Oblast: a better Blasto game for the Commodore 64

Way back (well, six months ago, anyway), when I was wiring up a Gremlin Blasto arcade board, we talked at length about this 1978 arcade game's history and its sole official home computer port by Milton Bradley to the Texas Instruments 99/4A. In the single player mode you run around in a maze and try to blow up all the mines, which can set off sometimes impressive chain reactions, all the while making sure you yourself don't go up in flames in the process.

The TI-99/4A version was the Blasto I originally remember playing as I never did play Blasto in the arcades. (Also, for the record, we're not talking about Sony's unrelated Blasto for the PlayStation which, other than having the voice talents of the late and lamented Phil Hartman, was apparently a traumatic slog both for its developers and the few people who actually played it.) To the credit of its three composite authors, it is a competent and accurate conversion that also adds configurable options, colour graphics and music; in fact, TI's Blasto is probably my favourite game on the /4A, more so than any other cartridge. On the other hand, because it's an accurate conversion, it also inherits all of the original's weaknesses, which admittedly hail from the limited CPU and ROM capacity of the arcade hardware.

So, in that article, I mentioned two future Blasto projects. One is to save my pennies for a custom arcade cabinet to put the board in, though I just spent a cool grand plus on tires which used up a lot of those pennies and I've also got Christmas presents to buy. But the second was to write my own take on TI Blasto and soup it up. This project is the second one from my bucket list that I've completed. It took a couple years of work on it off and on, but it's finally done, with faster action and animation, a massive number of procedurally generated screens, and fully configurable gameplay.

I've christened it Oblast, and it's free to play on your real Commodore 64 or emulator. Let's talk about what's the same and what's different.

Refurb weekend: Gremlin Blasto arcade board

Because my sisters were taking rollerskating lessons and my own rink skills mostly consisted of pratfalling, my mother would occasionally give me quarters for the arcade instead. This was my first introduction to pinball — one of these days I'll have room for my first pin, a Williams Pin-Bot, alongside my Sopranos and ST:TNG machines — and quite a few arcade video games that I later got to play on my Tomy Tutor, Commodore 64 and Intellivision at home.

However, a few games I played on the Tutor first before I ever played them on an arcade cabinet (Pooyan and Loco-Motion come to mind), and one outlier I never played in the arcade at all. Earlier, when we briefly lived in the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles, the first computer I got to ever touch (albeit briefly) was a Texas Instruments 99/4A in the third grade classroom. Among other cartridges it had a brisk and zippy arcade conversion called Blasto from Milton Bradley which never got ported to any other system, and it wasn't until after college that I reacquainted myself with the TI version in emulation. I never actually got to put quarters in one.

A shame, because by then we lived on the mean streets of east county San Diego, California — not far, it turns out, from the corporate office of Gremlin Industries where the original arcade incarnation of Blasto was developed (completely unrelated to the later PlayStation game). I spent most of my childhood and got my bachelor's degree in San Diego, and I still consider it my hometown. Decades later I managed to pick up an original service manual for yuks last year, which sat mostly pristine in my collection, but much more recently an actual Blasto logic board based on an 8080A CPU turned up on eBay.

After waiting awhile for the seller to cut the crap, they finally posted it at a not totally unreasonable price for a completely untested item, as-was, no returns, with no power supply, no wiring harness and no auxiliary daughterboards. At the end of this article, we'll have it fully playable and wired up to a standard ATX power supply, a composite monitor and off-the-shelf Atari joysticks, and because this board was used for other related games from that era, the process should work with only minor changes on other contemporary Gremlin arcade classics like Blockade, Hustle and Comotion [sic]. It's time for a Refurb Weekend.