Why is Aquarius Burgertime so stinkin' rare?

[Rev]

Seriously,there is always 3 to 4 night stalkers on ebay and the last time a burgertime ame up it sold for over 100.how an a game so plentiful on intv be so rare on aquarius!!!!

 

 

p.s. anyone have a spare?

[jaybird3rd]

I think Night Stalker is the Combat of the Aquarius world. If you see an Aquarius cartridge for sale on eBay, about four times out of five it will be a Night Stalker cartridge. It must have been a fairly cheap cartridge to mass-produce, too: Mattel designed a tiny 2600-sized 8K cartridge board with a glop-top ROM (I'm using a picture of it right now as my avatar), and to the best of my knowledge, it wasn't used for any other game. It's kind of cute, but it looks almost silly sitting inside that gigantic empty cartridge case.

 

My guess is that BurgerTime was a late release, and that relatively few copies were made before the Aquarius was pulled from the market. Remember that all the television commercials that Mattel did for BurgerTime were originally supposed to be commercials for the Aquarius: Mattel had bought all that commercial time, and when they decided to kill the Aquarius, they used it for BurgerTime advertisements instead. BurgerTime must have been in development for both the Intellivision and the Aquarius around the same time, since both versions used the same music. If the Aquarius was killed off that close to the Intellivision version's release date, the Aquarius version couldn't have gotten a very wide distribution.

 

I think the Aquarius version is actually a fairly poor port of BurgerTime. They did the best they could with what they had, but BurgerTime is a game that requires very precise sprite movements, where characters have to move close together without touching (such as when you're luring four enemies at once onto a bun), and the Aquarius's character-oriented graphics just weren't well-suited for those types of games. I haven't played it very much, but the character movements seemed too clunky to me, and the default character set didn't give them enough suitable graphics to make it look very good either. One of my crazy ideas for the SuperFont upgrade would be to reverse-engineer the old Aquarius games and to produce SuperFont-enabled versions that would use better graphics, and BurgerTime would certainly be an ideal candidate for that (although better graphics alone wouldn't fix all of its problems).

 

I certainly plan to include BurgerTime in my upcoming multi-cart, so if all else fails, you'll get to play it that way.

[Rev]

I think Night Stalker is the Combat of the Aquarius world. If you see an Aquarius cartridge for sale on eBay, about four times out of five it will be a Night Stalker cartridge. It must have been a fairly cheap cartridge to mass-produce, too: Mattel came up with a tiny 2600-sized 8K cartridge board with a glop-top ROM (I'm using a picture of it as my avatar). It's kind of cute, but it looks almost silly sitting inside that gigantic empty cartridge case.

 

My guess is that BurgerTime was a late release, and that relatively few copies were made before the Aquarius was pulled from the market. Remember that all the television commercials that Mattel did for BurgerTime were originally supposed to be commercials for the Aquarius: they had bought all that commercial time, and when they decided to kill the Aquarius, they used it for BurgerTime advertisements instead. Intellivision and Aquarius BurgerTime must have been in development around the same time, since they both used the same music. If the Aquarius was killed off that close to the game's release date, Aquarius BurgerTime couldn't have gotten a very wide distribution.

 

I think the Aquarius version is actually a fairly poor port of BurgerTime. They did the best they could with what they had, but BurgerTime is a game that requires very precise sprite movements (such as when you're luring four enemies at once onto a bun), and the Aquarius's character-oriented graphics just weren't well-suited for those types of games. I haven't played it very much, but the character movements seemed too clunky to me, and the default character set didn't give them enough suitable graphics to make it look very good either. One of my crazy ideas for the SuperFont upgrade would be to reverse-engineer the old Aquarius games and to produce SuperFont-enabled versions that would use better graphics, and BurgerTime would certainly be an ideal candidate for that (although better graphics alone wouldn't fix all of its problems).

 

I certainly plan to include BurgerTime in my upcoming multi-cart, so if all else fails, you'll get to play it that way.

 

keep us posted on the progress of the multiart!

 

i wonder where we could find sales figures on stuff like this?

[psquare75]

It's rare? I've had it since I was 6.

