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Strange things with Kool Aid Man....


-^CrossBow^-

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Okay...I need some confirmation on this.

 

I just got Kool Aid Man for the 2600 with the instructions...and when playing it in my 7800 I noticed several odd happenings.

 

The game doesn't use the difficulty switches that I am aware of. (Haven't looked in the manual...).

 

But I did noticed that if you flip the left difficulty switch while the game is on the demo mode...it will pause the demo...but does not pause the actual game when you are playing it for real. Also...several combos of the left and right difficulty switches in certain posistions will prevent the game from even coming up!!

 

believe when I had both switches to the left (A) setting. The game demo paused. I then pressed Reset..and low and behold...I see the opening screen...but Kool Aid Man would never bust through the wall..However there were some odd looking brown lines on the right hand side of the screen that would change when I moved the controller. It looked a lot like a frying effect.

 

I was unable to reproduce these effects like this on the Heavy sixer...so it may be something with just the 7800. I know it wasn't a fluke since I can reproduce this at any time on the 7800 now.

 

Anybody else confirm this or perhaps just speculate on which flavor my bathwater was when I was drinking it?

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Hehhe...

 

Not familiar with that one.

 

Despite my humorous ending sentence. I am serious about the above issue. I am wondering if this is just a 7800 thing...something with my particular cart of Kool Aid Man (Doesn't appear to be anything special). Or if perhaps the mods done to my 7800 could have anything to do with this.

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quote
but Kool Aid Man would never bust through the wall..However there were some odd looking brown lines on the right hand side of the screen

 

If the game console is turned on while the difficulty switch is in the A (pause) position, numerous lines appear on the right side of the screen. When the switch is flipped to B, the lines disappear and the game starts.

 

[ 07-25-2001: Message edited by: postamessage ]

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Hmm.. would love to confirm this.. but for some reason, my Kool-Aid Man cart won't stay in my 7800's cartridge port.. you push it in all the way and it pops back out a couple millimeters (enough to avert any possible gameplay) ... guess my 7800's trying to tell me something. ^_^

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I have actually heard and did read over at the Sky Blue Rangers site that the 7800 is supposed to be imcompatible with the game. They didn't mention how or why. But perhaps this is another one of those test games for checking compatibility with the 7800 to determine true compatibility. As for yours popping the cart out...that is odd. Did Atari change the depth of the cart slots on the 7800 later rev models? I haven't really seen a later revision than my 84 model up close...I don't know based on looking at them. That might explain why that is happening. Some also complain that Imagic games won't fit into their 7800s either. I only have two Imagic games that I have to really push to get into the unit. All the others slide right in (Don't say it...).

 

There is something else on the 7800 I have noticed lately...but I am gonna post that to the experts in the 7800 section.

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Let me state for the recorde that the changes described with the difficulty switches is exactly what I was talking about. Other than this...Kool Aid Man works just fine in my 7800. As does Robot Tank, Space Shuttle (use the backup engines instead of the primaries). Don't know about Decathalon...but if Robot tank and shuttle work..then I would imagine Decathalon would also.

 

Postamessage:

 

Your 7800 is one of the later revisions which is known to not work with these 2600 games.

 

As for your Jr. that doesn't...that is more interesting. I wonder if you have one of the more uncommon single chip Jr. units. That is on the mainboard of the Jr. some models still used the 3 chips for the 6502, Tia, and Riot but then some of them used a newer single chip solution for the above. Perhaps it is these single chip systems that have the similar incompatibilities.

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All the other M-Network/INTV games I've tried work.. Space Attack, Frogs N Flies, Lock N Chase, Adventures of Tron.. KAM is the only cartridge I've tried in my collection (there's so many I've collected that I haven't had time to try them all!!) that pops out. It'll do the intro bit with Kool-Aid Man breaking through the wall if you hold it in tho.

 

(Is it just me or does the "manager" sprite from Journey Escape look more like Kool-Aid Man than the Kool-Aid Man sprite from Kool-Aid Man does?)

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I don't know about the NTSC 7800, but the reason why Kool Aide Man doesn't work with the PAL 2600 and 7800 seems to be the positioning of the score counter. This game accesses the positioning registers repeatedly in a way that according to the Stella programmers guide might result in "random" positions. On NTSC consoles everything seems to work fine, but on all my PAL consoles the sprites are positioned partly on top of each other, which constandly triggers the collision detection. This results in the game being totally unplayable.

 

The emulators also suffer from this, which is why we added a special cheat routine in z26 for this game, that forces the correct position for the score display.

 

As for Decathlon, Robot Tank and Space Shuttle, I think Activision later released versions with different bankswitchting formats that would work on the 7800 too. At least I have a PAL Decathlon by HES like that, and the ROM image of Space Shuttle NTSC also uses a different BS format than my old PAL picture label version.

 

If there is someone out there who has a cart reader 7800 and the picture label versions of these three games as well as the text label versions, it would be nice, if he could compare the ROM images to see if they are really different.

 

 

Thanks, Eckhard Stolberg

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As soon as I can figure out why mine keeps timing out and get that fixed...then I can at least do Robot Tank. Shuttle and Decathalon I don't actually own. I only know that the Pic label version of Shuttle works because a good friend of mine had it and used to let me borrow it all the time. He was never able to figure the game out but I was pretty good at it. Anyway the only thing about shuttle on the 7800 that is odd is that you have to use the left difficulty switch to fire up the backup engines since you can't control the primaries correctly with the 7800 pause button.

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