Meteor - an Asteroids Clone

[TrekMD]

Did you know that Mattel had originally made an Asteroids clone for the Intellivision called Meteor?  

Astrosmash started out as a clone of the arcade game Asteroids, called Meteor!. The game wasn't very big, so John Sohl used the extra room in the cartridge to come up with a variation called Avalanche using the same graphics and sound effects. At the last minute, afraid of a lawsuit from Atari, the Mattel lawyers killed the Asteroids-like Meteor!. Rather than risk introducing bugs by deleting code, John simply put a branch around the opening-screen menu straight into the Avalanche! variation, which was released under the name Astrosmash. Very rarely, when there's a glitch hitting RESET, the Asteroids version will show up on screen.

Here is a video of Meteor in action...

https://youtu.be/GZpHkVChkug

It is possible to get the game to work more easily using the jzIntv emulator using the following steps:

Copy astro.bin to, say, "mod_astro.bin". Then, make a text file named "mod_astro.cfg" that contains simply:

[macro]
@p506A 0

You can then run "jzintv mod_astro.bin" and you should have the game menu enabled after the title screen. Press [1] then [Enter] for Astrosmash, or [2] then [Enter] for Meteor.

You can make the modification permanent by running "rom_merge" on the binary:

rom_merge mod_astro.bin astro_meteor.bin

That will write a new BIN+CFG for Astrosmash with Meteor permanently enabled. That should play in any emulator, not just jzIntv.

[Shadowrunner]

I had no idea it started out as an Asteroids clone. Cool story

[zapiy]

Brilliant..

[TrekMD]

It's really cool to see this!  It's too back it was never officially released as its own game.

[vandro]

That's awesome. Although I couldn't believe the first death,  clearly the wrong asteroid to.shoot

[TrapZZ]

Neat, thanks for posting this!  Years ago I used the ECS to access the sprites from the cartridge, but I never could get the 'reset' glitch to work. 

Now I know what I was missing