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I'll sure try it again, maybe tomorrow evening when I'll be at home, Tom .

Hey John ! > Well, regarding the fact that the game actually seems to come from a much more powerful and advanced console, I participated in a "heated" discussion on my own Facebook group (translated) "the Dawn of Videogames" ... always the same topic, when a game like this appears on the wild: "Using the DPC+ in this way is cheating or not?" ... of course I ended with my thought, which is always the same; as also Duane stated, "If you plug a cartridge into an UNMODIFIED VCS/2600 and you can play the game, then it's a VCS/2600 game, no matter if it has 20 Gigabytes of ROM and a magical half-unicorn fairy living inside of the cartridge !". > HAHA ! Exactly he same for me, John : my "very first contact" with Mappy was on my PSX and Namco Museum vol.2, which also has one of my all-time-favs: Xevious !!!!!!!!! > Yep, graphic and music are really awesome (that really low distortion we could hear, if compared to Pitfall's music, means an intensive "cleaning work" !). Very nice, Nathan and Mike ! > NP... I would have bored you with my usual arcade-line artworks . ____________________ Got some "free-hours" before goin' to my job tomorrow morning so I played for some minutes... When I reached, with test-mode-invincibility, the level 24, at the beginning of it the game crashed with black screen, 1-second diagonal white bounds and an audio "beep".I use a NTSC Heavy6er console, which I modded with an E.S.board for CVBS + S-Video + AudioStereo outputs, and my Harmony Encore has the latest bios, updated the last year from http://atariage.com/forums/topic/156500-latest-harmony-cart-software/ . It does almost the same thing when switching it on with my Saboteur loan cartridge inserted, while my other (PAL) consoles seem to work perfectly... I'll do some further tests with the emulator and some other on original hw...

Thanks, Tom ! Ok, I've just tried it but all I noticed is two "bad" changes compared to both the NTSC and "previous" PAL palettes. You could see from the pic attached, which is one of the 24 I "captioned" for a few seconds from the beginning of the game (I might have just obtained the "F12 - hits per second" world record ), colors are pretty much the same except for the light blue in some doors, which it is never appeared to me with that palette, and the level number, which is turned to purple instead of green (sometimes also the bumper near that number, the first on the low right, turns the same purple). Mappy PAL60 with full PAL hardware (CVBS out) [same picture in my prev. post] Mappy NTSC - screenshot from Stella emulator Mappy PAL60 (DEFAULT PALETTE) - screenshot from Stella emulator Mappy PAL60 (ALTERNATE PALETTE) - screenshot from Stella emulator

Hi John ! ... been a long time since I played "something"... and this new porting seems really outstanding ! Maybe more than it happened with your Scramble/SuperCobra, people here won't believe it's a VCS game !!! Unfortunately here in Italy, or at least here in my area, the game was not well known because many arcades strangely ignored him. I remember I had seen it in an arcade when I was in a seaside resort but, frankly, I had never played it there ! "One point less" for a "first hair gamer" like me, apparently... Turning to game features, I noticed the "Left Switch A"/"invincibility" mode, which I used to record the two little clips at the end of this post, the "usual" pause mode that can be activated with the Color/B&W switch and the awesome sampled music thrown inside the DPC(+) and played on the left channel just as Pitfall II did with its "situation-music" in the 80's (and also as Darrell did in his marvellous Stay Frosty 2 !!!!!!!). Colors of the PAL version are apparently excellent and, in accordance with the huge lack of "nuances" of the TIA PAL palette, enough matched to those of the NTSC version. Above all, they're absolutely not like those represented on the emulator Stella... and here I would like to ask one thing: is it me who did wrong with Stella settings or it is true that many games (fortunately not all...) seem, wrongly, just NTSC cartridges inserted in a PAL console (and with the resulting colors from "Courage the Cowardly Dog") ? NTSC - modded S-Video & Stereo NTSC "Heavy Sixer" Mappy_NTSC_20180603_214440.mp4 PAL60 - modded CVBS PAL "Vader" Mappy_PAL60_20180603_214115.mp4 Nice job, as always, John & all the Champ Games Team !! ... a label contest "in the air" ?

Hi there, this is Marco from Italy. I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who owns a "Super Pong 10". He has never been able to correctly view images on LCD TVs and therefore he'd like to make it to be modified to have the composite output, in order to play on his livingroom TV (a LED 55'). I have already personally modified dozens of VCS and/or 2600, from the Heavyes to the Juniors, but having never done anything to other consoles, even to MY Sears Pong, I am asking to any experienced in this specific case: from what you you know, can it be modded in such a way ? Is there any scheme that would allow me to make the mod "in security"? Thanks, anticipately

Surely there will still be done (many) progress with the programming of the VCS (unfortunately no "Bus Stuff", however, apparently... I read that some CPUs were frying...), and this on is a great "experiment"... but what I had in mind is not really such a thing. When I talked to David Foster (from the Digital Leisure) we thought about a platformer, just like NES & / or SNES portings (I hate them, heavily !), but playable and beautiful like Pitfall ( II ).

