raindog

Wasn't that MAX the same as the Ultimax, the low-end C64 which was meant to be used with cartridges only so they took out most of the RAM?

Yeah, you guys are doing an awesome job on this. The music is just about exactly how I would have done it if I could have at the time. The complaints people have about the high pitched whine apply to the original Ms. Pac-Man and my hack as well, unless there's something I missed in this hack in my experimentation with Stella under Linux. The shortcut with pitch 0 was on the part of Atari's guys, not us. Some of the other requests people have had (in particular the white dots) would require a total rewrite of the kernel, I think. Not to say it'd be that hard nowadays, but I had no way to disassemble and subsequently reassemble an 8K game back then (and I still don't know how now.) I hand-assembled the hundred or so bytes of new code I added and patched it in like the rest of my changes with a hex editor. The maze editor is definitely doable and I thought about doing some VB thing back then, but you also need to figure out how many dots will display in your layout and change the "number of dots to complete the board" byte in the ROM. Piece of cake but I was too lazy at the time and it's kinda low priority for me now. Anyway, great going, it'd be cool if someone came up with something generally available that's visibly better than that infamous uncirculated Ebivision game Rob

I made a VCD version of it, and if anyone wants the MPG and has eDonkey, eMule, mldonkey, etc, it's here: ed2k://|file|atari-icons.mpg|244010704|622915552F706801C5479C478A16F6B1| As opposed to the DivX version this one's like 230MB. Sorry that the forums won't let me turn that into a link. Rob

I think Donkey Kong for the SGB was probably the most impressive update I've seen, not because of graphics or anything obviously but because they improved the replay value by about 10,000%. Honorable mention for Pac-Man Arrangement (available for like every platform) and Galaga '88 in its various home versions (it was too hard for me in the arcade, but I enjoyed it on the GG and TG16.) And my partner and I really enjoyed Hasbro Pong for the PC. Worst 'update' I've played by far was Defender for the GBA. Some of the others like Frogger seem like no more an updated version of the original than Phantom Menace was an updated version of Star Wars; it exists purely as a licensing thing with no actual entertainment value. So I have to cut them some slack as I never expected anything other than a crappy platform/RPG type experience from them. Rob

It's Rob, but thanks Actually, looking at these two screenshots reminded me why I switched the ghost colors around: Because when I first started hacking on the .bin file, the first thing I messed with was the title screen, and seeing them in the wrong order grated on me. If you look at the Pac-Man attract mode: that's what I was going for at the time. I realize now it screws up gameplay because you're looking for the red guy to be the smart one and the pink guy to be the fast one, etc, but I was just so impressed with myself at being able to change the colors so the attract mode looked less wrong that I didn't care Of course, I still got the last two monsters switched around but I was also doing it all from memory back then as I had no working MAME setup, so it made even less sense in the long run. As for the logo.... yes, yours looks better. Grab a copy of hackomatic and see if you can actually make that work, if you like; for my part, though there's lots more I could do with it, if I do anything more with Pac-Man it'll be to do something from scratch like the Ebivision guys. PacF2M was meant to be a stop-gap measure that would annoy someone enough to release the Ebivision version (which I'm sure has its own variances from the arcade game - the monsters' eyes don't move at all, for example, and I heard the sound was more minimal but considering it's 4K, they may be jerks but they're geniuses and geniuses frequently are). It was pretty funny to hear people saying it was the best possible version of Pac-Man when it's really more like Pac-Methadone in the absence of a mainline. I mean, it's a lot of fun and I still enjoy playing it (more than I enjoy playing Ms. Pac-Man.... must be all the blue) but I only did the foolish thing because I was pissed I couldn't get the real deal. Since that still hasn't happened, eventually I'll probably get another bug up my ass and do a Still-Better Pac-Man and before you know it there'll be a Pac-Man glut. (And if someone else would like to take up this mantle before I do, I will still be elated ) ... Speaking of bugs up the ass, hey Clay, have you considered getting some more fiber or something? Jesus christ. I liked you better when you were posting impossible mockups to that game hacking thread NE1 and I had going on that British site. Seriously, no one cares if you know the difference between a bitmap and a pixmap because the rest of us all knew what 'zilla meant. Going all au contraire mon frere on the newbies (or trolls, if you want) doesn't prove your point, it just makes you look like a dick and drives the actual talented people away from these boards. People don't walk away thinking "Man, that Zylon guy had a good point," they go away thinking "Who killed that dude's kitten?" Since this thread is about an old hack rather than a new programming technique that needs to be brainstormed, I won't mind if it becomes unusable and I'm planning on not quitting the forums anytime soon. Being a not entirely respectable member of the community myself enables me to say what the smart guys won't. So take a pill or something. For great justice.

