I have come in contact with Dan Kramer via Facebook (Atari museum and Trak-bomber pages).
Dan worked at Atari and developped most (all?) of the Trak-balls they produced for the home systems.
We talked a bit about the differences between the home and arcade versions of Missile Command and then he mentioned that the guys at Atari build their own 3-base Trak-balls (guess we'd call it Control Panels) to play the ultra-rare internal-use only 3-base version of Missile Command for the Atari 8 bit computers !!!!!!
I was blown off my chair when I read that !!!
For those who don't know:
Arcade MC of course has three bases and thus three fire buttons.
Since the Atari 2600 and 8 bit computers have joystick ports with only one fire button they had to change the game for them.
Arcade, three bases:
A8 version:
They simply removed the two bases in the corners. (This also makes the game a lot easier to continue on the higher levels as you simply defend the base and 1 city).
SO........the only MC I ever knew on the A8 was the regular released 1-base version.
And now it's 2014 and I hear that a 3-base version exists !!!
Anyway, here the pictures that Dan Kramer posted:
