Defender (Arcade)

SCORES

Scores - MAME:
 30550 ...........  on 2013-12-08
 26925 ...........  on 2014-12-10

Other scores:
 22250 ...........  on 2014-12-03

Log entries

2013-12-08
• [3232]
  Got the score 30550 in MAME.
2014-12-03
• [4805]
  Got the score 22250. For the first time, I played Defender on the original hardware. Ruben & Bobbie in Copenhagen has a machine, and I struggled with the button layout and got this one decent score after spending a lot of 5 DKK coins...
2014-12-10
• [4850]
  Got the score 26925 in MAME. Theres been quite a bit of Defender going on on the PD MAME machine. Me and Jeppe are narrowly competing for the top.
2015-02-14
• [5063]
  Preparing for my talk at Spilbar on 80s game music and audio technology, I looked into the audio implementation of Defender. It's basically a MC6800 that outputs 8-bit samples to a DAC. All code and data is in a 2048 byte ROM. I've now managed to disassemble and reassemble the ROM and figure out how parts of it works and even write my own replacement ROM with test sounds!
Spilbar recording
2015-02-23
• [5094]
  My newest Defender sound ROM plays a two-channel music loop, specifically a beepy version of the Lost Empire: Immortals theme.
2015-03-11
• [5156]
  This Sunday, I armed myself with a MC6800 manual and Visual Studio, and made a working Defender sound board emulator in C++. It currently only plays the boot sound, because I haven't implemented the full instruction set yet.
2020-02-29
• [10448]
  I found a Defender cabinet at the Brooklyn Barcade. There was a hiscore by a mysterious person 'A' (the name you get if you just press the button instead of entering your initials), and after many quarters, I started getting used to the button layout and stopped accidentally using smart bombs instead of reversing direction. I ended up with no. 1 spot of 'ALL TIME', 22,850.
2020-07-07
• [10894]
  I played a bit of Defender on the MiSTer, but I had trouble with the controls. I need to spend more time setting them up.