Dav

Treasure Island has some kind of rom board apparently in addition to the dongle, haven't been able to find out much about it. That's the reason the graphics have been broken until recently. It loads a new gfx set for every level with new monsters and playfield tiles. The monsters line up so that's not a problem, but if I try to keep using level one tiles on level 2 the monsters don't follow the playfield. If explorer had some kind of extra board that would explain why yours crashes at the same place as the other one. BTW I took some pics of the screenshots. http://widel.com/stuff/deco.htm That's an interesting theory, although I find it hard to believe DECO would bother with an additional piece of hardware. However my Explorer came complete with box and there is no mention of an extra RAM board anywhere in the instructions. I'm going to take another look at them tonight though, maybe I missed something? Neat pics. This may be the only way I ever get to play most of these games on my cab... BTW did everyone know that Treasure Isalnd was ported to the TI-99/4a? Talk about an obscure port! Tempest I found some comfirmation in the mame source about explorer. It lists it as missing a rom dump for the add on board. I have no idea what it looks like. Judging by the function I would think it would have to plug into the cpu socket. The one for Treasure Island is called DE-0091xx I would guess that's probably what you need to get explorer working. I got Mision X running now. Turns out the problem was the program uses variable w/o initializing them. This works because they are in a known state after the bios loads the tape. Since I wrote my own bios I didn't have the same values. I also got Treasure Island running. About the only thing left is scrum try and I'm not sure I can get it. Someone reminded me that someone in mamedev I think is sitting on Angler Dangler, telejang and hamburger. I need to see if I can shake those loose. Especially angler dangler. Nicola took a look at the color issue, He fixed some of the color problems in MAME but not all of them. It will probably be in the next release.

Treasure Island has some kind of rom board apparently in addition to the dongle, haven't been able to find out much about it. That's the reason the graphics have been broken until recently. It loads a new gfx set for every level with new monsters and playfield tiles. The monsters line up so that's not a problem, but if I try to keep using level one tiles on level 2 the monsters don't follow the playfield. If explorer had some kind of extra board that would explain why yours crashes at the same place as the other one. BTW I took some pics of the screenshots. http://widel.com/stuff/deco.htm That's an interesting theory, although I find it hard to believe DECO would bother with an additional piece of hardware. However my Explorer came complete with box and there is no mention of an extra RAM board anywhere in the instructions. I'm going to take another look at them tonight though, maybe I missed something? Neat pics. This may be the only way I ever get to play most of these games on my cab... BTW did everyone know that Treasure Isalnd was ported to the TI-99/4a? Talk about an obscure port! Tempest Btw MAME is definately wrong on the background colors. Try playing pro soccer in mame. The fields black with green speckles for highlights. The goalie has a black jersey so his chest looks invisible. When I tried it on my board, it has a nice green field, there's even a black shadow under the ball that wasn't there before.

I used to have a Mirco Challenge, a 1-4 player pong cocktail from about '74. If you beat it in 1 player mode you got a free game.

I don't bother fixing satellite boards. If you ever need them, I sell the original style for ~$12 if you buy in quantity. You can select how many of each as long as you don't go too exteme with the VRAM addressers. I usuallly sell them in lots of 10-30. I've sold as many as 50 but soldering that many at once gets pretty old.

Good to know, I was going to email him and ask him if he knew any chips I could replace to get rid of that. And you are talking about the "Featuring" screen where the ghosts come out one by one, and not the maze attract screen right? Right, when it first starts the intros hit the coin before red comes out.

He's not going to be able to fix that one. They all do it if you coin up before the red ghost comes out.

Treasure Island has some kind of rom board apparently in addition to the dongle, haven't been able to find out much about it. That's the reason the graphics have been broken until recently. It loads a new gfx set for every level with new monsters and playfield tiles. The monsters line up so that's not a problem, but if I try to keep using level one tiles on level 2 the monsters don't follow the playfield. If explorer had some kind of extra board that would explain why yours crashes at the same place as the other one. BTW I took some pics of the screenshots. http://widel.com/stuff/deco.htm

So there are games that use two buttons? I always thought there might be. On my cab there's a spot for a second button on the control pad, but to add it I'd have to cut out the metal. It's a really thin piece of metal though, there's already a hole cut in the thick 'under metal' so they obviously anticipated this being done. I simply never bothered because none of my games use two buttons (that and I'd hate to damage the control pannel). Tempest Ice Cream Factory has 2 for sure. Yes, I noticed on the back the predrilled holes, I just need to decide which one to open up. The one on the lower right looks like it's marked as a spinner on my panel. I've got a big dent in the overlay on that one so I'm kind of leaning towards drilling that one even if it is kind of far away from the first button. I took a look at explorer. I'm wondering if your tape is the one that's dumped in mame. It does the same thing. If so it's definately a bad tape, it never even tries to read the dongle before it crashes. On the other hand if it's not the tape in mame, then there's probably a missing piece of hardware, like the rom board on treasure island that makes it crash.

It's more like a different way of using the dongle. Some of them are storing graphics etc in it, others just check every once in a while and make sure it gives them back $7c. The former is a problem for me obviously, the latter is not. Yeah, you'd think with unrecordable tapes they wouldn't worry about it too much. But I guess if they didn't have the dongles someone might have gone to the effort to track down the tape manufacturer. Mame likely has a problem with the emulation or my hacks would have wierd backgrounds when I run the hackes in mame. That doesn't mean black isn't right, just that it's still possible I'm right until someone finds a screenshot. Terranean seems fine. I haven't looked at explorer yet. BTW I picked up a Deco cab this weekend, burgertime originally i think. Looks like the monitor is dead though, and I'll have to add a button since some of the games need 2. I'm not sure where to add the extra button. There's a space above the first but that's just wierd. There's a space off to the right for a spinner looks like but that's kind of far away. It looks like there's holes drilled in the control panel for a whole row above the current button, so I guess I could move up diagonally.

Nope not in real life. Mame could have it wrong, but black makes more sense. You can't believe how excited I am about this, keep up the good work! Tempest I got it working late last night. I thought it was a problem with my compression code, but I finally figured out I need to reset the sound cpu after a boot. These are the games so far. I only played a couple of games with each so I'm not sure if I got all the protection patched out. In fact it's likely I didn't if they added some protection in the upper levels only. There were a couple of problems though. Mission X has some garbage on the screen, looks like part of the title airplanes except they are between the Mission and high score. They aren't in mame so I'm not sure what's up. And as mentioned PPICF has a slightly bluegrey background and Rootn Tootn has a seventies avocado color for a background. It could be right, but it seems odd, and I did have to patch the heck out of it. Some games like Treasure Island just aren't going to work. They swap out all the graphics after every level. I can make the first level work, but the tiles on the second level don't match up so it's unplayable. That's a shame as it's kind of a unique game. Some of the games, like lock and chase only had 1 or 2 protection reads, and did a compare right after, but others like rootin tootin loaded 4k of data from the dongle and were a real pain. Tornado was bad too, it has code watching for patches and code watching that code for patches, and code watching that code. Like I said I'll probably have to play them a while and look for bugs. I'm not very good at some of these games though. I haven't worked out a way back to the menu yet. The bios only runs when a coin is inserted, so what I'm thinking is holding both start buttons while you coin up to return to the menu. Other alternatives would be patching every single game, YUCK, and a hardware reset button.

Probably, the really hard part is done now. The opcodes are encrypted so I had to write a program to go though my code after it's compiled and encrypt only the opcodes. I've even emualted most of the features of my dongle in mame so I can test easily. No idea what a time frame would be though as I have a lot of stuff going on. I need to find a job, depending on what happens with that I may not have much time to work on it. Have you ever seen a working PPICF? I'm wondering why my background is blue-grey and mame's is black. I should be running the same code as mame, and the countdown screen looked right, so I'm inclined to think it's an emulation bug. I guess it could be some kind of color adjustment though, maybe they expected you to adjust the monitor.

I had to post some pics. I've been banging my head against this thing all week and it finally came together today. This is Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory, the rare sequel to Burgertime. I've made my own dongle, and written my own bios. The bios doesn't bother with the cassette deck, it loads the cassette data from an eprom on the dongle. The actual data loads in a few seconds instead of the minutes the cassettes took. It still takes about 15 seconds to copy the sound data to the sound cpu though, otherwise it would boot faster than my monitor warms up. I had several hardware and software bugs that were messing me up, the last thing I figured out just now to get the sound going was that I had the sound connector backward. At this time the bios only loads one game, but there's no reason why it can't load a menu and then select a game. There's room for 8 games to an eprom and I've got 3 eproms on the dongle. That's with no compression, with compression I think I can double the number available. There were two small dongle checks that had to be patched out, otherwise it's running the same program code as before. They were just reading the dongle expecting a specific byte, I replaced the dongle read with a load of the number. Hopefully the other games don't bother do anything much with the dongle after the game is loaded either.

Google made Google Groups (which mostly consists of every Usenet text group, so it's full of e-mail addresses) stop putting e-mail addresses in the clear long ago. And on Yahoo you can actually have user names that don't correspond to your e-mail address. I stick by my decision. YG is inferior to the average web-BB setup. I'm going to have to agree with you. When I see I have to sign up for something I generally just quit there. I can't imagine there would be that many emails listed in a coleco technical discussion and the ones that were could be easily obfuscated if someone felt it neccessary.

Yeah, kind of. I orderd some famicom to NES adapters from Hong Kong. I had to order a bunch of them to get a good price. That gives me 2 options, go with the Famicom connector which is closer to standard or desolder the NES connectors. I kind of like the famicom idea because the playchoice supports the extra sound input famicom carts had. Of course that still leaves the problem of sourcing the famicom connector, but at least it's a standard pitch. Just the ends are a little wider than usual. I did a new layout with both connectors, I need to order a prototype now. I have to get a panel together which will take a few more days. I'm waiting for someone to send me deco cassette stuff as I need to get it on this panel too. I usually get the panels back within a week of ordering. I also thought I'd try a multicart on this panel as well. I haven't added it to my new bios yet, but the idea would be if it detected the multicart it would just add more virtual slots and then scroll the menu as necessary if it goes past 20 slots. Does anyone actually have Famicom carts though? I mean if nobody actually has them I might as well desolder the connectors.

It is not. I'm not real optimstic about it getting dumped. Coincidentally before I'd seen that version I had written a similar one called Mr and Mrs Pacman. It's part of the 96 in 1 it might be in misfit mame, I'm not sure.

I am the official keeper of the pacman ripoff information and I've not heard of it so you must be dreaming. Just kidding. There were way to many of them to keep track of. Some of the ones we know about we only have a single screenshot of. Most of the pacman ripoffs evolved over time. If you can remember what was different about it from pacman maybe I can narrow it down to one that was almost the same. Pacman doesn't have a title screen so they could put anything on the marquee they wanted. BTW one of the last remaining known missing pachacks showed up in my mailbox the other day. Abscam by US Billiards.

The X in 1 jamma boards are by no means the real thing. They are cheap single board computers running an emulator. With the low horsepower the emulation is generally not very good. The early chinese boards were horrible, wrong colors and sounds, lagging inputs etc. They have since improved, but they are still not as good as MAME on a decent PC.

Yeah, I agree. if the pirates wrote their own emulator rather than steal mame code I'll eat a circuit board.

Because he just wanted the creme filling. Regarding the topic, I suppose that it was kind of an in-joke...as if they were meant to be longer, but "bloopers" made them end early (the monster looking around as if to wonder what to do next, and the next act where it makes a hasty naked retreat). Perhaps Dav knows? I don't know. To be honest I never really noticed it before. My only thoughts would be that they cut them down to get the play time shorter. Iirc the intro music on Make trax is a couple of seconds shorter than on the original version. A couple of seconds all day probably added up. Or maybe they didn't think people would make it that far and didn't care too much. Since we're on the subject of intermissions I did a speedup chip a long time ago that doesn't break the intermissions. If anyone wants it I'll look around for it.

I wrote a new PC10 bios today. And I've ordered some edge connectors from China so this may happen after all. If the edge connectors work out I'll order some more boards to test.

