hepcat

Whoa, thanks!!

I received Globetrotter in the mail yesterday from Atari Charles. He will be on his way to Hong Kong and the Philippines with me this Thursday morning. His traveling case seems to have picked up quite a few souvenirs since I last hosted him. I looked at the pictures from the Tokyo Game Show and I think I'm gonna have to check that out next year. --Jason

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=40787 This topic was dicussed extensively in the above thread. Reading through that thread, I realized that another year has passed, and I have still not beaten my Ms. Pacman high score from 1997. I did get 219,000 a couple days ago though. --Jason

OK, thanks to someone over at GP32x, I finally did get the Atari 800 emulator running and all three of the games do work on the GP32. I did notice that Hanglyman still has a couple of "bugs" that you took out of Pacman Plus and original Pacman. By far the biggest of these is the monsters staying blue forever on no blue boards. Did you fix that for the Hanglyman carts you made up? --Jason

I'm going to be traveling again soon so I figured I'd try to put PacMan Plus, Hanglyman and the "Fixed" 5200 Pac-man on my GP32 using the GP32's Atari 800 emulator. No luck so far, but I couldn't get ANY games to work on that thing so it's probably because I'm not using the emulator correctly. I'm trying to get some help over at the gp32x.com and I'll let you know if I ever do get them running. --Jason

OK, I just played a few games of version 5. The bug I mentioned before did not occur and I tried eating a couple monsters close to the box to see if that triggered it. The blue monster speed seems just about perfect now and the monsters reversed after every energizer whether they stayed their regular color or not. I'll play it some more over the next few days, but right now this looks really good. Too bad there is no cuttle cart for the 5200. --Jason

Sorry, I didn't have time to try the new version (#5) last night. I will definitely get to it tonight. BTW, what's the difference between the 16K and 32K versions? --Jason

OK it’s great, but I’m going to be a little more nitpicky this time. First though, a huge bug: sometimes a monster will come out of the box and go straight up through the walls. It’s actually quite similar to an arcade bug I’ve seen a couple times, but it happens much more frequently here. The blue monsters still seem a bit fast to me, but it’s better than before. And blue monsters in this game do reverse instantly which may make it seem like they’re moving a bit faster. Next: when you get an energizer in arcade Pacman Plus even if one of the monsters remains its regular color, it will still reverse. That’s not happening in this game. The monster is completely unaffected and keeps chasing after you. I’m not sure if this was intentional on your part, or if there’s simply no way to tweak this game to make it match the arcade in that way. This lack of reversal can have a big impact on later, no blue time boards. One of the ways I deal with no blue boards is to lure the monsters into the tunnel. Just as they’re about to leave the tunnel, I grab an energizer forcing them to go all the way back through at a slow speed before they can chase me again. Last night I was playing on the fifth pancake and tried this trick, but one of the two monsters in the tunnel did not reverse and since they’re so much faster than you on that level, he nailed me before I knew what was going on. One other thing, I noticed that the Pac-man slow down you implemented will be begin on the fifth pancake if you don’t die on the fourth. So one way or the other, it’s going to happen pretty quickly. Great job! I’m going to be playing this one for a while. --Jason

Wow, just wow. This is one challenging game. I doubt I'll ever break 300K on this one. You matched up the blue times to arcade PacPlus pretty well, but the blue monsters seem to run away alot faster than they do in the arcade. It may have been the same on the original Atari 5200 Pacman; it's been so long since I played that game I can't remember. But it also seemed like Pac-man slowed down a bit after eating a fruit which makes catching the invisible monsters even more difficult. I only managed to get all four of them once. I made it to the fourth key (by starting on the 1st key) and I noticed that Pac-man didn't slow down at all. Do you plan on implementing that feature? (You couldn't slow him down much or the game would become impossible.) I did try this in Mess but it didn't run very well so I downloaded Atari800Win. It took me a little while to figure out how to set it up, but I eventually figured it out and even managed to use the Slik Stik controller which is FAR better than the keyboard. The game seemed to run slow at "100%" speed in Atari800Win, so I upped that to 120% which seemed just about perfect. I did all these tests with version 2, I will definitely be trying version 3 tomorrow. Again, great job! --Jason

