Tag Archives: robotron

The Robotron: 2084 Challenge

Posted on by
Reply

John Walti showed up last Wednesday for our Robotron: 2084 tournament. I may have had a slight home field advantage since I’m familiar with the particular quirks of my Robotron, so we played his choice of rules. Difficulty level 7, extra man every 20k points, winner of 2 out of 3 games wins the match. To limit the time, the winner of the first game was defined as the first player to reach 1 million points, the winner of the second would be the first to reach 2 million, etc. We managed to complete two games in under two hours, thanks the point limits. I was quite pleased to win the first two games; the first just barely and the second by a slightly larger margin. It was very tight though and he was ahead of me as often as I was ahead of him.

Robots and Robotron

Posted on by
Reply

I’m finally within sight of being mostly caught up on a lot of the work around here. Susan and I managed to find time to make two DSO performances in January. I might even have enough free time to keep my weblog up to date or work on a few non-work-related projects during February.

Work on the DPRG‘s non-profit status continues. We received our certificate of incorporation from the State of Texas this month. The next step is filing the 501(c)3 application with the IRS. The Tuesday night RBNO meetings at the DPRG World Headquarters (aka the “warehouse”) continue to grow in popularity. We now have two live webcams and an IRC channel during the RBNO.

I had to squeeze in a little time during January to open up the Robotron: 2084 cabinet and tune up the joysticks. A fellow VAPS member has challenged me to a game. This is the first time in 15 years or so I’ll be playing against another expert level player. In the 80’s I don’t think anyone could beat me – but I’m a bit rusty these days, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

I’m thinking about updating the Robotron logic board to the slightly newer blue ROMs from the yellow/orange ROMs I currently use. At one time this would have been a simple matter of going to any of dozens of Internet ftp or web sites that offered the ROM images for download and then burning a new set of EPROMs. But it appears there has been some sort of crack-down on arcade game ROM images online. Several fellow collectors emailed me the ROM images but it’s sad that this has gotten so much harder than it used to be.