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Bradley Trainer Support in MAME 0.62
TheAlchemist writes "The Bradley Trainer was a modification to Atari's Battlezone arcade game created for the US Army to help train personel in the use of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Supposedly only two of these machines were built, and of the two only one of them is known to exist today. The latest version of the arcade enumator MAME (0.62) has support for the Bradley Trainer, which hasn't been emulated until now. Pictures and more information of the Atari Bradley Trainer be found on this site, and screenshots of it running in MAME can be found here."
Now I need to worry about impressionable school kids in trench coats carrying tanks as well?
Better start carrying a few extra lives with me.
To the actual arcade hardware? It seems like it would be able to run on a standard issue machine of the time. Were there any "trade secrets" involved in the game. If not, then why not mass market the trainer as an arcade machine. It would have recieved my quarter.
it's still illegal to play the rom unless you own the original, which, especially in this case, is highly doubtful.
Would this be a trainer for the same Bradley who's development and general crapness was lampooned by this movie?
MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It emulates hundreds of old arcade games, which you can download and play... if you own the original rom chps.
of the last link have read: Download here!!!
The roar of the tank and the roar of the vid card will cancel each other out.
The battlezone hardware had already been emulated. Supporting this game was just a matter of accounting for the differences. That's why MAME supports over 3,000 games. It's astoundingly good too. Unfortunately I can no longer get a free toobin t-shirt for finding all the letters in the word toobin in the game.
You could always use the highly confused statement as an excuse to play it that states:
"If you do not own this rom, you must delete it from your harddrive within 24 hours of the download."
- - - - - Fear not the reaper, but my shiny white teeth.
I didn't realize tanks had score and high score displays in them! Schweet. :)
You're just lucky michael didn't submit this story....
OK, troll. It's not "yet-another-coin-op-arcade-game", it's a custom US Army military simulation.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I am well aware that mame is for emulating multiple arcade machines. My point was that it has a special modual included in it now that only does 1 machine and can only be used with 1 game. Gotta love red herring threads... Me: The sky is red in the evening. Slashdoter1: its also many other colors Slashdoter2: Its black during nighttime you dumb shit! Slashdoter3: You all should know its blue during the day. RE to #3: Not when its cloudy!
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
The US Air Force is using a modified version of Choplifter originally from the Apple II to train its personnel for the Commanche Helicopter.
"The other tanks do not fire at you, and the only way to end the game is to run out of ammo or shoot a 'friendly' tank or helicopter"
So, uh, this is a faithful simulation of actual American war fighting methodologies?
I mean, you are in a Bradley, flying a US flag presumably.
Right, so who would *dare* to shoot at you?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"enumator"?!?!?! That was painful even by /. standards...
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
Hmmm....makes it tough to claim you have the original ROM.
;)
And I'D know you'd be lying, 'cause I have the second one right here. Yup. For sure.
Maybe they meant "enumerator". I always wanted to enumerate an arcade. (Only every time I went in an arcade, I just kept "enumerating" my losses in quarters...)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
This is all well and good, but I'm not all that interested in playing it. On the other hand, I'd give my left nut to play the unreleased Marble Madness II on MAME.
According to news media logic.
If Doom/Quake = Kids shooting up school
Then Bradley Trainer = Kids stealing tank and demolishing school.
Remember you heard it here first!
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
The 'Bradley Simulator' was more of a test idea to show the brass. IIRC it wasn't actually used to train anyone. Now, the SimNet program (started in mid 80s?) & hardware used by the USAA is quite impressive.
I can't believe no one's mentioned that the Bradley was the subject of a great bit of political and military satire in the movie Pentagon Wars. Very funny and scary at the same time. Well, scary if you're an American.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
If you were a fan, check out pandemic's battle zone II: http://www.pandemicstudios.com/games/bz2/index.htm
It's like starcraft from inside a tank, only better.
And does anyone know of a pc port of the Pointblank that used to ship with SGI's?
A secretive federal court on Monday granted police broad authority to monitor Internet usage, record keystrokes and employ other surveillance methods against terror and espionage suspects.
So now your accusing us of "terror and espionage"??
Here's a link to a screenshot. The US Army (and others) were 'playing' massively multiplayer 3d games LOOOONG before anyone else.
http://www.ets-ne ws.com/virtual.htm
This wasn't training for tank-to-tank battle...
This was for knocking those elusive spaceships out of the sky...bastards won't stand still!
Karma: Excer..ex...excellahhh...realll good (mostly affected by drinking not done in moderation)
"By clicking on this link you stipulate that you own one of the original machines".
