Hmmm, maybe this could be a reason for different ROM revisions? I don't know
anything about the US market, but did Sears distribute Asteroids as a Sears
cart? If so, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't like an Atari copyright
message appearing at startup, hence the revision... but it's only a wild
guess.
No, the original release didn't have the copyright under the Atari label
too. That's the one I think most people have. That's the one I have.
BTW, I saw that Asteroids is an 8K cart, which rather surprises me since I
think it's not THAT complicated... so I'm only curious if all ROM revisions
have 8K or if there are some with less (4K, for instance...). And I still
wonder what they needeed all that ROM space for...
Someone explained how the Asteroids kernel worked a while back and it's a
pretty complicated flicker routine!! Also, as has been stated, in order to
save processing time, tables and code redundancy can be used. So it's
possible that Asteroids "unrolls" a lot of its loops and uses lookup tables
in the extra space.
It's probably true, though, that it had plenty of space left over for the
copyright message.
The copyright/title-screen is something they tended to add to their games
around that time, like Yars' Revenge. It also might have been a reaction
to Activision which always reserved a portion of the screen to their
copyright. I was wondering whether Activision ever had to sacrifice some
'game' for that logo... Seems very wasteful on their 2K titles to have it
there, even if it's not the rainbow one.
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