That's awesome. Are you interested in sharing a quick runthrough of how you accomplished such an enviable mod? How about some more pictures? It'd be sweet to make a bank of ten cartridge slots, mount it in the coin door, wire it back to the MB with IDE cables, and relocate the power switch somewhere nearby. Kudos, Josh Thanks, I intended the adapter to point up but after I had the board made I couldn't find any card edge connectors to fit a NES cart. I ended up cutting one of the repair connectors in half and using it but it was a real pain. That's what's holding up the project. I'm thinking of redesigning it with a famicom connector instead of a NES since I can get those edge connectors. I can get adapters to NES cheap. Or possibly I guess I can desolder the connectors from the NES adapters. My adapter also includes nvram to store the game title, but I'll need to write a new bios to take advantage of that feature. Yes, I"ve thought of remoting one of them. It doesn't matter much for me as I'm using a Japanese jamma cab with the board opening in front. I've also thought of hanging another board off of the last slot to add more slots, there's no real limit. Another possible idea would be instead of the adapter plug the roms directly into my board. The extra address lines could be used to make a multicart and add extra games that way.

The way I remember it is there's two modes. In chase mode they follow their personality traits, in scatter mode they each head for their home quadrant. The difficult rom set changes the personality traits slightly. Iirc pinky aims a little closer to pac and the stupid one is a little smarter. Ms pac mixes it up by making each ghosts quadrant random.

Sorry it's not for sale. I just had to post it so I could say neener, neener.

Yep, looks like this: 0EAD: 3A A5 4D ld a,($4DA5);pm death animation 0EB0: A7 and a 0EB1: C0 ret nz ;return if pacman is dead 0EB2: 3A D4 4D ld a,($4DD4);fruit acitve 0EB5: A7 and a 0EB6: C0 ret nz ;exit if fruit active 0EB7: 3A 0E 4E ld a,($4E0E);# of dots 0EBA: FE 46 cp $46 0EBC: 28 0E jr z,$0ECC 0EBE: FE AA cp $AA 0EC0: C0 ret nz 0EC1: 3A 0D 4E ld a,($4E0D) 0EC4: A7 and a 0EC5: C0 ret nz 0EC6: 21 0D 4E ld hl,$4E0D 0EC9: 34 inc (hl) 0ECA: 18 09 jr $0ED5 0ECC: 3A 0C 4E ld a,($4E0C) 0ECF: A7 and a 0ED0: C0 ret nz 0ED1: 21 0C 4E ld hl,$4E0C 0ED4: 34 inc (hl) 0ED5: 21 94 80 ld hl,$8094 0ED8: 22 D2 4D ld ($4DD2),hl;fruit coordinates 0EDB: 21 FD 0E ld hl,$0EFD ;fruit data table 0EDE: 3A 13 4E ld a,($4E13);level 0EE1: FE 14 cp $14 ;max level 0EE3: 38 02 jr c,$0EE7 0EE5: 3E 14 ld a,$14 0EE7: 47 ld b,a 0EE8: 87 add a,a 0EE9: 80 add a,b 0EEA: D7 rst $10 0EEB: 32 0C 4C ld ($4C0C),a;sprite buffer 0EEE: 23 inc hl 0EEF: 7E ld a,(hl) 0EF0: 32 0D 4C ld ($4C0D),a;sprite buffer 0EF3: 23 inc hl 0EF4: 7E ld a,(hl) 0EF5: 32 D4 4D ld ($4DD4),a;fruit on 0EF8: F7 rst $30 0EF9: 8A adc a,d 0EFA: 04 inc b 0EFB: 00 nop 0EFC: C9 ret fruit bonus sprite table offset 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f 00000ef0 00 14 06 00000f00 01 0f 07 02 15 08 02 15 08 04 14 09 04 14 09 05 00000f10 17 0a 05 17 0a 06 09 0b 06 09 0b 03 16 0c 03 16 00000f20 0c 07 16 0d 07 16 0d 07 16 0d 07 16 0d 07 16 0d 00000f30 07 16 0d 07 16 0d 07 16 0d 07 16 0d

I think you should leave Cookie Mon. It's a great game for younger kids. My nephew likes it (and the Mr. & Mrs.). That's what I thought about cookie mon. Maybe I'll talk to Mike about it. That is the one that gets the most requests to drop but I think a lot of people like it too.