When I tried this classic arcade game in an emulator and watched it boot up, I was very puzzled by the text I saw on the screen:
It talks about "DOWNLOADING TEXTURES", "LINK PAL", "LOADING OS-WMS", "SATELLITE COMM", "NETLINK", "CONNECTING TO HOST", "PUBLIC-KEY", "FTP"...
While I'm aware that 1995 isn't exactly the dark ages, and I'm well aware that car games of that era in the arcade could be connected locally together (although I don't personally remember seeing that for this particular game), while that might explain some of the text, it certainly does not explain the mentions of "satellite comm" and "downloading textures".
Why would an arcade game need to "download textures" from a satellite? Did it receive frequent updates that were distributed via satellite? It all sounds so very strange; even if it did use the network to fetch updates, why specifically talk about "satellites"? Wouldn't it just be using the normal network of the arcade house/cruise ship? (Which of course could be using a satellite Internet connection, but the game wouldn't have any idea.)
It almost seems like this is just random nonsense/word salad, but it's not even displayed to customers, but only for the initial boot before they let people in to pay and play the games. Also, it's written in an extremely cryptic and concise manner. Just makes no sense to me. It looks to me more like the kind of output you'd see in a military computer from the 1960s.
What could possibly explain this?