Don't be silly. I don't have the simulator. I've got the damned tank in my backyard. It's just that the neighbors got upset last time I blew up their Buick.
http://www.atasite.org/2002apr14.html
Some relevant quotes:
The Turret is controlled by a 'Star Wars' style yoke controller. It turns the guns and lets you change the elevation of the gun. . There are 3 type of weapons - 25mm cannon ; 7.62 mm coaxially mounted machine gun; TOW missile launcher with twin tubes.The upper left of the bezel hold the Range control, and also the magnification switch. The range control sets the height of the gun before you launch rockets or shoot the machine gun. The magnification switch changes your view from 3x to 10x. On the right side of the bezel, there is a switch for arming the TOW missiles. Once you fire these missiles, you can guide them with the 'laser' sights. You can steer the missile into targets, or into the ground if you overshoot the target.At the lower right near the yoke, are 7 buttons for selecting the 'AP' (armor piercing) rounds, or the 'HE' High Explosive rounds. You also have the choice of 'SS' single Shot or 'CF' Continuous Fire modes. You can also switch to the '7.62mm' machine gun also.
The TOW was a wire-guided steered missile. The fact that they programmed that in is pretty cool. Also, different ammo types? I'm impressed. Did the MG and Cannon ammo follow balistic paths?
All I gotta say is: Tanks a lot to all the MAME developers for all the hard work!
*ducks* *runs*
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
except this isn't yet-another-coin-op-arcade-game. Its about custom hardware, running a modified Battlezone ROM to train Bradley gunners in the mid 80s. Semantics I suppose in your world, but the distinction is important.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
I thought the lampoon was this movie.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
eom.
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
IT
is NOT
BATTLEZONE
idiot.
"The other tanks do not fire at you, and the only way to end the game is to run out of ammo or shoot a 'friendly' tank or helicopter"
:)
So, uh, this is a faithful simulation of actual American war fighting methodologies?
-----
the way the persian gulf war went down, the other tanks rarely got a chance to fire at all, and there were more friendly fire incidents than enemy deaths.... so, yeah.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Laugh now. Then wait until some ambulance-chaser files suit against the US government for a school shooting caused by the America's Army video game. :-(
May we never see th
I want MAME to get to work on emulating the degenatron! "Swing from green dot to green dot with your red square monkey!"
That's what I want MAME to support.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I now this is off topic, but im replying to Flarners.
Where do we go to find out this type of news with forums? Kuro5hin? Plastic? Metafilter?
...the controls don't work right yet, and mame.net's webhost has already been down all day on top of the attempted slashdotting.
Well, all I can really say is that I'm sure glad we didn't have any big wars during the 80's, because this is just funny. I'm off now, to download this incredible training simulation and turn myself into a lethal killing machine, able to blow up tanks with single shells.
Yeah, of course they should have kitted it out with a nice 30 inch monitor and nice 3D hardware pushing 4,000,000,000 textured polys a second, with dolby 5.1 sound and authentic hydraulic motion.
Oh wait, this was built about 20 years ago....
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Sure, but they *wouldn't* like the Bradley if it had been constructed without the safety modifications mentioned in the film. Hot aluminum vapor filling the cabin when the tank gets fired upon isn't a good thing...
:-)
Plus, it was originally designed as a fast troop transport and ended up a slower smaller tank after decades of bureaucracy and *billions* of dollars--a huge waste of resources at the taxpayers' expense. Remember the outcry against military cost overruns in the 80s? The Bradley was one of the big reasons.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Only when I played it they called it Battle tank.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
I resent your "in more important news" comment. This is extremely cool news, as the Bradley Trainer has almost been a piece of mythology in video game history. The US military hired this guy to make an enhanced version of Battlezone to simulate tank combat. This isn't an arcade game, it is a military simulator, developed by an arcade game developer. Pretty much everyone interested in classic gaming has wanted to play this, and just about no one has been able to until now.
Personally, I couldn't care less that a new version of FreeBSD came out. Go submit it as a story; don't go and use your "scoops" as troll ammunition. In short, your comment is a straight up troll and should be modded as such.
-Mani
the computer software backup clause only applies to identical backups
The backup law, 17 USC 117, permits some limited adaptations, such as (I'd assume; IANAL) copying the work from a Battlezone board to a computer. And even if the backup law doesn't cover it, wouldn't such copying be covered under the fair-use space-shifting right of the Betamax and Diamond precedents?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I for one found this interesting. If you look beneath the surface, you see a glimpse into history of what was actually being used to train our soldiers during the cold war.
We may live in a world now where this level of application is laughable, but look at the fact that during the 80's this was cutting edge.
With this in perpective, this game was probably much more advanced than the training programs used by the people we were training to fight. Sure, it probably wouldn't have trained people as well as blowing stuff up in the real thing, but this was a pretty large step into modern military training.
I had never heard of this before, so I did find it worthy to be posted here. The re-relase story may not be too interesting, but the idea of early military computer based training is to me.
makes it tough to claim you have the original ROM.
It was a wirewrap, with few if any consequential changes made to the ROM. The diffs from the Battlezone ROM to the Bradley Trainer ROM are a work of the United States government; thus, the XORs from Battlezone to Bradley Trainer are legal to redistribute. (All works created by the US government enter the public domain upon first publication.) If you have a Battlezone board, dump its ROMs and then use the XORs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So can anyone tell me where the best place to download MAME roms? I've found several dead links on websites and P2P searches on kazza and gnutella turn up console roms only. I was contemplating building a mame cabinet with an old slot-a athlon 600 system i built for my father 3 years ago.
new form of /. Haiku?
