Discs of Tron — Bally Midway (Arcade MAME 30Hz no commentary)

This is gameplay from the arcade game Discs of Tron, the excellent 1983 Bally Midway game based on the 1982 Disney movie Tron.

According to MAME this game only updates the display at 30Hz. This was probably a concession to the hardware at the time in using Tron's high-resolution sprites. Tapper, Spy Hunter, and Timber are other arcade games that have a similar look, with low resolution backgrounds and high resolution sprites — but IIRC those update the screen at 60Hz and have interlaced sprites.

Apparently, Discs of Tron was originally going to be an additional sub-game of the 1982 arcade game Tron, but was cut due to time constraints. Instead it appeared a year later as its own game on more advanced hardware. Also there is a painted cityscape in the background, giving the game an even more impressive visual look.

I thought I might be good enough at this to reach a level with the platforms that travel vertically, and the need to adjust your aim up or down. I'm sure I could get that far on the genuine arcade machine. But I must be out of practice. I wasn't able to quite get there, so you'll need to look at the attract sequence to see those levels.

It's quite tricky to get a good controller setup suitable for playing this game. I have had a spinner, and several arcade sticks, but nothing with trigger to fire. So I built another arcade stick with a trigger and thumb button, which should work well for other directionally-shooting games, such as Frontline, which need you to aim and fire, while also moving your character with the primary stick.

Initially, I had a brief go at recording gameplay, using the built-in MNG + WAV output of the MAME arcade emulator, which I uploaded here:
   • Discs of Tron  (quick snippet  arcade...  
But that method caused a lot of dropped frames, so I aborted that session, and instead did the more traditional OBS window capture for this video.

Wikipedia entry for the Discs of Tron game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discs_o...

Arcade Museum link for Discs of Tron game:
https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videoga...

Wikipedia entry for the original Tron game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(v...)

Wikipedia entry for the movie Tron:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron