johnnywc

Congratulations to our 3 winners!!! Thank you again to all the participants, it was really difficult choosing only 3! The Winners: devwebcl, Maze 2 Ferf13, Maze 3 Machine, Maze 3 I will send a PM out to the winners to get the their info to be included in the official Wizard of Wor Arcade manual! Thanks again!

Round 2 results - the final 6! Thanks again to everyone for their entries. The 3 winners will be announced tomorrow! devwebcl - Maze 2: Ferf13 - Maze 3: Machine - Maze 3: Mountain King - Maze 3: save2600 - Maze 3: TheMrVideo - Maze 1:

UPDATE: First, thanks to all for your submissions, they are all very creative and fun to play! There were 35 entries and I have trimmed the list down to 12 by picking the best maze from each of the 12 participants, so everyone is still in the running. Since there are so many entries, I am breaking the judging into rounds. The next round I will trim the list down to 6 and will post those results tomorrow. In the final round I will announce on Sunday the 3 winning mazes that will be included in the final version of the game. Thanks again for everyone who participated! John

Apologies, I am still reviewing the mazes and will be posting the winners soon!

Hmmm, maybe I can see about adding that feature if it doesn't take up too much ROM. If I do get it done, once I have the 3 mazes chosen I'll ask the winners what they want to call the mazes (actually I'll do that anyway so we can include them in the manual ). Thanks! John

Cool mazes Nathan (and cool namez too! ). I actually thought of letting the users name their mazes too (like THE ARENA/ THE PIT, etc) up to 12 characters, but I didn't want to use another save slot on the AtariVox (need to save some of those for other games ). That's cool! I was originally going to have people send me Save States and write a utility to read the mazes from the data, but it'll probably be much quicker to do it by hand once the 3 winners are announced. 18 hours left for anyone who wants to participate! Thanks, John

Honestly, I didn't even know you could design mazes in KC Munchkin! I am a big fan of Pick Axe Pete (I even started a 2600 port way back when that I should finish someday). I always had an affinity for the Odyssey 2, but I only played it at friend's houses or at retail stores back in the 80's (and most recently on emulation). Maybe one of these days I'll pick up an actual system.

That is how it's supposed to work. You cannot shoot the enemies' shots. The rule of thumb is: when you shoot an enemy, any shot that he has on the screen will disappear immediately. In your case, if you shoot at an enemy and miss him, his shot will continue along it's path, even if your shot crosses his shot. Hope that helps!

Looks like we were posting at the same time. Yes, the walls disappear, but only on ADVANCED mode (both for ARCADE and CUSTOM mazes). It's a feature I'm experimenting with; I do agree that perhaps they shouldn't start disappearing until later in the maze (maybe not until all of the blue guys or killed or something like that). Thanks for the feedback!

Very cool! Quick question; were you playing this on Advanced? I'm wondering where those partial horizontal walls came from 4 lines down. On Advanced, the walls will slowly deteriorate over time. Can you take a pic of the maze either on Standard or in the editor? Thanks!

Thanks Jess! Yup, AA got it right - today is 51 for me.

Thanks! Yeah, an updated bowling would be cool - the original is one of my favorites! I was thinking it would be modeled after Intellivision Bowling which I think was a great game! Having a more advanced basketball game would be cool too... I really liked the original but it would be nice to have a few more options than 1 on 1 full court .

Here's a pic of the back; apologies for the bad lighting. There is one opening for the channel select switch. The RF cable is fed through an opening under the channel switch hole. Thanks! John

Thanks for the suggestions! Although I like the idea of calling it Realsports Hockey, I do have plans on releasing other sports games as well (baseball, football, basketball, soccer, bowling, etc.) and would like them all to be part of the Champ Sports series. I guess we'll see if I ever get to the point of having a playable game and then we can worry about naming it Thanks again!

Pics as promised: These show the entire board, a closeup of where the cable is connected to the board, and a pic of the cable (half black RF / half white coax).

Sorry - maybe splice isn't the correct word. There is one cable coming from the 5200 that is soldered to the board; it appears to be the original cable. However, the cable was cut outside the box and part of a white coax cable was attached to it, so now the end of it is coax and not RF/RCA/phono jack. Darn I really need to post a pic, I'll take this thing apart in a few...

Hmm that may be the case. I don't know how they would have gotten power to the 5200 though unless they modified the switchbox too? Very strange indeed! I'll take some pics and maybe that will shed some light on their madness Thanks!