And you don't have a lieutenant four years younger than you yelling through the headset all the while.
I miss the good ol' days! *sniff*
"This food is problematic."
http://www.tombstones.org.uk
They sell rom sets for the cost of media and shipping. You click on the area of the world you are on and they show you who is availible.
I got all the games for 10 bucks. 3200. But you have to find mame on your own.
Theflatline
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
You must not be familiar with the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It's a test that is administered to recruits. It pre-qualifies them for certain fields.
This friend of mine (a fellow who graduated from high school when he was 21) did not score well on his ASVAB and wound up assigned to a Bradley in Korea. He is a tool. Since leaving the service he has taken a few community college classes and worked his way up to Assistant Manager at Blockbuster.
The parent wasn't a troll, it was an observation, a bon mot. Rocket scientists work on rockets. Morons who can count drive Bradleys.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
I used to play something exactly like that on OpenStep.
anybody still play netreck? it was developed by starfleet academy to train for the nc-1701 series ships.
ricocheting the big square bullets off walls to kill the enemy.
o o-doo-doo-doo-dwup* :)
*chhhh*
*bong*
*bong*
*bong*
*bhgh*
*doo-d
These guys are cheating! They used Wire-frame hack so as to see thru the obstacles to take advantages of others!
Tell that to the British, Canadians, members of the Red Cross, Chinese Embassy workers, and assorted Afghan wedding parties.
If only the USAF had trained with this simulator the bloodshed could have been avoided!
It just occurred to me that Battlezone had to be the very first of the "First-Person Shooter" class of games. You were in a tank instead of on foot, but it's very much the same feel.
Sigh. Has there really been nothing new in video games since the 80's? It feels that way.
That's because the original BattleZone, of which the trainer was a modification, used "stick-figures" or a sort of "wire frame". BattleZone is ,after all, older than dog dirt >:)
Xibalba: My hell. Your hell. Our hell!
... in 1998, called "Battlezone", by Activision. It's homepage is here, there is a downloadable demo too.
Of course, since only two were ever built, that means that there are only two sets of ROMs out there. Since you can't legally play a MAME game unless you have license for the ROM images (which generally means owning a physical set of ROMs, which generally means owning the actual game), there are only two people out there who can actually USE this patch in MAME.
Which makes me wonder how it was written, tested, etc... seems like prima facie (sp) evidence to me that MAME is an illegal product.
Excuse me, mr. Troll, but as a bradley gunner for 3 years, I can say that my ASVAB score was 99 and I chose infantry because it offered me $22,500 for college. I had the entire range of military specialties at my disposal but choose infantry for the college money. Me and my Army funded college degree had a wonderful time blowing things up. There were tons of idiots in the infantry, and tons of intelligent people who were doing exactly what I did -- getting money for education that we couldn't come up with elsewhere.
Keep your trolls to yourself and show some common sense. I'm sure there are even some intelligent Blockbuster assitant managers who would argue with your intimations of intelligence.
MOS : 11M-C2 Bradley Gunner, Dragon qualified
More than 20 years ago IIRC.
When I was a lad (8, 9, I dunno, 34 now) they used to have one of these in the arcade at a resort my parents used to take me to every other year or so (a caravan park in Mablethorpe, UK, if anyone's interested, yes - I was deprived). Forget the awesome graphics & gameplay (for the time), the most fun you could have with one of these was to spread black shoe polish around the periscope bit that you put your head against and wait. Worked every time.
thats how every game in mame works, just like the code that runs rally-x is the same code that ran pac-man that was a hacked puck-man etc etc so on and so forth, they probably just instituted it as a hack of battlezone. just like the 15 versions of street fighter 2.
I grew up in Germany in the 70's and 80's and I remember "Reforger" and "Autumn Forge". One of the main reasons the Bradley failed was it was to fast. It would outrun the Armor and Infantry. Nothing like being in a box surrounded by enemy guns. The Sgt. York was supposed to be the replacement that actually worked but funding was killed on it before it could be produced.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Actually if they used the original code this might work. It started out with a close simulation (for an AppleII) of a helicopter, but had to be modified so the player didn't always crash.
At least thats what I remember from an interview I read in the mid 80s.
Wumpus
I just watched that 2 days ago at my GF's behest. You're right, it would be funny if it were fiction. It's definitely worth watching, especially if you're considering going into the armed forces..
You cannot time/space shift unless you have legal rights to the original copy.
My assumption, "copying the work from a Battlezone board to a computer", assumed that the user was at least in possession of a legitimate copy of Battlezone(tm) software. And unless the user is renting the board (such as in a hypothetical Blockbuster store that carries arcade boards), the user is probably the owner of a legitimate copy and therefore allowed to exercise rights under 17 USC 117.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Commanche would be under Army again though :( Interesting related factoid: the Army has more aircraft than the Air Force does http://www-rucker.army.mil/
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Eh, that's it, I guess. No 300 million dollar unveiling event for this
kernel, I'm afraid, but you're still supposed to think of this as the
"happening of the century" (at least until the next kernel comes along).
Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)"
series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets
and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
-- Linus Torvalds, on releasing 1.3.27
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