Zaxxon
Image: Champ Games

A new unofficial port of Sega's revolutionary isometric shooter Zaxxon is scheduled to release for the Atari 2600 this October, and you can play it right now, thanks to a brand new demo available from the developer's website.

Zaxxon was released in arcades back in 1981, almost 45 years ago, and was later brought into people's living rooms and bedrooms through various ports, released for the different home consoles and computers of the time.

Because of the game's groundbreaking graphics, however, a couple of these early home console versions, such as the Atari 2600 and Intellivision "ports", ended up making some pretty sizeable changes from the original arcade experience, switching the perspective from an isometric viewpoint to a third-person behind-the-ship angle, which would have undoubtedly disappointed a few players at the time.

Now, though, with the rise in homebrew game development and the growth of unofficial fan ports, it appears that a developer is gearing up to try and correct this, setting out to make a more definitive version of the original arcade game for the Atari 2600, and it's using some special cartridge-based hardware to make it all work as intended.

Zaxxon Arcade, as it is being called, is being developed by Champ Games (John Champeau, Nathan Strum, and Dave Dries) and is set for release as both a cartridge and a digital ROM. It restores the classic isometric perspective seen in the original game, includes 99 maps (including maps from Zaxxon, Super Zaxxon, and original levels), and offers four difficulty options (NOVICE, STANDARD, ADVANCED, and CHALLENGE), as well as support for AtariVox/SaveKey and the Quadtari multilink.

Like other Champ Games titles, it achieves much of this by leveraging the Atari Age-developed Melody Board, a homebrew circuit board that includes an ARM chip and allows developers to access additional bank-switching techniques for extra memory, including 64K of RAM, rather than the 8K, 16K, or 32K, which most developers had to deal with in the '80s.

This board is built into the cartridge and means that the digital ROM is best played on emulators such as Gopher2600 or Stella v6.7 or higher (the developer personally recommends using v7+).

You can download the demo here if you want to give it a shot. Here's a video of it in action: