More finds from the dig. This time the animation sequence of an unused flying saucer thingy.

For reference, here is what David Theurer/Atari eventually settled on. A simple iconic design that only requires a handful of vector commands to draw.

The final group of unused player ships is something else again. Definitely not a claw, but has claw-like properties!

This second group is much more recognizably #tempest. They have a lot of detail that was later dropped though.

I think these are all in the same family. They kind of look like stages in an animation, but they don't at all resemble the player's ship that was used eventually. They are obviously much more complex articles than the final product!

To make it posh and proper will require a lot more twiddling of these particular knobs. The descriptions I've added: I'm making it look like I have them fully figured out. I don't - they interact with each other in sometimes unexpected ways. It's tweak-and-build until it looks right I'm afraid.

This means we can start meddling with the source to see what happens. The natural place to start is with the levels. Someone did this back in the 80s, they disassembled the ROMs and figured out how to add completely new 'tubes'. The full story of 'Tempest Tubes' is here: https://arcarc.xmission.com/Web%20Archives/ionpool.net%20(Dec-31-2020)/arcade/tempest_code_project/TempEd/tubes/tubes.html. My first instinct is to add the webs from Tempest 2000. So let's do that. This is the result when I drop in the first 16 T2K web definitions without any real tweaking.