Tangentially related, when I was slaving away at Dickinson College, there were three arcade machines in town; one of them was Tempest. I must have put about a thousand dollars worth of quarters in it.
I could never figure out how it was coded; I didn't have the mad skillz to write it, and this really bugged me. A few years ago I grabbed a ROM dump and reverse engineered the source code to the point where I could understand the game engine.
-- CharlesÂ