Talk:Tank (video game)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 05:47, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Back at it with the classics I see. Time for me to get back to work then as well! Indrian (talk) 05:47, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Lead

•  Done"It was the only original title by Kee Games" - Actually, the company's first game, Elimination, was also original. The Atari version, Quadrapong, arrived several months later.

• Good point, clarified that it was the only original title not based on an existing Atari property (calling a 4-player Pong game "original" is true only in the sense that it wasn't a clone of an already-released game)

Development

•  Done"In the early 1970s, the arcade game market was split into manufacturers, distributors, and operators" - This is still the way the business works today. The wording implies something changed at some point.

• Yeah, I was trying to indicate that that was the state of the industry then (even if it's still true now), but I can't think of a non-awkward way or non-implicative way to do it. Changed.

•  Done"Exclusivity agreements, in addition, meant that most distributors were tied to a single arcade game manufacturer" - Not quite. A single distributor could carry multiple lines, but if one distributor in a region carried a particular line, no other distributors would.

• Changed.

•  Done"Tank was the first game to use integrated circuit-based memory—specifically, mask ROM (read-only memory)—to store graphical data, rather than the diode arrays that previous arcade games used or the diode-based ROM of Gran Trak 10 (1974), and it thereafter became the standard for arcade and console video games." - This is an oft-repeated myth, as Gran Trak also used mask ROM, as discussed in Business is Fun and also presumably confirmable by looking at the schematics online. Tank was also preceded by Ramtek's Clean Sweep in this regard.

  Ugh, this is a mess to track down. I think you're right, and it's a myth- the problem seems to stem from the extended operations manual for Gran Trak 10, page 2-15, where Atari describes the ROM as "You can visualize the ROM being constructed from 2048 rows of 8 diode gates each", and does not clarify if this is just a metaphor or if it's actually diode-based ROM. (the spec diagrams just say "ROM", which is super-helpful). Business is Fun, however, claims it's a 74168 ROM chip, which non-reliable hobby websites seem to confirm is the right part number, and sure enough, the 7400 series is a TTL (transistor) chip, not a diode-based one. I've adjusted the text to match, and left an invisible note as to the specifics of the confusion to preempt well-meaning changes in the future.

And that's it. The article is in good shape overall, so I will place it  On hold while these minor issues are worked out. Indrian (talk) 06:14, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@Indrian: Alright, fixed everything, I think. On an entirely different note- I wanted to start working on Star Trek (text game), as it's the earliest game article to not be GA, and I was wondering if you knew off the top of your head of any sources that talk about it. I did a brief search and only turned up [1], which is a great resource with long quotes from the original devs of Star Trek and Super Star Trek, but (a) it's on someone's personal blog and (b) I'd rather not have literally half the article sourced from one web page if I can avoid it. Do you know of anything else? --PresN 16:47, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@PresN:Unfortunately, I don't know of any other source that goes into that level of detail on Star Trek. I believe the information contained therein to be accurate, but as you say from a Wikipedia perspective you cannot verify that the information actually came from Mayfield. If I were reviewing the GA I would not really have a problem with it, but it might not survive an FA source review. Indrian (talk) 16:33, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

I made a few more grammatical tweaks and am now ready to promote. Nice job as always! Indrian (talk) 16:21, 9 December 2016 (UTC)