Desert Patrol

Arcade Video game published 47 years ago:

Desert Patrol (c) 1977 Project Support Engineering.

One of 3 shooting-type gun games produced by PSE using similar hardware.

Desert Patrol is a timer based, single player game. Players shoot at various aircraft targets flying on screen from left to right or right to left with a mounted machine gun on the control panel. The objective is to successfully shoot down various aircraft targets consisting of planes, jets, and a helicopter within an allotted amount of time. The time setting is operator adjustable with a pot for speeding up or slowing down of how fast the time counts down to zero.

If an aircraft is successfully hit, a figure then appears on the screen as a parachuting pilot. Players have to avoid hitting the pilot or else points are deducted from point total and also the ability to shoot gun is disabled for a few seconds. This is the penalty for shooting down a parachuting pilot.

If player shoots down the parachuting pilot, the parachute disappears and the pilot then immediately plummets to the ground at a fast rate. When that happens, a scream sound effect is played as pilot plummets to the ground. The machine gun is then disabled for a few seconds as a form of a penalty for shooting at the parchuting pilot.

- TECHNICAL -

The machine gun has a recoil action when pressing the fire button and shakes around when firing.

The game is non-cpu, but uses roms and proms to store game data, game screen images and a scream sound effect.

The scream sound effect is stored in a ROM chip and is the only audio sound effect for Desert Patrol that is stored in a rom. The audio pcb uses discrete components to generate remaining sound effects and also to control how scream sound effect is played.