[jaybird3rd]

I've been looking through the material in the Intellivision Lives! collection, and it actually refers to Aquarius BurgerTime as being "unreleased." This puzzled me, since there are obviously BurgerTime cartridges floating around out there, but perhaps it means that it was never released by Mattel. There could have been a limited number of cartridges manufactured by Mattel but sold later by Radofin, after Mattel handed over the Aquarius rights and merchandise.

 

Interestingly, Aquarius BurgerTime is mentioned ("coming soon!") at the end of the

and

BurgerTime commercials.

[the-topdog]

I've been looking through the material in the Intellivision Lives! collection, and it actually refers to Aquarius BurgerTime as being "unreleased." This puzzled me, since there are obviously BurgerTime cartridges floating around out there, but perhaps it means that it was never released by Mattel. There could have been a limited number of cartridges manufactured by Mattel but sold later by Radofin, after Mattel handed over the Aquarius rights and merchandise.

 

Interestingly, Aquarius BurgerTime is mentioned ("coming soon!") at the end of the

and

BurgerTime commercials.

 

Burgertime was not released in solo form, but only as a pack in cartridge in the "Family Pack" which included the Aquarius Computer, Mini Expander, 16k Memory Cart, and four random games (I have a few ). So even if you purchased this Family Pack, you only had about a 25% chance of getting Burgertime. I is very difficult to find, so I'd rank it about a R8. Chess, Zero In and Melody Chase are even more difficult to find and would be more akin to R9 or R10

 

As for Nightstalker. It is the most common of all commons for the Aquarius... as someone else said, think of it as the E.T or Combat of the Aquarius world.

[psquare75]

Now the cable to hook the printer up on the other hand....

[the-topdog]

p.s. anyone have a spare?

 

Sorry I gave my spare one away to the owner of Reto-Zone.org in the UK a few months ago.

[marcfrick2112]

p.s. anyone have a spare?

 

Sorry I gave my spare one away to the owner of Reto-Zone.org in the UK a few months ago.

 

Nice pic, the-topdog!

Me needs a Burgertime cart for my Aquarius(es)

Why oh why did I not save the boxes from my Aquarius systems?????

[the-topdog]

Too bad this Burgertime cartridge is broken and the controller overlays are missing eBay Auction -- Item Number: 300476894149 (not mine) or this would be a steal of a deal. Without it, the price is a little steep... but if you have a loose Burgertime and need a box, manual and keyboard overlays, you might want to pick this up... you could make over 1/2 your money back by reselling everything else.

[psquare75]

I'd be tempted to trade my Burgertime/box/manual for the cost of a multi-cart

[jaybird3rd]

That BurgerTime cartridge can be easily fixed with a replacement board. One of my new boards, or an old board retrofitted with an EPROM copy, would do the job just fine. The nice thing about Aquarius cartridges is that they open from the back, so you can swap the boards out without damaging the labels.

 

Seeing this thread again reminds me of the "negative review" that I posted earlier of Aquarius BurgerTime (in Post #2). I've spent quite a few hours playing it since then, and my overall impression is much more positive now; it was mainly a matter of getting used to the gameplay and finding new patterns.

[the-topdog]

Seeing this thread again reminds me of the "negative review" that I posted earlier of Aquarius BurgerTime (in Post #2). I've spent quite a few hours playing it since then, and my overall impression is much more positive now; it was mainly a matter of getting used to the gameplay and finding new patterns.

 

Yeah, I simply love the Aquarius port of Burgertime and think it is one of the best of the era. Just my opinion of course.

[jaybird3rd]

Yeah, I simply love the Aquarius port of Burgertime and think it is one of the best of the era. Just my opinion of course.

The hardest thing to get used to was the more coarse movements of the nasties, which comes from the fact that they're limited to one-character increments on the Aquarius. But once I learned new techniques for guiding them and grouping them together, I was able to work out a pattern that allowed me to drop every nasty on every layer of every burger. This, by the way, earns you a total of 66,550 points on the first screen if you also pick up every pepper bonus, including the last one that appears about a second before the end of the level. It's actually easier than coin-op BurgerTime in certain ways because the nasties are more likely to completely overlap each other, if you do it right.

