MAMEWorld Forums - News - DICE .9 Released

>3 new games: Hi-Way, Steeplechase, Indy 4

http://adamulation.blogspot.com/

A bit earlier than I expected...I was guessing the next release would be in May.
Thank you Adam and Rich as usual for your work...especially getting Highway emulated.

Steeplechase and Indy 4 use roms/proms so they should be around/available eventually.
iirc Highway pcb didn't use any roms.

* Text from Adam's page *

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Hi-Way (Atari, 1975)

Single-player driving game that to this day maintains a small (but loyal) fan base...
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I figure the Atari marketing staff got creative with the game name then, but it should be Highway for younger generation that never seen nor played game before.

>...loyal) fan base

ie: just me. *kidding*

There has to be others from my era and also older folks that did play actual game in arcades in mid 1970s etc. Either they aren't aware of emulation or used to follow emulation but left/retired from emulation scene many years ago.

As mentioned numerous times before, many Highway cabs were converted to play Night Driver and a fair number of Highway cabs that were already out there at places would eventually be re-worked/modified to play Night Driver. Night Driver was released in 1976 and in my area of places that I went to for arcade gameplay all the sit down cabs that used to have Highway were running Night Driver instead. To me, it seemed as if Atari Highway became extinct by late 1976. I never saw another cab running Highway after fall 1976 ... so this is great being able to play Highway again in some form.

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Indy 4 (Atari, 1976)

First color monitor using game in DICE! (Now if only someone would dig up the schematics for Color Gotcha...)

Features fairly unique gameplay for its time due to the ability to perform a handbrake turn to quickly skid around corners. And surprisingly runs at fairly playable speeds despite the large amount of players and road graphics!
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Unable to help with schematics for color version of Gotcha. I am guessing it may have been a single color overlay piece that gave the game an appearance of having color?
I will be surprised if it was an actual color monitor being used for color version of Gotcha. Maybe Keith Smith might have info about this?

Great to know that it was possible to reduce/re-use multiple car board pcbs down to a single car board, since they all same pcbs, to improve speed for gameplay.

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Steeplechase (Atari, 1975)

First six-player one-button horse racing game? Each player tries to jump the pickets to reach the finish line first, competing with each other as well as the meticulously-computer-controlled white horse who never misses a jump (but runs less quickly).
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http://unmamed.mameworld.info/no_cpu.html#Steeplechase

Wasn't my type of game when I was a kid then seeing it in arcades, but good to know it is now emulated. I recall someone had posted way back around 2002 or maybe 2003 on old MAME.net forum asking if Steeplechase were possible to be emulated in MAME. It wasn't possible then and wouldn't be until the cpu support in MAME was eventually changed where all components on a pcb including cpus would be treated as devices. And that was just the initial start...more still needs to be done in MAME first before other non-cpu games are supported in MAME.

Had this game been made/marketed in 1990s or had the ticket redemption concept been around for video games in 1970s, Steeplechase likely would have been Atari's first ticket redemption video game imo.

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Also new in this release:
•Configurable video options (anti-aliasing, vsync, status bar visibility)
•Fixed crash on exit
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Thanks for fixes and feature additions.