Tutankham Prototype from Parker
Brothers. The RLS.1 on the cartridge refers to "Release 1", meaning the
game was considered a completed project. There is one GROM chip on the
board as well as an 8K ROM chip. Parker Brothers was one of the few
companies allowed to produce their own GROMs for cartridges (from a
license with TI), GROM stands for "Graphics Read Only Memory."
The game itself is a very faithful conversion of the 1982 Konami arcade
of the same name. The game play is fast and furious without any flicker
or slowdown, which helps keep it true to the arcade and also much more
entertaining (who wants a slow game that is a flicker-fest?).
Everything you would expect to find in
Tutankham is here: the Flashes, 4 different stages (which have to be
beaten 4
times around before you can claim yourself as victor), bonus lives,
etc. Overall, there are no complaints for this game as
Parker Brothers delivers yet another outstanding conversion to the
99/4A. Although, I guess this should come as no surprise since the
programmer was a big fan of the arcade original!
Something you might notice is how similar the
graphics are to the Colecovision version of Tutankham. The
TI-99/4A and Colecovision used the same graphics chip which allowed
the programmers of both systems to share graphics data. Both the
TI-99/4A and Colecovision versions were in development at the same
time, roughly early-mid
1983.
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