Holy crap, I'm going to download a 5200 emulator tonight just to try this! In the alternative, will it work in MESS? --Jason

Wow, definitely one of the more elaborate April Fools pranks I've seen, and you guys did have me going for a while. Anyway, I still hope to receive Trotter in time for my latest vacation! --Jason

Bump. Shortly after I broke 300,000 I did check out the MARP website in hopes of getting my score posted there. I e-mailed someone at the site who told me that they would post the score but that it couldn't be verified as an "official" score because I was using plain old Mame32. They told me I needed to use a build called Wolfmame which supposedly makes cheating almost impossible. So I got Wolfmame windows version.94 and for the several weeks I've been trying to break 300K again. I finally did it last night with a score of 300,320. I was a little less aggressive chasing monsters on the earlier screens than I usually am so I missed several 1600 and 3200 point monsters. But I did make it to the 11th pancake this time, one screen further than before. Hopefully my new score will be posted on MARP soon. --Jason pacmanplus300320.zip

Such as me moving it from the room with the TV to the room with my computer several times? So it's just a matter of soldering something back on? Or would the chip have to be completely replaced? --Jason

Dammit, sorry about breaking the tables. If I could edit that I would. I'm just not having a good week.

Ok, I got it open and took a couple pictures. If there's an extra chip installed anywhere here, I don't see it. BTW, I wrote down these version numbers off the TV screen while it was still working. Maybe they'll make sense to someone. Avalaunch Version 0.49.2 Alpha Build 129 Evox Version 0.37.1218A Build 543 --Jason

Oh man, I didn't even think of trying to remove those. I'll check them out tonight. --Jason

Thanks for the suggestions, seriously. I'm just feeling even more retarded now that I can't even figure out how to open the thing up. --Jason

I just tried to open the Xbox to take a picture of the mod chip. Two screws come out on the bottom, but it didn't open when I took them out and I saw no obvious way of making it open. Obviously I didn't want to force it. I also reviewed my old e-mails to see if the guy who modded it mentioned what chip he was putting in. No luck. To clear up some apparent confusion, no I didn't try to do this mod by myself, I hired someone to do it who came highly recommended. --Jason

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, but I'll have to report back on them tomorrow night or over the weekend. Right now if I touch that Xbox, I'm going to wind up throwing it out the window. --Jason

I pushed the button once. It turned on and off twice and stayed on the third time while flashing red and green. It was making noise, almost like there's a fan inside. This sound was nothing I haven't heard from it in the past. Someone else asked me about the chip last night. I have no idea how to disable the chip. Can that be done without opening up the Xbox? --Jason

Ok, my foray into modern gaming has not gone well. I bought an Xbox around Christmas and got it modded in late January. It came with a bunch of emulators and games on it, but I really wanted to FTP over some of my Mame roms so I could finally try some of those games on a real TV. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, I could not get the [email protected] thing to FTP to my PC. And last night, it stopped working entirely. Well it would start to fire up and it made noise, but nothing appeared on my TV screen. All I got was a light flashing green and red where the on/off switch is. A tutorial I found on Xbox-scene said that probably means the chip is bad. Yeah, I know, I took a risk by modifying a delicate piece of electronic equipment to do something it was not originally designed to; please don’t interrupt my rant with logic and common sense. I guess what I’m looking for here is experiences from other AA members who’ve had an Xbox mod go bad. What were you able to do about it? I have contacted the guy who did my mod, he is willing to look at it, but it probably won’t be until next week at the earliest. The ironic thing is that the Atari 2600 I keep next to my TV and just below the Xbox is at least 25 years old and it works every freakin’ time. Dammit this pisses me off!!!! –Jason

I just got my CC2 and vaguely remembered reading about this hack. How exactly is it different from the original Kaboom? --Jason

I'd like to be added to the high score club. I'll definitely be playing this game a lot this week. --Jason

I've already got the Sonic Collection for X-box. I didn't know about the Megaman collection, but I will definitely be picking it up soon! --Jason P.S.--I probably would've bought the Sonic Collection if I HAD to choose, because didn't play the Megaman series much after MM2.

I checked the site yesterday and saw this update from March 16. http://www.schells.com/cc2.shtml#Updates --Jason