REVIEW BY:  KEITH JEFFERSON of ST.LOUIS AUG.
     Keith writes for SLAUG newsletter & BBS.


                        Super Action

Super Action games (Baseball, Football, Frontline) can only
be played with a special hand controller.  The problem is
that not everyone has one.  You may not feel like spending
the extra money for one on top of the price of the catridge
just to play one game.  Or maybe your s-a controllers are on
the blink.  Or maybe you do have a set but have gotten so
good that you no longer find your s-a catridges interesting.

In any event this article should keep you entertained for a
while.  Maybe even give those games you thought you'd
perfected a new lease on life because I'm going to show you
how to play s-a games with a regular hand controller.  For
purposes of illustration I refer to the action battle game
"Frontline" since that is the game I am most familiar with.

IN "Frontline", the player starts off as an infantryman
surrounded by an advancing army on all sides.  You are able
to hurl grenades or fire your gun in the direction your arm
points.  Hiding behind obstacles, running and firing, you
advance forward (avoid the land mines!) until you reach your
tank.  You promptly hop into your tank, where you continue
the battle against the enemy's tank force.  The object is to
get to the enemy's main gun nest, hop out of your tank, and
lob a grenade at it to end the game.  Not an easy as it
sounds, even with s-a controllers, as there will be two
machine gun nests and tanks converging on you as soon as you
leave your tank.

The s-a controllers allow you joystick movement as well as
the 4 fire button options: turn firing arm clockwise (c),
counterclockwise (cc), fire gun, and fire grenade.  The
grenade button is also used as a toggle to hop in and out of
the tank when you are near it.  If you try playing this game
with regular controllers you find that the left fire button
fires the gun and the right fire button rotates the arm
clockwise.  You can get up to the tank but you can't get in.
Even if you got to the enemy's main machine gun nest you
couldn't blow it up because you can't activate the grenade
button.

Playing "Frontline" with regular controllers got me thinking
that there must be some way to activate the other functions.
Trhough experimentation I found that if you press the
numbers 3 an 9 simultaneously on the keypad you are able to
rotate the arm cc. Numbers 6 and 7 activate the grenade and
tank toggle button.  In addition to this I also found that
numbers 3 and 5 launches a grenade as well as turning the
arm cc.

Technically speaking, s-a controllers plug into the 9 pin
"male" on the console just like the regular controllers.
This means that they both use the same means to enter their
commands to the computer.  The special s-a buttons must
activate a pin or series of pins that are common to both but
not normally activated by the regular hand controllers. This
is why you can use regular hand controllers in place of
s-a's.  (See table 1 for a comparison between s-a and
regular hand controller fuctions and table 2 for alternate
number combinations that you can use with the regular hand
controllers in place of the numbers listed in table 1.)

I'm going to continue experimenting with other games and
controllers and see what I can come up with.  The above
should work with "Rocky" but (because of the s-a roller) may
give you some problems with "Baseball" and "Football".  Till
next time dust off your old s-a games and have a go at them
with your regular hand controllers.  It's a little more
difficult at first but can extend the lifetime of a s-a
cartridge for you experts out there.


                                Table 1
               s-a and regular hand controller comparison

motion              s-a buttons         regular button

turn arm c          orange              3 and 9
turn arm cc         purple              right fire
fire gun            yellow              left button
grenade/tank toggle blue                6 and 7


                                Table 2
                 alternate keypad number conbinations

grenade        cc and grenade      cc        pause

2 and 3        1 and 4             1 and 0   1 and 9
3 and 7        3 and 4             3 and 0
6 and 7        3 and 5             3 and 9

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