********* Welcome to Project 64! The goal of Project 64 is to preserve Commodore 64 related documents in electronic text format that might otherwise cease to exist with the rapid advancement of computer technology and declining interest in 8- bit computers on the part of the general population. Extensive efforts were made to preserve the contents of the original document. However, certain portions, such as diagrams, program listings, and indexes may have been either altered or sacrificed due to the limitations of plain vanilla text. Diagrams may have been eliminated where ASCII-art was not feasible. Program listings may be missing display codes where substitutions were not possible. Tables of contents and indexes may have been changed from page number references to section number references. Please accept our apologies for these limitations, alterations, and possible omissions. Document names are limited to the 8.3 file convention of DOS. The first characters of the file name are an abbreviation of the original document name. The version number of the etext follows next. After that a letter may appear to indicate the particular source of the document. Finally, the document is given a .TXT extension. The author(s) of the original document and members of Project 64 make no representations about the accuracy or suitability of this material for any purpose. This etext is provided "as-is". Please refer to the warantee of the original document, if any, that may included in this etext. No other warantees, express or implied, are made to you as to the etext or any medium it may be on. Neither the author(s) nor the members of Project 64 will assume liability for damages either from the direct or indirect use of this etext or from the distribution of or modification to this etext. ********* The Project 64 etext of the ~Beamrider instructions and help file~. Instructions were converted to etext by Peter Karlsson . Original Windows(R) Beamrider help file obtained from the Activision C64 15 Pack was supplied by Fandango and converted by the Basic Bombardier. BEAMRI20.TXT, August 1998, etext #407#. This replaces BEAMR10A.TXT (100). ********* Ride those beams and make it through the matrix alive! BEAMRIDER (c) 1983 1984 ACTIVISION INC. THE GAME A huge beam matrix has formed within the vicinity of your home planet, and beamer ships are at this very moment launching an attack. Your mission is to infiltrate the matrix and annihilate all enemy craft. LOADING COMMODORE 64 OWNERS: 1. Connect the cassette unit to you Commodore according to the User Manual. 2. Place the rewound cassette into the cassette unit, and press PLAY. 3. Press RUN/STOP and SHIFT simultaneously on your Commodore. COMMODORE 128 OWNERS: 1. Switch OFF your Commodore 128, and switch it back on whilst holding down the COMMODORE key. 2. Now follow the instructions for Commodore 64 owners above. NOTE: Full loading instructions can be found in your Commmodore Manual. PLAYING THE GAME JOYSTICK CONTROLS Left = Move left Right = Move Right Up = Fire Energy Torpedo Fire = Fire Laser Bold Beamrider is a game for one or two players and can be started from sectors 1, 5 or 10 by pressing the function keys. Your vessel appears at the bottom of the screen. There are seven different types of beamer ship to be dealt with, the most important of which are the white saucers, 15 of which must be destroyed before one can proceed to the next level. You must also be careful to avoid the indestructable 'Kamikaze' craft. Contact with th eyellow rejuvenators adds another ship to your reserve. However, if shot, the burning debris hurtles towards you and contect then proves fatal. When the 15 saucers have been destroyed, you must attempt to destroy the Mother Ship, which is guarded by swarms of green suicide ships. To destroy the Mother Ship, you have 3 energy torpedos, launched by pressing the joystick forward. A direct hit from the torpedo causes the Mother Ship to explode, and a bonus is awarded according to the level and the number of ships remaining. WARNING: Copyright subsists in all Firebird Software, documentation and artwork. All rights reserved. No part of this sofware may be copied, transmitted in any form, or by any means, hired or lent without the express permission of the publisher. If this program is faulty, or fails to load, please return it to the address below CLEARLY MARKED 'RETURNS' and it will be replaced free of charge. This offer does not affect your statutory customer rights. Firebird Software, First Floor, 64-76 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1PS Firebird and the Firebird logo are registered trademarks of British Telecommunications plc ********* End of Beamrider instructions. Start of Beamrider help file. ********* Beamrider Contents General Description [ 1.0 ] How To Play [ 2.0 ] Scoring [ 3.0 ] Hints [ 4.0 ] Game History [ 5.0 ] Troubleshooting [ 6.0 ] [ 1.0 ] General Description 3-D. Dark. Dangerous. Demanding. A beam matrix of iridescent blue engulfs the distant blackness of EarthSpace. You stand watching. First mesmerized, you now realize the beams carry weapons. Frightening creations in endless configurations. Intriguing to watch, but will you - yes you, dear reader - take action? You will??!! Then roll up your sleeves, mount these beams, and...ride!!! Animated graphics create a 3-D perspective that virtually pulls you into the screen. Pulsating sound effects intensify the constant array of new objects that zip from beam to beam. Beamrider combines tomorrow's technology with designer Dave Rolfe's fantastic imagination to forge the challenge you'll return to again and again! The Restrictor Shield, 99 sectors deep, now surrounds the Earth. You are the Beamrider, on a mission to clear the Shield. There you must demolish an onslaught of alien frights as you dodge from beam to beam. Sector after sector, the deluge deepens... Award Winning! Winner - 1983 "Video Review" Magazine Computer Game of the Year Beamrider won the 1984 ViRA Best Computer Game award for the year 1983. The ViRA is an award given out by Video Review magazine for the most ground-breaking product in a field. Beamrider's three-dimensional graphics were extremely realistic for the time, resulting in a game that was as much fun to watch as it was to play. [ 2.0 ] How to Play Basics How to Start Select number of players by pressing the appropriate number, 1-4, on the keyboard. Select level of difficulty by pressing its corresponding number on the keyboard: Level Begins at Sector 1 1 2 5 3 10 You will immediately be in the Space Station. Its control panel displays your score, two reserve ships, the sector number, the number of enemy saucers in the sector, and three torpedoes. To start the action, move the joystick in any direction. The hatch doors will open, thrusting you through hyperspace to the Restrictor Shield. {Diagram - Number of enemy saucers in sector, Torpedoes, Sector, Sentinel Score, Green Blocker, Chirper, Yellow Rejuvenator, Your Light Ship, Enemy Saucer} Beam Basics The Space Station. Whenever your ship is destroyed or when you complete a sector, you will return via hyperspace to the space station. When you're ready to continue, push the Joystick in any direction. The hatch doors will open and you'll be on your way. Enemy Saucers. There are 15 white enemy saucers in each sector. They all must be destroyed before you can go to the next sector. Every time a saucer is hit, the number in the upper left corner of the screen will count down by one. The Sector Sentinel. When all 15 enemy saucers have been destroyed in a sector, their Sentinel ship will cruise across the top of the beams. Only a torpedo can destroy it. Weapons. Laser lariats are only effective against certain invaders. (See Dangerous Encounters, below). Torpedoes, however, will destroy the first object they meet on a beam. You are only given three torpedoes per sector! Use them sparingly since they are your only weapon against the Sector Sentinel. Yellow Rejuvenators. Occasionally, yellow rejuvenators will float through the beam matrix. Allow them to land on your deck, as each connection will add a bonus ship to your fleet. If you shoot a rejuvenator by mistake, it will turn red from the heated blast. Get out of the way! The wreckage will destroy you on contact. A torpedo will completely destroy a Yellow Rejuvenator. Dangerous Encounters With the first swing of your laser lariat, the white enemy saucers approach. But there's more. As you progress through the Restrictor Shield, a sinister collection of aliens will materialize. A new danger is added with every other sector, up to sector 14: Sector Craft Vulnerable ------------------------------------------ 1 White Enemy Saucers Yes 2 Brown Space Debris No 4 Yellow Chirper Ships Yes 6 Green Blocker Ships No 7 Green Bounce Craft No 10 Blue Chargers Yes 12 Orange Trackers No 14 Red Zig Bombs Yes Only "vulnerable" objects are affected by laser lariats (Saucers and Chirper are destroyed, Chargers and Zig Bombs are deflected.) Everything else can only be dodged, or, in extreme cases, torpedoed. Keyboard Function Key Description F1 Begin new game with same difficulty and number of players. The keyboard can be made to act as a joystick. See the Game Options section for help on configuring your keyboard for use as a joystick. The following keys are used in this game, and should not be reassigned to the joystick functions: - The 1, 2, 3, and 4 keys are used to select the number of players and starting difficulty level. To drop out of a multi-player game without interrupting the other players, press Q on the keyboard when your turn begins. Your score will be omitted and the sequence of play will be adjusted for the remaining players. To begin a new game when the current one is over, press F1. Beamrider will replay at your previously selected difficulty level and number of players. To begin a new game at any time at a different difficulty level or number of players, select Restart Game from the File menu.. Joystick Your Light Ship follows the left and right movement of the Joystick. To fire laser lariats, press the joystick button. To fire torpedoes, push the Joystick forward. [ 3.0 ] Scoring Points are scored each time an enemy Saucer, Chirper ship, or Sector Sentinel is destroyed. Point values increase as you progress to higher sectors. The exact point value for each hit appears in red, briefly replacing your score, the moment an enemy craft is destroyed. Also, if