 

The most frustrating thing about the Aquarius version is the nine life and nine pepper limitation, since I can hit that limit fairly easily now, sometimes before I'm even done with the first screen.

[psquare75]

It's probably easier with the keyboard, IMO. I never really use the AQ controllers for anything.

[jaybird3rd]

It's probably easier with the keyboard, IMO. I never really use the AQ controllers for anything.

The Aquarius/Intellivision controllers don't really bother me; I've gotten used to rotating the disc to move around corners, which is the key to playing four-direction games.

 

Even so, I've got a project in mind which will allow some easy replacements for the stock Aquarius hand controllers, but that's in the future somewhat.

[the-topdog]

Even so, I've got a project in mind which will allow some easy replacements for the stock Aquarius hand controllers, but that's in the future somewhat.

 

Aqua-sticks!

[+MattelAquarius]

I've been looking through the material in the Intellivision Lives! collection, and it actually refers to Aquarius BurgerTime as being "unreleased." This puzzled me, since there are obviously BurgerTime cartridges floating around out there, but perhaps it means that it was never released by Mattel. There could have been a limited number of cartridges manufactured by Mattel but sold later by Radofin, after Mattel handed over the Aquarius rights and merchandise.

 

Interestingly, Aquarius BurgerTime is mentioned ("coming soon!") at the end of the

and

BurgerTime commercials.

 

Burgertime was not released in solo form, but only as a pack in cartridge in the "Family Pack" which included the Aquarius Computer, Mini Expander, 16k Memory Cart, and four random games (I have a few ). So even if you purchased this Family Pack, you only had about a 25% chance of getting Burgertime. I is very difficult to find, so I'd rank it about a R8. Chess, Zero In and Melody Chase are even more difficult to find and would be more akin to R9 or R10

 

As for Nightstalker. It is the most common of all commons for the Aquarius... as someone else said, think of it as the E.T or Combat of the Aquarius world.

 

Burgertime and all 1st party titles were sold individually by Radofin through various mail-order companies in the U.S. The two primary sellers were Bentley Industries and Crimac Inc. In fact, Radofin's MO was to license the Aquarius to various companies that would sell the computer under their own name. Some of these companies went as far as to get their name printed on the actual hardware/boxes etc. Others just opted for to leave the Aquarius name by itself.

 

BurgerTime was built and sold by Mattel, but mostly in the Family pack inventory closeouts, as you said.

 

Others like Chess, Zero-In, Melody Chase, and Space Speller were not ever packaged and sold by Mattel (AKAIK). However, it seems the box art and manual design was created, and handed over to Radofin along with all the ROMS, of course. They manufactured and sold them as described above.

[+MattelAquarius]

Seeing this thread again reminds me of the "negative review" that I posted earlier of Aquarius BurgerTime (in Post #2). I've spent quite a few hours playing it since then, and my overall impression is much more positive now; it was mainly a matter of getting used to the gameplay and finding new patterns.

 

Yeah, I simply love the Aquarius port of Burgertime and think it is one of the best of the era. Just my opinion of course.

 

 

I'm with you; I love Aq BurgerTime.

 

For those who haven't seen our discussion of the magical Peter Pepper on the Yahoo User group, Peter is unique among Aquarius graphics.

He actually displays 3 colors in one character block, which is supposed to be technically impossible on the AQ. After some testing, we learned that it is a special graphical effect when you have a black background on the screen, and poke the hat character graphic (which is actually the running man's legs for vertical motion), with a white foreground color and orange background. Somehow, the orange does not fill the entire background area of the character block, only the portion below the "hat." I did the same with white on blue, and he looks like a Smurf. Someday (ahem) I had planned on making a Smurf game with that trick.

 

Is this the result of some NTSC side-effect, or was this deliberately incorporated into the Aq hardware specifically to pull off this game? If you read the BlueSky Ranger's history, they state that the game programmers were asked what they needed in the character set to pull off making games. I wonder if Peter Pepper was a major point of discussion. Without this special effect, Peter looks poor, and the game would have suffered. Check the emulator, which does not recreate the special effect, for an example.