Hi Mike ! Sorry... I was really too "blind" to haven't see this ***pretty interesting*** post before... If you want (and as you probably already know... ) I already have, since about 10 and more years, many "things" related to Dragon's Lair for our VCS. And, as it's one of the most important thing if one of us really want to build up a game named "Dragon's Lair", also the rights from the owner (I already know people from the Digital Leisure, as I was involved in the copyright granting to share laserdisc capture for the Daphne emulator through the "internal" DaphneDownLoader torrent, and it was about the 2006 or 2007). We could and should sure talk about it

Hey Jack ! Carlo owns several (boxed) console, cartridges, computers and rarities at all, and he's a good friend of mine. If we knew that dump-matter before... ?

Awesome find !!! Of course... please send me the manual scan and I'll translate it for you Cheers, Marco

Tom ! ... and ......... what about a deep-hack of Pitfall II to create that masterpiece game that is the Sega coin-op ?

Thanks for the clarification, Ketah, impeccable esamination ! And thnx to you, too, Fred ! (Heh... Who better than you can know these things ? ) -[ Hope it's all right for you now ]- Just wonder if that "5-:-3.3 matter" would affect the LTOflash for Intellivision (yep, many people asked me about it, but being able to repair TV and building audio amplifiers does not turn me into one who knows everything... )...

Heh ! This is something we are wondering in many, even here in italy, after that "someone" has spread this link in almost every retrogaming community: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/07/flash_carts_could_be_slowly_killing_your_retro_consoles?utm_content=buffer721d8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer After all, that's not completely "wrong"... but the concern of "fading" something would only exist if voltage differences were much greater and/or currents involved were higher. A power increase of about 2mW [(5-3.3)V x 0.012A] and the consequent increase in energy dissipation in the form of heat would not even justify the substitution of the "dissipation" resistor (let's call it that)... So, I checked around in the AAforum(s) but I haven't seen a thred about this "5-:-3.3 mismatch"... so I ask here ! Does anyone have any idea about this thing and if it could also involve our Harmonies+VCS' ?

It's a matter which has been fought since 1984 here in Italy, since we all could read in a magazine (of course italian: VideoGiochi - Jackson Publishing Group, No. 13 - March, 1984) that the top score achieved by a player was 61110 points. Now ... after at least a period of 20 years in which I have returned to videogames as a hobby, I met several people, including some of the editors and reviewers who had also worked for that magazine, as well as in many others. So, they say that the "videogara" contenders, in order to validate a score, necessary send up photos that "testify the true" ! Assuming, then, that the reported scores are REAL, take a little 'a look at the next pictures..................................................................................... 65860 ?!??!! 170000 pts ?!??!!???!!!????!!!!?????!!!!! ... If everything is as it should be (that the photo was sent and then validated, taking that at the time there were no photoshop or related...) may be that (at least with PAL version, the one played here) there must be "something" (easter-egg ?!?) that at some point and/or a "particular" racing behaviour give a substantial surplus-bonus points !!! Oh yeah... it might be worth to look deep in the Pole Position code ... ((( in the last picture you could see my personal highest score, 60910, made on my full-PAL system )))

Tips are correct, Mike For a better "arcade feeling" you have to set blanks this way: -blank_searches -blank_skips -min_seek_delay 750 -seek_frames_per_ms 20 (where "delay=750" is something like the average searching time of a Pioneer LD-V1000, the NTSC laserdisc player which was (is ) inside most of "your" US cabinets) ________________________________________ The version you played back in the middle of '83 is probably this : [clip, taken from the net, in which you can see an early version of the cabinet: different marquee, different scoreboard, plexy angle, control panel...........] But 2.1 version actually ISN'T this early version, because it was created by two friends of mine at the D-L-P community in 2005. It's based on a romset specifically created to enhance the gameplay of Cinematronics' 1983 arcade version. Logical reconstruction to game organization and presentation has been implemented, and the result is what is believed to be the first and only Dragon's Lair game program that plays the game the way it was intended to be played while it was being designed/animated. And the same year they create another set which was specifically programmed to also play the "extra footage" recorded onto the "Dragon's Lair Limited Edition Laserdisc", pressed in 2002 (200 numbered copies). These extra scenes come from a VHS (!!!) recorded from the entire footage of the very first revision of the arcade laserdisc, which was printed in something like 5 copies (as Rick Dyer said years ago in a "special" interview... ) . Unfortunately we're (almost ?) sure those discs are all lost because in almost 30 years of "DEEP searching" we still haven't found one, just as we haven't found any prototype revision boardsets ! ________________________________________ [clip of me playin' on my cabinet the "Prototype DL" version which included extra footage, extra ways, different paths and different moves ]

