Starting ICBM Attack -------------------- December 20, 2010 By Adam Trionfo When starting ICBM Attack on a real Bally / Astrocade console the player will be greeted by a black screen when the game is first turned on. In order to start the game the player must press the Reset button, after which ICBM Attack's title screen is displayed. If ICBM Attack is played using the MESS emulator the same thing occurs. Start the game by pressing Soft Reset (F3). For those that would like additional information about WHY this happens, Frank Palazzolo posted a message to the Bally Alley discussion group on June 24, 2005 that gives further explanation for this behavior. Frank wrote: "I looked at why ICBM Attack wouldn't start in the emulator. Strangely, this game uses the stack pointer before it initializes it. On a cold start, it uses a BIOS trap (RST 0x38) to call a function (0x19) to initialize the color registers. This requires the stack pointer to be pointing to RAM. After that, it clears some memory and initializes the stack pointer. So, ICBM Attack won't start in the latest MESS from a cold boot - it gets caught in a loop trying to return from that bios function. However, if you start the emulator without the cart, hot insert the cart, and then reset it, it should run." Frank is referring to an older version of MESS that needed the game started without the ICBM Attack cartridge. That is no longer necessary. Just choose the game and Soft Reset with F3 as already stated.