TomCat

Atari · 1983

by Daniel Ferrer

Details

Original hardware

Atari dual 6809 + mathbox, AVG

Romset

roms/tomcatsw.zip

Controls

The stick is the flight yoke; the four buttons fire, and button 4 also inserts a coin. Hold button 4 at launch for the options screen. On the web: the arrow keys, and Z, X, C, V for the buttons.

Analog controls

✓

Last update

2026-11-08

Changelog

1. v1.12026-11-08
   • The romset can live in any folder of the card. The game looks in .roms/, then roms/, then searches the whole card, and remembers where it found it (.conf/<romset>.loc), so the next start goes straight there; if it is moved, it is searched for again.
   • Settings go in .conf/ and romsets in .roms/: the UVMC2's menu hides folders whose name starts with a dot, so the card shows only the games. A card set up before keeps everything: the old config/ and roms/ are still read, and nothing is written to them any more.
   • Without the romset on the card the screen says ROM FILE NOT FOUND and the name of the zip it wants.
2. v1.02026-11-06
   • First release, on the console for the first time.
   • The whole picture: the command list was too small for this machine and half of every frame was being lost. It now runs at 300 MHz with Star Wars' drawing path, and nothing is dropped.
   • The FLIGHT INSTRUCTIONS page is left out of the attract, as in our Star Wars: its text alone did not fit the console. The coin wording says what to press instead.
   • The high-score table at the size of the rest of the text. The prototype drew its entries twice as large, over the title (MAME shows it the same way).
   • The arcade's screen, checked against MAME, fitted to the tube; an options screen at start, after the Vectrex Studio intro, with the screen vertical or horizontal.