Robotron: 2084

The enemies in the game are called Robotrons and there are five different kinds of them: Grunts, Brains, Enforcers, Tanks and Hulks. There are also three different kinds of human family members who must be rescued including women in pink dresses, men in blue suits and boys in red shirts.

Each kind of Robotron has a different way of attacking you and also different point values. Points are also scored by destroying the missiles that they fire at you, by destroying other enemies that appear during each wave and by saving humans.

• Grunts (100 points) do not shoot but they will attack in large numbers.
• Brains (500 points) can fire Cruise Missles (25 points) at you and turn humans into Progs (100 points).
• Spheroids (1000 points) can create Enforcers (150 points) which fire guided mines (25 points) at you.
• Quarks(1000 points) will create Tanks (200 points) that will try to run over you or fire Bounce Bombs (25 points) at you.
• Hulks are indestructible and will kill humans as they approach. Your blaster will only halt them as long as you are shooting them.
• Obstacles such as Electrodes in your path can be removed by firing at them with your blaster.
• Humans are worth an increasing point value. The first human scores 1000 points, the second is worth 2000 points and so on until the point value reaches 5000. The point value will remain at 5000 for all the remaining humans in the same wave. When the wave is completed or you have been killed, the points awarded for saving another human will be reset to 1000.

During each wave, you must destroy all the Robotrons (with the exception of the indestructible Hulks) and rescue as many human family members as possible in order to proceed to the next wave. When you complete wave 255 it will appear as if you just started the game! Wave 1 starts it all over. Your score will be unaffected.

There is a bug in Robotron that can make the game crash when you shoot into the corners. This is said to be avoidable by turning the fancy attract mode of the game off.

In wave five, the first brain wave, a mistake in the brain's algorithm can help you gain a vast amount of points. There is one Mikey with lots of Mommies. However, the mistake in the algorithm causes the brains to seek out Mikey rather than the Mommies. Therefore, if you can keep the brains from getting to Mikey without picking him up yourself (at least until you rescue all the Mommies), you stand to gain a huge amount of points (up to 5,000 points for each Mommy).

During the tank wave, try to avoid shooting the tanks shots for as long as you can. If the tanks fire 20 shots that do not hit anything, the tanks will cease firing.

There is an easter egg hidden in the game with the games credits. To exploit this easter egg, you must execute the following commands during gameplay

1. Move the "move" joystick right and the "fire" joystick up and press the one player start button.
2. Move the "move" joystick up and the "fire" joystick down and press the two player start button.
3. Move the "move" joystick down and the "fire" joystick up.

When the last sequence has been entered, the credits will be displayed until the "fire" joystick is moved from the up position. These sequences must be done within a quarter of a second of each other. You can hold a sequence as long as you like, but when you let it go, you must execute the next sequence within a quarter of a second.

The game was programmed by Eugene Jarvis.

The unique dual-joystick control was created because of two occurrences: Jarvis liked the game Berzerk, but hated the joystick and button run-and-shoot configuration, and the fact that Jarvis's right hand had been broken in a car accident shortly after he finished creating Stargate.

The human characters in this game are named Mommy, Daddy and Mikey. The idea and the inspiration for the character Mikey was from the 1970's commercial for Life cereal.

By swapping the twelve program ROMs and the one sound ROM, Robotron 2084 can be made to play Joust, Stargate and Splat without any hardware modification other than to the controls. With a little more work you can add Defender, Bubbles and Sinistar.

Play the game online requires Shockwave at www.shockwave.comswcontentrobotron

The ROM revisions are as follows

Yellow Orange

• The default difficulty is 5.
• The demo calls the Quarks "Cubeoids".
• The default high score is 131682.

Blue

• The default difficulty is 3.
• The default high score is 151782.
• The "shot-in-the-corner" bug is fixed.

A common problem with Robotron machines is that the game resets when powered up. This is due to the 5v dropping too low on the CPU board. This can be fixed by reflowing solder, replacing connectors or just cleaning the bent connector pins.