Welp. I did it. I threw in the towel and (mostly) vibe-coded an entire game.
I have mixed feelings about “vibe coding” and I won’t go into my grievances with it. But what I will say is that it was a lot of fun. And I was able to complete this thing in roughly a week – this would have taken me a few months or more if I didn’t have the assistance of AI.
Along the lines of the other classic games in the arcade here, this is about as close to accurate as I could get. Sprites and sounds were all ripped from the original. And between watching videos, playing the MAME version on my laptop, and pouring through a ton of online documentation, I was able to bake in about 95% of the details of the real thing.
I’m treating the scale of this one a bit different from the others because I wanted to showcase the crazy cabinet set up of the arcade version, which uses a reflected image of the game onto glass in the cabinet. Behind that are two background layers (moon and space). And there was a gel sticker applied to the glass/screen in there somewhere to fake different colored sprites, which, if I recall correctly, wasn’t a capability of these machines at the time. I think I got the cool 3D and translucent effect copied pretty well.
I hope you have fun playing it. And don’t forget, all of these games have gamepad support!