Lander, Red Baron, Spaceduel and Tempest. Thanks to Al Kossow, Hedley Rainnie and Eric Smith for the code to their VECSIM emulator which had emulated these games previously on the UNIX and MAC.

- 22nd November 1992: Dumped Red Baron.

Other Emulators:

* AAE

* JAE

* Retrocade

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Romset: 20 kb / 16 files / 16.5 zip

MAME XML Output:

<description>Red Baron</description>

<manufacturer>Atari</manufacturer>

</input>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</game>

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