Heh, as I said I'm not a programmer, but I understand the point of doubling the cartridge memory to switch the whole new routines on the added ROM... Then, 32K... with the new Melody boards (and so the DPC+ support) shouldn't be a problem to put it on a real cartridge...

Thanks, CDS ! Movements are exacly the same as VCS' original game, except for the "Indiana Jones cart sequence": Harry has to travel placed inside some mine carts which movements are left, right and also diagonal. For this last, I thought about Harry's movement routine when he jumps diagonally from a platform into the void. And, also grabbing the ropes in the first section has to be added... may it be necessary a "deep hack" ?

I work with an OLD (!!!) Ulead Photo Express which I use since I had Win98 . So, no PhotoSchlop for me... maybe it has the "fit" option, but Ulead does not , then I have to do it manually (it's not a great fadigue ! Otherwise I'd get immediately pissed off ) Multilingual is only for an European box... just want to "maintain" the same Atari format !

I already wrote in the "Atari 2600 Homebrew" FB group... and I also write it here, right now. It's almost 30 years I hope that someone will come out with the idea of making a 2600 porting of the arcade coin-op version of "Pitfall II - The Lost Caverns" (Sega, 1985). Since I cannot hack a game nor programming one from scratch, I made (but it's since 10 years...) some mockups of the game, a full-map, closely related to Crane's original, artworks (one of them it's the boxart), and many, many other things... I already played on the SG-1000/ColecoVision version (emulated): it is a good attempt to re-create the arcade game but... HEH !!! ... I really can't play on it because it has almost no elements of the gameplay of the Sega coin-operated game ! Believe me, since I think I know almost every aspect, even the "hidden" ones, of this game ! And it's since the 1985, when I used to play it in a local arcade, in which I owned the top-score (my best is around 2 million points... not so far from the World Record, and, of course, I got several 1.9 million point games recorded, and officially confirmed, with WolfMame). [CLIP = best score on Retrogaming History Arcade Competition 2013. Not my best but enough... ] And here it is the "Underground map" of the arcade game. I made it by editing and putting together hundreds of Mame screenshots... [PIC] Just to show you how "big" is the arcade game... Now, the full-map development of Crane's Pitfall II is 29 horizontal levels/platforms x 8 "columns" , for a total of 232 "locations". The arcade game's "lost caverns" underground section develops for 28 platforms x 8 "columns", and it also has a first section which is 2 levels x 32 screens, but apart from this last the two games' developments are pretty "near" ! Then, if someone would want to "hack" the original Pitfall II he can surely maintain the development of the game area ! He should give up only one of the levels of the ''underground section"(I have already made a" full map "and, knowing the game, I realized what platform can easily removed) and as many as 24 horizontal screens of the "first section", but it is a sacrifice that I believe can be done ! [ PIC(left) = original map of Pitfall II for the C=64. It differs from the VCS' version only for graphic details... ALL the rest is the same ! ] [ PIC(right) = VCS' "Pitfall II - Arcade" mockup map, taken from the original map and filled/completed with almost all the elements of the arcade version ] ... what do you think'bout it ?

I haven't read the entire thread... just want to tell the Action Max is already emulated with Daphne/Singe. The original plan was to emulate not only laserdiscgames but almost all the FMV-based games... There are: "38 Ambush Alley" [clip], "Blue Thunder", "Hydrosub 2021", "Pops Ghostly" and "Sonic Fury". [ "WAS" means that nobody in the Daphne Team wants to emulate anything, at now... ]

Extra spaces are many: all of them serves to fill the text and somewhat align it to L/R "square" borders. But, yes, this one is more noticeable than the others and that's because because it's near the comma... I'll sure fix it, maybe when all the other languages are translated correctly...

Typically, Deutsch takes one more line than the others... I've noticed it in most of my PAL Silver boxes. Then, it tooks me just a few more minutes to "fix" the sizes of the "squares" in which text has to be wrote.

Thanks, Thomas ! ... I'm writing it right now on the backside box artwork

Mah ? ... probably it doesn't matter, but maybe "Sie" gives more "80's-feeling" ?

... it's all taken from Vectrex's text...