you manage to destroy the Sector Sentinel, you'll receive an additional bonus for each ship in your fleet. [ 4.0 ] Hints Dave Rolfe, programmer of Beamrider Greetings from sector 26 and moving! If you want to make it to the outer sectors, pay attention to these tips. Maintain precise control of your Light Ship by learning to TAP the Joystick to move your ship a single beam at a time. And stay near the center beams so you won't get boxed into a corner with nowhere to run. Zap the white enemy saucers as early in their approach as possible. And check this out: You can hit them when they're slightly off the beam, before they can drop their missiles. When you see a yellow rejuvenator, don't abandon all caution as you move to catch it or you'll likely wreck your ship. If an enemy object is blocking the rejuvenator, you can use a torpedo to blast it out of the way. Then, catch the rejuvenator. But remember, you only have three torpedoes, and they're your only weapon against the Sector Sentinel. And while we're on the subject, when the Sentinel is about to approach, don't sit on the beam you plan to shoot from. Green Blockers will swarm onto it immediately! Instead, wait on a beam you're NOT going to shoot from (like the one nearest the Sentinel's first sighting). As soon as the Blockers are 'locked' onto that beam, zip over to an unblocked beam and torpedo the ship. Last but not least, take time to notice the enemy attack movements. They follow motion patterns that allow you to anticipate many of their moves. [ 5.0 ] Game History Dave Rolfe, Programmer The burden falls upon the survivors to tell this tale of the old days. This was an era of 8-bit processors with 1- or 2-megahertz clocks, and graphics systems so primitive that in some cases the computer had to actually guide the scan down your television screen, line by line. These were game machines that had perhaps 128 or 256 bytes of scratch RAM, and could accept a program ROM cartridge of no more than 4 or 8 thousand bytes. The challenge, in those bygone days, was to use those primitive tools as a platform to create something fun and interesting and maybe a little bit complicated. Into this world was born Beamrider. My name is Dave Rolfe, and I was the primary developer of Beamrider. I'm writing to give you a short history of Beamrider and me (the two are, of course, inseparable). I made the transition from amateur software designer to professional software designer in 1977, when I graduated from Caltech. Being a professional is desirable, because it means that people pay you money, in theory if not in practice. After graduating, I worked for a couple of tiny little companies. You can make a difference at a small company, instead of being just another cog in a large machine - but be warned that working for a tiny little company sometimes pushes the monetary rewards back into the realm of the theoretical. It turned out that this company where I worked was asked to help Mattel build some games for a new game unit. So I visited Mattel and found that their hardware was impressive (for that time), but the software was non-existent. And so I proceeded to develop, from scratch, the protocols and software environment and initial line of games to support what would eventually become the Mattel Intellivision. Between the late 1970's and the mid-1980's, I worked in many areas of game development. After setting up the basic method of Intellivision game design, and writing the Intellivision operating system (the "Exec"), I went on to create four other Intellivision game cartridges and to supervise other apprentice game programmers. I also programmed games for other platforms, including the Atari 2600 and Colecovision, and some of my games were ported to still other game machines. I developed small games, such as prototypes for the Mattel handheld units, and big games, including two arcade games, "Star Fire" and "Fire One". ("Star Fire", released in 1979, was the first arcade game to maintain a high score table which accepted and displayed the name of the winning player. Sometimes I wonder whether this might be my personal contribution to our planet's culture. Not exactly on the level of world peace, but I suppose it's something.) The funny thing is, despite all of the game work I've done, I have never thought of myself a "game person". I am a computer person at heart, and I see games as merely something you can do with a computer. So in the Beamrider days, I was very grateful to be working with Tom Loughry, who is the best game person I've ever known. You'll find Tom's personal history of Beamrider somewhere nearby. It was Tom who came up with the original inspiration for Beamrider, and I'd run screaming to him whenever I needed to kick around a development question about what was "fun". And there were many questions as the game of Beamrider was fleshed out. First the basic game scenario was created: There was a moving matrix of beams with a 3-D perspective. The player controlled his base unit on the bottom (near side) of the screen. The enemy spacecraft appeared at the top (distant side) and then scurried towards the player while dodging left or right across the beams. With that structure in place, the tweaking began. A