 

If you want to see it for yourself, you can view my Burgertime youtube video here:

I don't mean to keep plugging my youtube channel, but it has been relevant to the discussions. Sorry.

[jaybird3rd]

I'm with you; I love Aq BurgerTime.

 

For those who haven't seen our discussion of the magical Peter Pepper on the Yahoo User group, Peter is unique among Aquarius graphics.

He actually displays 3 colors in one character block, which is supposed to be technically impossible on the AQ. After some testing, we learned that it is a special graphical effect when you have a black background on the screen, and poke the hat character graphic (which is actually the running man's legs for vertical motion), with a white foreground color and orange background. Somehow, the orange does not fill the entire background area of the character block, only the portion below the "hat." I did the same with white on blue, and he looks like a Smurf. Someday (ahem) I had planned on making a Smurf game with that trick.

 

Is this the result of some NTSC side-effect, or was this deliberately incorporated into the Aq hardware specifically to pull off this game? If you read the BlueSky Ranger's history, they state that the game programmers were asked what they needed in the character set to pull off making games. I wonder if Peter Pepper was a major point of discussion. Without this special effect, Peter looks poor, and the game would have suffered. Check the emulator, which does not recreate the special effect, for an example.

 

If you want to see it for yourself, you can view my Burgertime youtube video here:

I don't mean to keep plugging my youtube channel, but it has been relevant to the discussions. Sorry.

I actually looked into this myself, because it was an interesting "trick," and it turns out that it's a very clever use of the way adjacent colors tend to "bleed" together on conventional televisions, especially through an RF modulator.

 

While I was looking around in the program code to get rid of the extraneous characters in the screen border, I found the routine that paints the chef's hat, and it's just an ordinary white-on-orange character, so there's nothing unusual going on in the hardware. The hat is white, its background is orange, and the screen background is black (actually, it's dark gray for some reason, but it looks black on the real hardware because the two colors are so close in the Aquarius palette). Because the contour between the hat and its background isn't as prominent as the contour between the orange and the black, and because the white is brighter and tends to bleed over the orange, the undesirable thin orange line along both sides of the hat seems to disappear.

 

I tested this by comparing the way the chef looks through different displays. The first of these pictures is a photograph which shows him through an ordinary television, and the second is on a Commodore 1702 monitor connected through a VCR:

 

 

As you can see, there's a lot less "bleed" on the 1702, which reveals that the orange background is still there. That also explains why the orange stands out so prominently in emulation, which doesn't reproduce the bleeding effect. You can see the same effect if you take character number 18, a plain vertical bar that is the same width as the chef's hat, and paint it white on an orange background against a black screen: again, the orange seems to disappear if you view it through a regular TV.

 

People really should check out your YouTube channel, by the way: it's a great way to see the Aquarius games in action on the real hardware, which does the games justice much more than running them through emulation. BurgerTime is one example of a game that doesn't look nearly as good in an emulator.

[psquare75]

I should fire up Burgertime on my Samsung LCD to see what he looks like, and take some comparison pics.

[+MattelAquarius]

 

I actually looked into this myself, because it was an interesting "trick," and it turns out that it's a very clever use of the way adjacent colors tend to "bleed" together on conventional televisions, especially through an RF modulator.

 

While I was looking around in the program code to get rid of the extraneous characters in the screen border, I found the routine that paints the chef's hat, and it's just an ordinary white-on-orange character, so there's nothing unusual going on in the hardware. The hat is white, its background is orange, and the screen background is black (actually, it's dark gray for some reason, but it looks black on the real hardware because the two colors are so close). Because the contour between the hat and its background isn't as prominent as the contour between the orange and the black, and because the white is brighter and tends to bleed over the orange, the undesirable thin orange line along both sides of the hat seems to disappear.

