1987 · Thalamus

Delta

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Stavros Fasoulas drew every bullet in Delta as a letter of an inverted font, and the game finds out who was hit by reading the screen. Rob Hubbard wrote thirteen tunes for it, and the game asks for three.

01 · The game

A shoot 'em up that sells you its weapons

In Delta a small ship flies right through 32 stages of space while attack waves come at it in formation. Shooting every enemy in a wave usually earns a credit. Every so often a wave arrives made of weapon icons instead of enemies: that is the shop, and flying into an icon the player can afford buys it. Flying into one they cannot afford destroys the ship.

Some stages bring rows of rocks, bubbles or machinery along the top and bottom of the screen, and each one opens with a three-word banner: ENTERING ROCKS OF DEATH, LEAVING CAVES OF ILLUSION. After stage 32 the game says DELTA MISSION COMPLETE and starts again, harder.

Delta on the Commodore 64: the ship on the left, an attack wave in formation, and the weapon icons along the bottom
Stage 1 in an emulator: the score panel at the top, the first formation, and the seven weapon icons with the credit count along the bottom.

How it worksThe 32 stagesThe attack wavesMusic and soundDiscoveries

02 · The makers

Stavros Fasoulas's second game for Thalamus, with music by Rob Hubbard

The title screen says DELTA BY STAVROS FASOULAS and (C)1987 THALAMUS. Fasoulas, a Finnish programmer, wrote Thalamus's first three games: Sanxion (1986), Delta and Quedex (both 1987). Rob Hubbard wrote the music for the first two.

The tape release opened with Mix-E-Load, a program by Gary Liddon and Rob Hubbard that let the player remix the loading music while the game loaded. In the United States, Electronic Arts published the game as Delta Patrol.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Delta (video game)", Wikipedia, "Thalamus Ltd" and MobyGames, "Delta Patrol", as quoted in web search results on 1 and 2 October 2026. The pages themselves could not be opened, so these are second-hand.

03 · Reception

Reviewers split over a game that sets the pace for you

Commodore User reviewed Delta in its March 1987 issue. Chris Cain gave it 9 out of 10 and the magazine's Screen Star.

Zzap!64 was less sure. In the April 1987 issue its three reviewers, Julian Rignall, Gary Penn and Steve Jarratt, disagreed. None of them disliked it, but some thought it was not as good as Sanxion, Fasoulas's game of the year before. Penn found it boring and said he did not like the computer dictating the action, and the magazine's overall rating was 74 %.

Penn had a point the code bears out. Every stage takes its attack waves from a fixed list, in the same order every game, and each wave flies a path that is written into its record. The random numbers it does use go to the enemies' fire and the boss's aim (Discoveries has where they come from). The attack waves tab plays every wave the game has.

Players on Lemon64, the C64 games database, rated it about 7.7 out of 10, according to search results on 6 October 2026.

Sources: Amiga Magazine Rack, "Delta review from Commodore User (Mar 1987)", Zzap!64, "Review of Delta", Wikipedia, "Delta (video game)" and Lemon64, "Delta", as quoted in web search results on 6 October 2026. The pages themselves could not be opened, so these are second-hand. Scores from other magazines appeared in the search results without an issue to check them against, and are left out.

04 · The play screen

One frame, rebuilt from memory

The picture below is drawn by this page from the game's memory and the video chip's registers, recorded over one frame of stage 2.

Rebuilt with the site's C64 renderer from a frame recorded in VICE: memory as the frame began and every write to the video chip and the sprite pointers, with the raster line it happened on. Compared with VICE's own picture of the same frame, 0 pixels differ. The writes listed under the button are the recording's own.

The C64 has eight sprites, and this screen shows far more than eight things that move: two rows of rocks, the enemies, the score panel at the top and eight icons along the bottom. The game reuses the same eight sprites five times a frame. A chain of raster interrupts ($1800, with the next handler's address kept at $1000) wakes up at chosen lines down the screen and moves the sprites, with new shapes and colours, to the next strip before the beam gets there. The main program does almost nothing: main_loop at $17C9 waits for line 228 and runs the sound.

The play area itself is text. The stars, the enemies' fire and all of the player's weapons are characters on the screen at $4400, in a character set of only 64 glyphs at $4800. How it works follows that through the game.

05 · What the code keeps

A trainer nobody can reach, and random numbers made of code

The code holds a cheat routine that nothing calls, a timer cleared at the wrong address, enemy fire whose randomness is read out of the game's own instructions, and a copyright year that the title picture contradicts. The Discoveries tab has each one, with the questions still open.

No game image is hosted here.