Desert Patrol was developed by Project Support Engineering., Released in 1977
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.
Other Informations:
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.
Desert Patrol uses an amber plexiglass overlay to provide color to images and some status text to give meaning to the on-screen numbers. The overlay is seated inside the cab, near the bottom of cab and just above the monitor.