 

I tested this by comparing the way the chef looks through different displays. The first of these pictures is a photograph which shows him through an ordinary television, and the second is on a Commodore 1702 monitor connected through a VCR:

 

As you can see, there's a lot less "bleed" on the 1702, which reveals that the orange background is still there. That also explains why the orange stands out so prominently in emulation, which doesn't reproduce the bleeding effect. You can see the same effect if you take character number 18, a plain vertical bar that is the same width as the chef's hat, and paint it white on an orange background against a black screen: again, the orange seems to disappear if you view it through a regular TV.

 

People really should check out your YouTube channel, by the way: it's a great way to see the Aquarius games in action on the real hardware, which does the games justice much more than running them through emulation. BurgerTime is one example of a game that doesn't look nearly as good in an emulator.

 

Thanks for the great pics, and analysis. General consensus at the group was that it was merely a side-effect of RF/NTSC signal, but it was intriguing nontheless. I've seen the orange bleed around the edges of the hat on my tv before, too. Your pics tell me that your future video mod will hurt Peter's appearance. I guess that will just have to be accepted. It was serendipity for Mattel that this effect worked so well for Peter.

[jaybird3rd]

Thanks for the great pics, and analysis. General consensus at the group was that it was merely a side-effect of RF/NTSC signal, but it was intriguing nontheless. I've seen the orange bleed around the edges of the hat on my tv before, too. Your pics tell me that your future video mod will hurt Peter's appearance. I guess that will just have to be accepted. It was serendipity for Mattel that this effect worked so well for Peter.

Based on the limited testing I've done so far, I think the effect will still be acceptable even through composite video, although it will probably be more noticeable through S-Video.

 

The video upgrade, by the way, is the main reason I wanted to get rid of those extra characters in the screen border: they may not be very noticeable through an RF modulator, but they'll stand out more prominently when seen through upgraded video. The version of BurgerTime in the multi-cart will replace those characters with a solid border. I tried making the border the same color as the game background, but I got a very strange artifacting effect between them along the left edge, almost like a hovering green line, so I had to stick with the dark grey. I plan to include the original version as well, so anyone interested in seeing what that looked like will have that option.

 

I think that Mattel's artists had gotten pretty good at using color bleed effects to create the illusion of more colors than they were actually able to use, and BurgerTime may be another example of this. On the Intellivision, for example, they would place red and blue patches of color next to each other, which created a thin line of purple between them. All of these effects inevitably suffer when you view them on something other than a CRT television connected through an RF modulator. That's one reason why real video game purists keep old televisions around, so they can view the games the way they were intended to be viewed. I think it's inevitable that this will become more rare with the passage of time, as the old TVs break down and as people switch to more convenient 21st-century alternatives (such as LCD TVs).

[Tempest]

Why were there extra characters around the border? Programming error? Got a pic?

 

Tempest

[jaybird3rd]

Why were there extra characters around the border? Programming error? Got a pic?

I don't have a picture handy, but I'll try to take one shortly. I haven't looked closely enough to determine exactly why it's happening, but the extra characters seem to be a result of a problem with the routines that set the screen colors.

 

The Aquarius graphics memory is divided into two adjacent parts: there's a 1024-byte matrix for the characters on the screen, and there's another 1024-byte matrix for the colors for each character. To put a character on the screen, you would simply write a character code (0 to 255) in the right location in the character matrix, and you would write a color code into the corresponding location in the color matrix to set its foreground and background color. This is why each character on the Aquarius display could be a different color, with no limit on the number of colors per line. In addition, the character and color in the very first cell (in the upper-left corner of the screen) are also used to fill the screen border.

 

The BurgerTime screen background is black on dark gray, which on the Aquarius is color code 15. This means that every byte in the color matrix has to be filled with the number 15, including the first one, to change both the screen color and the border color. The extra characters in the screen border are this character (one of the running man "walk cycle" characters) ...

 

 

... which happens to be character code 15. I don't know whether the "fill" routine isn't checking its boundaries properly or whether the number 15 is simply being written to the wrong part of the graphics memory, but this character code is somehow being deposited into the first cell in the character matrix, which is why it fills the border. Because it happens to have the same code as the background color, I'm almost positive this was simply a programming error that wasn't fixed. So, I went ahead and fixed it.