Whew! Well that's kinda good news, at least there's a chance the adapter still works. That would be great if there was a way to modify the 5200 so that it could use the 2600 adapter even if it has a video mod! I'll try to get some today. I'll take one of the 'spliced' wire (not much to show, it's half black RF and 1/2 white coax held together with electric tape) and the board where it's connected. I've scoured the case and there is no place to plug in the power but the seller stands by their claim that this ran without a switch box and no power supply (as it turns out the power supply they gave me was DOA anyway). I don't see how it would have worked with the switchbox anyway since the RF cord is now a coax connector so it wouldn't end up hooking up to the right port (I would assume the power was only routed to the RF connection on the switchbox, not the coax/antenna connection too, but maybe I'm wrong). Thanks! John

Okay, that makes sense now. Nathan's original design used both ports; I approached him about modifying the design to use one port so the other port would be free for the Atarivox (for speech/savegame in Wizard of Wor). Anyway, so if we use one port, is it feasible to multi-purpose a pin to be input/output based on a switch on the adapter to toggle between the two modes (4 one-button joysticks and 2 two-button joysticks)?

Disclaimer: I'm not a hardware guy With that said, I think we only have 7 pins we can read in the first joystick port, right? 4 for the joystick directions, 1 for the button, and the other 2 from the paddle lines (the other 2 are vcc and ground). If we use 2 of the joystick directions as input to the multiplexer, that leaves 5 pins we can read I think (or at least that's how we're doing it now). I guess I don't understand enough about multiplexers about how it would work from a hardware or software standpoint. Certainly a more simple hardware design that supports 4 joysticks each with 2 buttons would be best!

Thanks for the advice! This is exactly what I'm doing in WoW Arcade: at the beginning of VBLANK I read joystick 1 and then switch the inputs to joystick 2. During overscan, I read joystick 2 and then switch back to joystick 1. This gives a minimum of 30+ scan lines between switching and reading (I lot more for joystick 2 as it waits 200+ scan lines between set/read with the kernel). It also reads both joysticks each frame. I have played WoW Arcade with this setup (2 player with my brother) for hours and the control is spot on; not once did it feel any less responsive than using 2 joysticks connected to the regular ports. One thing Nathan and I spoke about in the design is supporting 4 one-button joysticks on one port but also supporting 2 2 button joysticks. My thought was to multipurpose one of the joystick pins to be input or output; it would be controlled by a switch on the adapter. In 4 one-button joystick mode, the two control output pins would be used to select which joystick to read (1-4). In 2 joystick mode, only one of the pins would be used as a selector and the other would be an output pin for the 2nd button. Does that sound feasible? Of course the software would have to be written to know what to expect on that 2nd pin, but the game itself would decide that either by the nature of the game (for example, Wizard of Wor Arcade only supports 2 joysticks and needs only 1 button for each, so it would never need to write or read from the 2nd pin; it would only use the 1st pin as a selector and ignore the 2nd pin (not needed to select or to read since the 2nd button isn't needed). A menu configuration could also be used in the game to take advantage of 2 button mode if needed. I think it would make the multiplexer a bit more marketable and attractive to programmers since it would allow them to write games that support 2 button controllers for 2 players (I'm thinking sports games) but also have the flexibility to support 4 joysticks with 1 button for each player (like Nathan's demos of 4 player Combat, Joust, etc.).

Makes sense - it would probably only save a few $ for shipping anyway. Well, I hooked up my 2-port 5200 and tried the 2600 adapter and it doesn't seem to work. I've never had or seen one before; is there anything special it needs? I assume you just plug in the adapter to the 5200, insert a 2600 cartridge into the adapter (I'm trying it with Super Breakout), and then turn on the 5200. Does the adapter require external power (I don't think so, I can't see any power jacks on it)? Can the 2600 adapter function if the 5200 has an AV mod on it (I have a composite mod)? I would think it would. Any way to test to see if the adapter is DOA? Maybe it needs a cleaning? (it looks pretty cruddy). Again, this was advertised as 'working' but I know that that means lol. Turns out the power brick included with the 4 port is DOA too (I had a mild heart attack when I first used it to power my 2 port and didn't get any picture; I thought my 2 port was DOA).

Good point. What if I took out the MB and just shipped that? It would be much lighter and use a much smaller box. Do you do AV mods? I don't think it would make sense to do all this without getting an AV mod too, what do you think? Yes, the included the 2600 adapter (that's the only reason I bought the lot , but the S/N doesn't have an asterisk in it so who knows if it works. They said it did and are still insisting that the 5200 works just through the spliced RF cable hooked up to a TV. I'm going to dig out my 2-port and try out the 2600 adapter and confirm it works.

Thanks for the info! Yeah, I'm not a hardware guy but I couldn't imagine how this would ever work the way they described without a switch box. I scoured the entire case and even opened up the 5200 and there is no external jack or anything hooked up to the board (except the spliced RF/coax cable) to the board, so the only solution is a switch box or the power mod. I'm located in CT, so that's $70 shipped both ways; probably not worth it. They did include a 2600 adapter (which was the main reason I bought it) and I have a working 2-port 5200, so hopefully that works at least. I've reached out to the seller to try to return it but they stopped responding so I may have to keep this thing and absorb the loss. Thanks for the quick replies!

Thanks for the tips guys. Unfortunately I'm not a hardware guy (read: I don't even own a soldering gun lol). Any service out there that will do this mod for me that you can recommend? I know I'll end up paying through the nose for shipping, but it's better than me frying the board.