What are the "lost" Ultimate arcade games?

[MrCyan]

Sleuthing is fun. I did some searching through the roms:

Dingo

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ASHBY COMPUTERS AND GRAPHICS LTD. 12 THE GREEN ASHBY-DE-LA-ZOUCH LEICESTERSHIRE LE6 5JU ENGLAND TEL (0530) 411485
CHRISTOPHER STAMPER. JOHN LATHBURY. TIMOTHY STAMPER. CAROLE WARD.
COPYRIGHT 1983 ASHBY COMPUTERS AND GRAPHICS LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Just for completeness - of course it's also clear onscreen.

Blue Print

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CHRISTOPHER STAMPER. JOHN LATHBURY. TIMOTHY STAMPER.

Check Man

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COPYRIGHT 1982 DUNCAN SHORTLAND PETER HUGHES ZENITONE MICROSEC LTD *
PETER HUGHESDUNCAN SHORTLANDMALCOLM MAILERCOPYRIGHT 1982ZENITONE/ZILEC    MUSIC BY ROBIN CARTWRIGHT

Cash Quiz

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MALCOLM J MAILER

Wizz Quiz
Nothing of note.

Merlin's Money Maze
Nothing again.

Vortex

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AHMBPUERS  LSATT
C:CJHORHIN"C

which is probably nothing, really.

Reaktor
Again, nothing.

Phantoms II

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JOHN LATHBURY
CHRIS STAMPER
NORMAN PARKER
DAVE SWIFT
LEN PARKS

aka Enigma II; and if you play that version in MAME you get colour, too. These names are also at arcade-history.com, which I think is the source for the history.dat file that works with MAME frontends.

Grasspin

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CHRISTOPHER STAMPER,JOHN LA

Saturn

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THIS GAME SYSTEM WAS DESIGNED BY EXODIS LTDFOR ZILEC ELECTRONICS
EXODIS LTD. UNIT 2, 146 HIGH STREET, BURTON ON TRENT STAFFS. ENGLAND
JOHN LATHBURY,CHRISTOPHER STAMPER,TIMOTHY STAMPER
_THIS PROGRAMME WAS WRITTEN EXCLUSIVELY FOR ZILEC ELECTRONICS LTD BY A.W. ELECTRONICS.(C) MCMLXXXIII ZILEC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

And so, might as well check Gyruss

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PROGRAMED BY TOSHIO ARIMA CREATIVE BY YOSHIKI OKAMOTO CHARACTER BY HIDEKI OOYAMA SOUND BY MASAHIRO INOUE WE ARE MAKED TIME PILOT 

Well that's not mincing words. Though just to keep the dream alive, a comment by 'sho' at The Digital Antiquarian links to an article in Home Computing Weekly and notes the picture of a storyboard which indeed has an "uncanny resemblance" to Gyruss.

[Rorthron]

I raised the subject on WoS a few years back and there was a little discussion of it there:

https://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/ ... 6/dingo/p5

[Juan F. Ramirez]

A very interesting read, rev!

[djnzx48]

Apparently they also made something called 'Zog', which I can't find any references to other than one from Leigh Loveday.

(Note, btw, at 3m in that video, some short bursts of some music you may have heard in another arcade game. Buggered if I can put my finger on it at this exact moment.)

Sounds like it's from Wipe Out.

[zxade]

Sleuthing is fun. I did some searching through the roms:

Vortex

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AHMBPUERS  LSATT
C:CJHORHIN"C

which is probably nothing, really.

Apparently there are two developer credits, interleaved, in the main CPU at 0x47D8:

JOHN LATHBURY
CHRIS STAMPER

You can probably see that if you rearrange those groupings you found, (a few final chars appear to be missing for John Lathbury...)

C:CJHORHIN"C S LSATT AHMBPUER

[Ralf]

Interesting stuff. I didn't realise they were so much involved in arcade machines.
That explains the arcade quality of early Ultimate games like Psst, Cookie and Jetpac.

And they were always a bit mysterious people, not willing to talk much about their work.

[5MinuteRetro]

And they were always a bit mysterious people, not willing to talk much about their work.

Indeed. And still. Tim Stamper appeared on Twitter for just a few months back in 2015, then mysteriously went quiet. It was an interesting few months, though:

[DouglasReynholm]

Another clue perhaps - I just fired up MAME and ran the Grasspin ROM and it runs off the blueprnt.cpp driver, which means the hardware will have been almost, if not completely. identical to Blueprint's. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they had the same authors (though @MrCyan 's stirling work above shows this is true in this case), but is another data point to consider for the other titles, I I haven't looked at any of them though.

[Firefox]

Indeed. And still. Tim Stamper appeared on Twitter for just a few months back in 2015, then mysteriously went quiet. It was an interesting few months, though:

It very much looks like Atic Atac 3D at that stage...

I didn't realise they even created their loading screens on graph paper!

[druellan]

I didn't realise they even created their loading screens on graph paper!

I think that is a dot matrix color print of the loading screen