If no one else does it, I'll be writing a program to take a pile of .bins and stella.pro (Stella config file) and convert them to .vins as soon as this thing is actually being sold (assuming the .vin format is documented.) For my own purposes I'll probably also write a Linux shell script that strips off the .vin header and executes the stripped .bin from a temp directory. This sort of thing has actually been a long time coming IMO, though recent discussions on stella-list seem to indicate a demand for even more meta-data integrated into the .bin files somehow. As for the da Vinci vs. Cupcakus' project, I find the flash-based idea more appealing but I just bought both a PC-based linker and flash card based linker for the GBA (Flash Advance Linker Extreme and GameWallet respectively.) So chances are I'll buy both of these products as well, they'll go nicely with the Cuttle Rob

No, those black lines in the playfield are there because they also draw the dots using the playfield but they wanted them to be white. So I guess they had the choice between black lines in the playfield or white lines in the playfield Rob

I know you were pulling his leg, but that sort of thing has been around for almost a decade at http://www.activeworlds.com (see http://www.awcommunity.org/awhs/ - the AlphaWorld Historical Society.) It looks like it costs 7 bucks a month nowadays, but it also looks a lot cooler (3D has obviously come a long way) and more populated than it was when I last visited in 1997 or so. I don't believe there's such a thing as violence there at all, though things could have changed. And of course nowadays there are things like Everquest, but the female manager of my local Gamestop started getting this nervous tic and talking about all the great raids she had been on when I picked up an EQ box to look at the cover art. Not a place for pacifists. Hey, if that's what you want to call it, who am I to judge

My dad bought the original Magnavox Odyssey when I was still in diapers, and while we played it some after he passed away, it's still sitting largely intact packed in styrofoam in its original box in the crawlspace. My mom bought us the Odyssey2 in 1979 or thereabouts (our one TV store in town was big on Magnavox, though they also tried to sell us an Atari 400 which we couldn't afford) but never played it. She's made brief attempts to "get" computers since then, but not being interested enough to keep at it prevents her from ever getting comfortable with them. My stepdad plays solitaire. A whole bunch of different kinds of solitaire, but I think his current favorite is plain old Freecell for Windows. I got him a PC steering wheel and some racing sims a few years ago, but he couldn't really get into them. Ditto the combat and Tom Clancy type stuff my stepbrother gets him now and then. Solitaire is where it's at for him, and you know what? Before he had his PC it was the same way, only with actual cards. I look at my gaming habits and notice that 90% of my GBA games are conversions of games I played as a child, and my big accomplishment this month was obtaining a complete MAME set, so I guess it just shows we stick with what we know

I mentioned this on stella-list, but not here.... it actually works under Linux using Crossover Office, albeit without sound. Chances are it'll work under recent free Wine versions as well since Crossover doesn't have any kind of special DirectX code in it. Something to tide us non-Windows developers over till a native version starts happening Rob

I'm pretty sure it could, though I'd probably be tempted to use Andrew Davie's "chrono-color" technique from Qb to make 2-color enemies. I wouldn't feel too bad if someone else got to it before me though Rob

Atheism is a faith like any other, it's just that the faith is in the absence of something. That seems about as arrogant to me as Christianity, Islam and most of the rest, and indeed, there are devout atheists. What's harder to find is someone with no faith at all who's devout about that lack of faith. I suppose I could call myself devoutly faithless except I really don't spend much time thinking about it at all, it wears me out This really needs to be moved to OT, I think. Rob

For what it's worth, setting Stella's FPS to my monitor's sync setting (75) results in no noticeable flicker at all except when some other process slows Stella down for an instant. I know that's cheating because TV's only operate at 60Hz but it's refreshing for the emulator to look better at this funky stuff for a change Rob

The demos Thomas and Andrew have done in recent days do use the players, multiplexed 6 times as in many games' score display routine. I guess you could add both missiles and get 50 pixels instead of 48 Rob

It was PacF2M, and no one seemed to get it (well, one or two ) Seems appropriate now considering the "Transgendered game designers" thread elsewhere on this board. I was thinking about Pesco again earlier today and noticed that in Ebivision's description of the game they mention a "special challenge" if you get to the ninth board. I wonder if it reverts to Pac-Man at that point. I couldn't actually find my copy of pesco.bin to try and find out.... Rob

Well, the Lynx's resolution was much lower than either the INTV or 2600. So the number of objects and colors would be easier to duplicate but you'd have to scale everything down, possibly resulting in ugliness (c.f. Ms. Pac-Man.)

Not if you want to be able to display each 'pixel' in its own color, which entails hitting the background (or playfield, I guess) color register with a new value as often as you can. You can do shorter stretches of higher resolution different-colored pixels (c.f. Acid Drop, or the Rubik's Cube 3D thing) by mixing in playfield and player graphics, but to cover the whole screen you're looking at about 15 pixels per color change. (I say "about" because while it seems to me each color change should be 15 pixels, I seem to be displaying 12 colors which would come out to 180 pixels across at that rate.) Of course you can use COLUPF instead and have multiple pixels inside each color change, and that might well be preferable aside from not having time to make the playfield asymmetric, but to actually make a full-screen full-color 'bitmap' the best you could do would be 12x192 or flcikery pseudo-HAM 24x192 as I described (and it would be completely static, with nothing else going on, and I'm not even sure you could do that vertical resolution in 4K, I haven't tried it yet.) I'd love to see someone prove me wrong Rob

I don't think that'll be necessary unless the screenshots on AtariAge were sent in by Ebivision themselves. If the Als have it, that means the Ebivision guys didn't keep it entirely in-house and chances are someone will eventually leak it if they haven't already. (For all I know I could already have it in some archived RAR file of a "complete Atari 2600 set".) Ladies and gentlemen, another new name! I like this trend and would enjoy seeing it continue; perhaps we can all have our own private names for the hack. Rob

I know what you mean, but given how much more it looks, sounds, and PLAYS like the original compared to the 2600 version, it's still a quantum leap ahead. And for the best home version ever, I'll probably stick to the Commodore 64 anyway. The C64, 5200, Atari 8-bit and Colecovision versions all play roughly the same to me, and all are just too messed up with the timing on the long horizontal runs to be arcade-like in my opinion. The Pac-Man Collection that (um, I'm terrible with names and nicks....) is working on for the Colecovision is more my speed, and the NES version for ones I've actually played (I kinda like the GBA version actually, even the "Arrangement" one...) One of my old game writing goals is to do a NES-style Pac-Man for the C64, and I got as far as drawing out the playfield using hacked character graphics the last time I looked at it. Of course the multicolored monsters and fruits are important to me too, as is the font in which the score is displayed Rob

You can display any static picture you like in any amount of colors as long as you're okay with only having 12 pixels per scanline, or 24 pixels with a sort of HAM-like effect and 30Hz flicker. I haven't found an actual use for this yet, of course. Rob

The other thing besides graphical changes that Ebivision did to change Pac-Man into Pesco was remove one of the monsters. So it's not just a graphics hack to get it back to its original state. Clearly the ROM has been dumped and is in someone's hands besides Ebivision. AtariAge doesn't post any Ebivision ROMs at all, so I'm not surprised they don't post Pac-Man either. But sooner or later it's going to get circulated, and until then I'm okay with playing my own hack; in fact, the lack of availability of Ebivision Pac-Man is the entire reason for its existence.

maybe a little too obvious, but..... Thrust

Oh, but that was off-topic. I cut my teeth on the C64 and probably owe my livelihood to it. I guess I've had 3 of them over the years plus a 128D. I had the 128D at school and eventually sold it to buy an Ensoniq Mirage or some part for my Amiga, I forget what. The last 64C is still hooked up at my parents' house, though the NES hooked up to the 1702 gets a lot more play. Emulators have never been quite the same but more importantly, I find I'm always looking for ways to get around the annoying parts of the C64 experience (disk load times, weird key placement) and just get to playing games again. I've never quite been able to make the experience seamless. Rob

Atari's position in the 8-bit computer world never changed much under the Tramiels (and under them, a lot of great hardware did get released) but their position in the video game console world -- which ended up being a lot more lucrative of a market -- went from #1 to #3 between the time of the 5200's and 7800's releases by virtue of Japan becoming interested in the US market. And they never recovered from that. That's one decision (actually, two - to delay the 7800, and then to decline Nintendo's offer) you can lay squarely at the feet of the Tramiels. I was going to say they did all right in the 16-bit computer market, but they never really had a chance in the US -- there were three established players already out there (IBM and clones, Mac and the also barely-scraping-by Amiga) but they did well enough in some vertical markets like MIDI for a while. Handhelds.... Lynx took the #3 spot again by virtue of there being no #4. And then we were into the 90's, and by the time the Jag came out it was all over because apparently no one involved in its design had ever played Wolf3D and realized what was coming. They made mistakes before the Tramiels got involved -- sitting back on their licensing laurels with stuff like Pac-Man and ET, poor analog joysticks and no backward compatibility on the 5200 -- but I think it was their handling of the 7800 that ultimately sunk them 10 years later, because momentum is awfully important. Ironically, I bet you the Atari brand is bringing in more revenue now that it's just a brand than it has since 1982. Rob