Returning to the Moon

If you thought this was Stern’s Moon War you wouldn’t be too wrong

That’s MoonWar, as it’s been emulated in MAME for several years now, and if that was all I was going to tell you then this would be a pretty boring update wouldn’t it?

There are a few things about MoonWar that never quite added up. Firstly, the original boards / roms are all marked as MW2, leading to several people buying them, thinking it was a sequel to the game in MAME, only to find out it was exactly the same game, with exactly the same titlescreen.

A few years ago another board marked MoonWar turned up, but this time it was a Frenzy board, Stern’s old hardware, not related in any way to the hardware on which the known version of MoonWar ran on. Sadly, the only thing populated on this board were the Speech roms, for the S14001A sound chip which Berzerk, and Frenzy used for speech. Sure enough, the roms contained speech clips which sounded like they could be from a game called ‘Moon War’, but there were no other roms, and the whole thing looked like it was probably just some one-off prototype that was lost forever.

This left as many questions as answers, because the Frenzy hardware is vastly inferior to the hardware that the known MoonWar game ran on and definitely wouldn’t have been capable of running a game resembling the known game. Frenzy was also released in the same year as the known MoonWar game, and only a year after Berzerk which didn’t exactly leave a large timeframe for the development of two ‘MoonWar’ games, so what exactly was this mysterious board, and did Stern really make 2 MoonWar games?

Yesterday that question was finally answered. Team Europe & Volker Hahn dumped a Frenzy board which was missing it’s sound roms. That board turned out to be running MoonWar. The existing game in MAME really is a sequel, hence the MW2 markings. Stern probably weren’t happy with how limited this game on Frenzy hardware looked, so just aborted the project before giving it a wide release. By combining the old ’speech only’ and the new dump which was missing the speech roms we appear to have a complete set. As you can see from the screenshots below, it’s a significantly less advanced looking game than the previously known MoonWar (and it really was developed in the same year) but unlike the ’sequel’ / released game it’s full of Speech just like Berzerk was, it’s a shame they didn’t include any of that in the sequel!. There’s even a nice little Evil Otto reference in there.



It uses some kind of analog dial for rotation of the player ship, which I haven’t quite managed to hook up correctly yet (I can only rotate in one direction) Other than that it an be played. My only concern is if there is a mismatch between the program roms and the speech roms, because the speech sometimes talks about ‘Hyperflip’ and I haven’t worked out what it means yet. (although I have warped from one side of the screen to the other sometimes, so it might just mean that)

Another rare piece of history uncovered anyway, such things always bring a smile to my face especially when they just turn up out of the blue like this.

hear is an audio recording of it running in MAME, for those interested.

The same guys also dumped a very rare version of Berzerk with German speech. It’s a different code revision (appears to be based on the ‘new’ rules found in the parent set) Somehow the Robots sound even more intimidating when they speak in German! You can here that hear. It’s been a very good week!



Source:mamedev.emulab.it/haze/