Nebulon Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 Any Z80 programmers out there looking for a pet project? If so, you could make the world a better place by adding more levels to the arcade version of Mr. Do. You know how levels 2 through 9 each have a path/tunnel shaped like a number? What if there were additional levels that had paths shaped like letters (A through Z). Otherwise, exactly the same game. No additional features -- just more mazes. The existing game logic should do the rest on its own. Anyway, food for thought for anyone out there looking for something interesting to hack away at. I'd do it myself, but I'm completely ignorant of Z80 machine language programming. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+x=usr(1536) Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 Any Z80 programmers out there looking for a pet project? If so, you could make the world a better place by adding more levels to the arcade version of Mr. Do. You know how levels 2 through 9 each have a path/tunnel shaped like a number? What if there were additional levels that had paths shaped like letters (A through Z). Otherwise, exactly the same game. No additional features -- just more mazes. The existing game logic should do the rest on its own. Anyway, food for thought for anyone out there looking for something interesting to hack away at. I'd do it myself, but I'm completely ignorant of Z80 machine language programming. If the level designs are derived from the bitmaps for the numbers involved, it might just be a case of flipping a byte from 0x09 to 0xFF and you've potentially got 254 levels ('0' isn't used, IIRC). I'd be willing to bet that anything above 0x0F would glitch the display (or crash the game), though, since it only seems to be set up to base the screen designs on single digits. Could be wrong, though. Somehow, though, I suspect that they're stored as data rather than generated based on the character set. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nebulon Posted January 12, 2018 Author Share Posted January 12, 2018 I think you're suspicions are correct -- especially from the 'D' shape on the first level and the unusually distorted shapes of the numbers for some of the levels. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nebulon Posted January 12, 2018 Author Share Posted January 12, 2018 (edited) Hmmm.... This is interesting (even includes comments): http://tech.quarterarcade.com/tech/MAME/src/mrdo.c.html.aspx?g=1827 Not a lot of info in there though. Mostly stuff we already know. Was kind of hoping for the actual listing. Edited January 12, 2018 by Nebulon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+x=usr(1536) Posted January 13, 2018 Share Posted January 13, 2018 Hmmm.... This is interesting (even includes comments): http://tech.quarterarcade.com/tech/MAME/src/mrdo.c.html.aspx?g=1827 Not a lot of info in there though. Mostly stuff we already know. Was kind of hoping for the actual listing. That one's also very outdated. The current MAME driver is here. Someone familiar with Z80 dis/assembly would need to tear apart the original game, figure out where the screen drawing routines are (the MAME debugger may help with this), and go from there. That's not going to be me, however. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nebulon Posted January 13, 2018 Author Share Posted January 13, 2018 A buddy of mine is a crack 6809 machine language programmer. That's not going to help much for Z80 though. Oh well, it's just a matter of time before someone bored enough (or nostalgic enough) jumps in and tackles this one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nebulon Posted January 13, 2018 Author Share Posted January 13, 2018 That one's also very outdated. The current MAME driver is here. Someone familiar with Z80 dis/assembly would need to tear apart the original game, figure out where the screen drawing routines are (the MAME debugger may help with this), and go from there. That's not going to be me, however. I suppose I should ask though.... Where can you find the MAME debugger? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+x=usr(1536) Posted January 13, 2018 Share Posted January 13, 2018 (edited) I suppose I should ask though.... Where can you find the MAME debugger? It's built-in, and you start it with the -debug switch (the name of your MAME executable and path to your ROMs will likely vary from the example below): mamearcade64 -debug -rompath /path/to/your/roms/ pacman That'll start Pac-Man with the debugger window open. In the debugger, type 'help' for a list of commands. For the rest, you'll need to hit up Google - going into how it works is a deep rabbit hole, and pretty much outside the scope of what we can get into here. One hint: search for MESS as well as MAME debugger usage. Edited January 13, 2018 by x=usr(1536) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.