The runaway success of Atari's 1979 B&W vector game ASTERIODS spawned two sequels - ASTEROIDS DELUXE in 1980, and the full-color SPACE DUEL in 1982.  (And then, of course, there was 1987's BLASTEROIDS, but the gameplay was radically different from its predecessors since you now had power-ups, "transforms", a "Boss Alien" that took about 200 shots to destroy, and a game that ended.  It doesn't count.)  ASTEROIDS DELUXE was basically just a variation on the theme, with a couple of new enemies to contend with, asteroids that rotated as they drifted through space, and harder gameplay to stymie the "Vid-Wizards" who'd been racking up stratospheric scores and marathon-length games on the original by exploiting the software's behavior (such as the infamous "saucer-hunting" technique) in ways Atari's designers hadn't anticipated... but SPACE DUEL added full-color graphics, some significant new challenges, and offered a more interesting gameplay by allowing two players to either compete, or cooperate, simultaneously.  It's too bad that they also changed the "asteroids" from jagged rocks to spinning geometric shapes - somehow, blasting your way through a field of drifting Space Cubes just doesn't seem the same...

These pictures were taken just after I brought the game home, before I cleaned it up and repaired it.  It looks better now - but unfortunately, it's also tucked into my "arcade lineup" now, and much harder to take pictures of because of the size and shape of the room my games are in.  What can I say, this apartment has a weird floor plan.

This, too, was rescued from the auto-salvage yard in Bertram, TX along with my ROBOTRON (go there to read the story), making it game number six in my collection.  Unfortunately, this was a much more complex repair than ROBOTRON – the vector monitor had died, as vectors are prone to do, and needed some significant repair work to resurrect.  Unfortunately, you can't just go out and buy a new one, because they don't make these things anymore, and haven't for at least 15 years... and, just to make a vector collector's life really interesting, Wells-Gardner doesn't even have any old-stock parts for these (apparently, it all went to Atari, and who knows where it went after Atari crashed, changed hands, and re-invented itself as a PC-and-game-console software-only company...), so you're on your own when it comes to tracking down replacement parts.  Fortunately, the Internet is full of collectors who've been down this road before, and have all kinds of helpful information; there's even a mailing list devoted specifically to vector-game collectors.

Get a load of this – 20 years old, and only 1,096 games played!  This must've conked out on the original owner, whoever they were, not too long after they got it, since this game is in far too good a condition for the coin counter to have rolled over from 100,000+ plays.

Can you believe this?  Someone actually used the back of this game as a sign board!!   At least they had enough sense to take the schematic sheet off the inside and use that side of the board, so this desecration doesn't show when the game is buttoned up.  But still... if this game could talk, it would probably be uttering Rodney Dangerfield's famous line, "I'm tellin' ya, I don't get no respect at all..." right about now.

I believe my first encounter with a SPACE DUEL was at an arcade in Clearwater, FL.  (I don't remember the name off the top of my head – it was some privately-run establishment, not a chain like Aladdin's Castle or anything – but I do recall it was somewhere in the shopping center behind Countryside Mall.  I doubt it's still there, though...)  These, too, are highly sought-after by collectors, particularly because their higher-than-usual breakdown rate means that a lot fewer of the old vector games are still around, operational or not - scoring a SPACE DUEL in as good a cosmetic shape as this one was, for a mere $15, counts as a major coup.   Even counting the $100 or so I spent in repair parts for the monitor, this game was a steal.

Each player has an independant set of controls – left and right "ROTATE", "FIRE", "THRUST", and "SHIELD."  The button colors correspond to the color of your ship on-screen; for a single-player game, only the red controls on the left-hand side are used.  There are also two lighted pushbuttons (which don't show up well in this picture) in between the player controls, named "SELECT" and "START"; these are used to choose the kind of game you wish to play.

The game-selection screen appears after you insert the first coin.  The "SELECT" button on the control panel will begin blinking; press it until the white flashing border surrounds the game type you want - 1 or 2 players, single-fighter (competitive) or joined "Space Station" (cooperative) mode – then press "START" to begin play.

Wave 1 is fairly simple, pitting you against a handful of rainbow-colored "spinners."  The gameplay here is pretty much the same as ASTEROIDS – shoot the large spinners and they break in two medium ones; mediums break into two small ones, and small spinners disintegrate when hit.  Occasionally, a red or green Spark will come out and take potshots at you or the Spinners.  In the single-player Space-Station mode shown here, both linked ships are controlled by the red controls, rotating, firing, and throwing up their shields simultaneously – but only the RED ship's thrusters are active, so when you hit the "THRUST" button, the green ship will be yanked around as if it were attached by a towing cable.  This requires you to exercise a certain amount of caution; if your linked ships are drifting through space in one direction and you try to thrust in another, you can wind up spinning around like a bola until the red ship's thrusters succeed in overcoming both ships' inertia and momentum.  Worse, you could even end up swinging the helpless green ship right into the path of the object you were trying to run away from.  It takes a bit of practice to control a Space Station!  This, plus the fact that you're now a bigger target for the enemies to hit, is the trade-off you pay for the Space Station's increased firepower.

In two-player Space-Station mode, each half is controlled independantly, and both sets of thrusters are active... which can cause all kinds of problems if you and your teammate start trying to drive your respective ships in opposite directions!

This is your Space Station...

...and this is your Space Station about to go *BOOM!*

When two ships are linked as a Space Station, the pair can withstand one hit on either ship before being destroyed.  Whichever ship is struck will be crippled; it will only rotate and thrust at half of its normal speed, and will only fire one shot at a time instead of the usual four.  In a single-player game, the rotational speed limit will end up applying to both ships since they have to rotate in sync, but the undamaged ship will still be able to fire four shots to the crippled ship's one.  Whether or not the thrust-speed is restricted depends on whether it was the red or green ship that took the hit.

A second hit starts a chain reaction up the yellow linkage from the stricken ship to the other, destroying both - although you do have a couple of seconds to try and take revenge shots at whatever hit you.  Note that the yellow link itself is not vulnerable to being hit; enemy objects or shots will pass right through it.  Also note that in Space-Station mode, the red and green ships cannot shoot each other, even in 2-player mode.

On the other hand, if you're playing in 2-player Fighter mode, not only do your ships operate independantly, but you can also shoot each other as well as the enemy objects.  Being shot by your opponent does not cost you a life, however; rather, your ship will blink and disappear, then reappear randomly in a different location a moment later.  Your opponent will score 500 points – but you may also reap a benefit, because your "new" ship will come with a fresh, fully-powered shield.  This can be a potentially useful strategy if your shields are about to collapse and the other player is in a position to shoot you before other nearby objects collide with you.  If one player loses all of their ships before the other one does, their ship will continue to reappear as a "crippled" ship until the other player loses all of their lives.

After you've cleared each level's field of geometric targets, you enter a bonus round which Atari's flyer calls the "Onslaught Wave."  A flashing border appears around the screen, which serves as a boundary to prevent your ship from wrapping around the edges, and a squadron of Fuzzballs and Stars begin closing in on you.  You get a bonus for each one destroyed during this round - which lasts for about 15 seconds or so, and ends when the rising siren tone in the background reaches its highest pitch (or when all the targets have been destroyed.)  Your ship will bounce off the boundary walls, but your shots do not; nor do the enemy objects.

As you progress through the waves, new target shapes appear - Octahedrons, Cubes, Pentagons, Books, 8-Pointed Stars, and Hexagons.  The changes are merely cosmetic; they all have the same point value and do the same things as the Spinners.  You also have to contend with increasingly-frequent attacks from Saucers and Sparks, plus the appearance of Mines, SuperSparks, Stars, and Fuzzballs, all of which become more numerous as the game progresses.  The Mines are particularly irritating because they're fast, hard to hit, and require multiple shots to destroy (a single hit just makes them change color and slows them down for a couple of seconds) – and for all that effort, they're only worth 100 points.  Frankly, I wish someone would release a patched ROM set with the stupid things removed...

The SPACE DUEL Operator Information Display.  This gives you all kinds of information about the current DIP switch settings, how long the game's been operational, how many seconds of operation time have been spent in 1-player and 2-player modes, and the average length of the games...  Most of these statistics aren't of much use or interest to a private owner, of course, but arcade operators like to know these kinds of things so they can decide whether or not they need to change the difficulty level on the game – on the one hand, if it's too hard, people will quit playing it, but on the other hand, operators don't like it if the game is so easy that people can routinely tie up the machine for a half-hour at a time on a single quarter...

SPACE DUEL is a very well-educated machine; it can speak English...

...French...

...German...

...and Spanish.

The SPACE DUEL game-logic board.  SPACE DUEL runs on a 6502 microprocessor running at 1.5MHz, with a pair of Atari's POKEY chips supplying the sound and a custom chip – the Atari Vector Generator, or AVG – to handle drawing and scaling the graphics.  POKEYs are, of course, no longer being manufactured, but fortunately they (a) don't seem to be too terribly prone to failure, and (b) aren't too hard to come by if you put your mind to it, since Atari used them in just about everything they made; you can even salvage one out of an old Atari 8-bit computer such as the 400, 600XL, etc.  The AVG (which Atari's documentation simply calls an "address controller", even though it does much more than that!) is harder to come by – but fortunately, a videogame-collecting engineer named Clay Cowgill has devised an AVG Chip Replacement daughterboard that plugs into the original socket and does the same job.  You da man, Clay.

The source of all this game's troubles - the deflection board from the Wells-Gardner "Quadrascan" monitor (or the WG-6100, as it's more commonly referred to).  Vector monitors give cool displays, but they're notoriously unreliable - the color monitors in particular.  The biggest Achilles heel of the WG-6100 is its low-voltage regulator section, which has been known to burn out just from looking at it wrong.  Fortunately, there's a fix for this, too - the LV2000 low-voltage regulator daughterboard, designed by Anders Knudsen.  Another excellent fix for this monitor is the "Get-Well Kit" sold by Zanen Electronics.  Unfortunately, Zanen doesn't seem to have a web presence, but you can find contact information and a list of available kits here.

Another collector, by the name of Clay Harrell, wrote an excellent document on performing these repairs and upgrades.  Not only are his instructions much clearer than the ones included in the Zanen kit, he also discusses how to replace and upgrade some components which aren't included in the Zanen kit (which is based on the original P314 revision, not the later P327 or P339 revisions) which can increase the monitor's reliability.  Since the site which originally hosted this document no longer seems to exist, I have mirrored a copy of it here.

I also owe my friend Matt McCullar a debt of gratitude, for spotting my bonehead error in performing Clay Harrell's upgrade procedure – I thoughtlessly used nonpolarized ceramics for the 1uF capacitors, instead of polarized tantalums.  (Though in my defense, Clay's parts list doesn't actually specify the type of capacitor...)  You woudn't believe how that seemingly simple error will trash the display!  It didn't damage anything, but the picture was somewhat psychedelic, to say the least...

A view of the Wells-Gardner monitor from the back of the cabinet.  I didn't think to take pictures of it while it was out of the cabinet for repair, unfortunately.