good strategic balance between the player and the enemy had to be decided upon. How much freedom of motion should the player have? How fast should the enemies move to attack? At what point does the player feel challenged, and at what point is the challenge overwhelming? In an initial version of Beamrider, the player ship was flanked by two pods, one on each side, effectively making the player 3 beams wide. We thought it would be satisfying to control a big ship, but it turned out that it was a sitting duck for enemy fire. We decided to change to the smaller and more maneuverable craft that you find in the released game. There was also much focus on how the enemy craft would attack the player. Tom advocated fixed attack patterns, which would allow the player to watch the enemy and get some sense for the general shape of what he might do next. I favored dynamic computer-generated attack sequences, but experiments upheld Tom's view. In essence, the fixed attack patterns gave the enemy a veneer of intelligence, while simultaneously allowing the player to learn about the smart enemy and then outsmart him. So I spent countless hours developing a series of attack patterns, and then rating and sorting them, so as to present them to the player starting with the easier attacks, and later (if he or she survived), serving up the more vicious stuff. Then I had to invent the other nasties that would show up as the game progressed, just to make life more interesting for the player. First there are the straightforward traps, such as rocks that would simply fall and could be easily dodged. Then we move on to a series of trickier pitfalls, such as Bounce Bombs (which bounce along the beams) and Trackers (which try very hard to fall right on the player) and finally Zig Bombs (which zig (or zag) in such a way as to make the player dodge and then, just when it appears the bomb has been sidestepped, dodge again). Those Zig Bombs could be quite nasty until you got the hang of them! When Beamrider was originally released, customers were encouraged to join the Activision "Beamriders". If a player scored 40,000 points or more and reached at least sector 14, he or she could send in a picture of the TV screen showing the score and receive an official emblem like the one shown above. Photos and letters poured in to Activision, and I liked to read these when I visited the main office. I recall one thankful letter from a man telling of how he had conquered Beamrider and the next day he went in to work and was promoted. There was, it would seem, a connection between these two events, and I sincerely hope that you will have a similar experience when you master the game. NOTE: I'm sorry, but they tell me that the offer to join the Beamriders is no longer valid! The charter Beamriders have, like a well-known starship captain, been retired. There is as yet no next generation, so please do not send correspondence regarding this offer. At this point in time, you can only become an unofficial Beamrider-i -exile. Since the late 1980's, I have worked as a freelance consultant developing software for the IBM PC world. I was a principle programmer for Lotus HAL and Lotus Magellan, and I helped move Lotus 1-2-3 into the graphical era. I have also consulted for Stac Electronics, updating portions of their Stacker disk compression software for the Windows and Windows 95 environments. I'm pleased to report that I am still breathing and ambulatory as of this writing, and I invite you to visit my web page at: http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~drolfe/ I hope you have enjoyed this little lesson in history. See you on the beams! Tom Loughry - Designer "When we first started Cheshire, we had rented office space to get set up. [Ed. Note: see above for more on Cheshire Engineering.] We had rented this large office space that was all open, and eventually we were going to put up walls and build cubicles. Before we could get the cubes built, though, I was designing games." "We had this idea for a game called Beamrider, but all we had when we moved into this office space was that it would be on beams. We didn't know at the time what it would look like, or what the gameplay would be." "One day, I was rolling back and forth in my chair looking up at the ceiling, and I noticed the patterns that the ceiling tile was making and how it looked as I rolled back and forth under it. I used this to help me visualize the gameplay for Beamrider." When asked about why he would imagine things coming down the beams at him, Tom recalled: "A possible inspiration might have been the 6 inch potato bugs that were infesting the majority of Pasadena at the time, and were sharing office space with us for a little while." Tom recently completed working on PGA Tour Golf for Electronic Arts. He is currently working on a brand new game design for EA, which Tom informs us "is something like the 17th product of my career. I lost count a while back..." [ 6.0 ] Troubleshooting How to Start Press 1, 2, 3, or 4 for the number of players. Press 1, 2, or 3 for the difficulty level. Press the controller in any direction to launch into the game. ********* End Project 64 etext of Beamrider instructions and help file. *********