Bob's Blog

Thanks! I did purchase the cart in the end, but this gives me a chance to play the game while waiting for the airmail package to arrive. It looks like you have created another great game here. Incidentally (given that this is the final recap), was the problem with the faulty roms ever solved, or did Al just send out the game with non-CMOS parts?

 

Chris

No, the problem was never solved. I believe Al sent one of the TI EPROMs to Fred (batari) to test with some kind of special equipment; I haven't heard from either of them the results of the tests, if any.

 

And, due to the many many test versions I created after "finishing" the game, the source and roms above aren't, actually, the "real" roms. They should play exactly the same, but the source and roms above have extra digit graphics in them (for hex numerals A-F) that were used in some test roms. These data aren't present on the carts. But other than that, they should be exactly the same.

 

And glad you enjoyed it!

No, the problem was never solved.  I believe Al sent one of the TI EPROMs to Fred (batari) to test with some kind of special equipment; I haven't heard from either of them the results of the tests, if any.

I haven't gotten anything in the mail yet. I don't know if the mail is just slow or if Al was too busy to send it. I will let you all know if I figure something out.

I took a look at the source and I noticed that you RORG'ed every bank to $F000. If you put them at say $9000, $B000, $D000, $F000 then they are easier to decipher by a disassembler. And maybe, will work better with the Stella debugger in the future?

I took a look at the source and I noticed that you RORG'ed every bank to $F000. If you put them at say $9000, $B000, $D000, $F000 then they are easier to decipher by a disassembler.   And maybe, will work better with the Stella debugger in the future?

 

There are times having things RORGed to the same address can be helpful, especially if some banks will share common content. What I did in Strat-O-Gems was to have the common areas RORG'ed at $Fxxx but all the distinct areas RORGed at $1xxx, $3xxx, $5xxx, and $9xxx. Interestingly, those other areas were also ORG'ed at those same addresses (using every other bank); I then used a simple utility I wrote to interleave the NTSC and PAL versions of the code.

Hi Bob!

 

Just a thought: Did you ever play "Jump Bug" on MAME?

 

Greetings,

Manuel

Hi Bob, did you ever have a Jump Bug in RR?

 

Just kidding, I see the similarity (tween Jump Bug and RR). I guess you could almost do an arcade hack of Jump Bug into a RR game and have a RR standup. heh.

Hi Bob!

 

Just a thought: Did you ever play "Jump Bug" on MAME?

 

Greetings,

Manuel

No; never heard of it until now. Just looked on KLOV, have to check it out in MAME.

 

Looks interesting, though - maybe I'll have to hack my own game.