Jumpman1981

Huh, guess I'm wrong. I don't know why I thought DK's roar would be TTL, perhaps it's because most of the other sounds (ex: all of Jumpman's movements) are done that way.

IIRC, Donkey Kong's roar is generated by discrete logic circuits (TTL), so the only way to hear it uncompressed would be if someone made a high-quality recording of the original board. You have to remember that Donkey Kong's MAME samples were recorded in the late 90s/early 00s (MAME itself dates to 1997), probably by someone holding a microphone to the cabinet's speaker, so they're not exactly the cleanest. Pauline's voice probably belongs to an intern at Nintendo or Ikegami, rather than an actress. Nintendo wasn't in the best financial condition at the time of DK's development, so they probably couldn't afford to call a professional in.

Is it possible that the Kid Vid data is simply being interpreted as button presses by the Atari? As in, you could theoretically tap the joystick in a sequence and fool the game into thinking you're playing a tape?

Hey all. A while ago I was given a box of various broken Commodore stuff, and I've finally decided to try and fix them. It's 2 VICs and a C64, with a couple of accessories and a lot of custom hardware (previous owner was a bit of an experimenter). I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on what could be up with them. VIC-20 #1 - Black Screen of Death - Voltage appears to be fine. Second board revision VIC-20 #2 - So close to working, freezes on "CBM BASIC V2" screen and emits a loud buzz - I've heard something about there being too much power from the PSU, but I checked and it's getting 9V, as it should. Second board revision C64 - Black screen - PLA's getting nearly 11V, two rams have a jumper wire running between them. 250425 board revision, if that helps. Datasette - Works, but the mechanism's too slow for my fully-working C64 to recognise the signal - replacing the belts hasn't helped. If anyone could give me some advice on how to fix them, I'd really appreciate it.

I think it may be a combination of the second and third. It looks to me like a generic Jamma cab that someone's put a Ms. Pac-Man board into, said board may or may not be official. An official Midway re-release in the 1990s would most likely be impossible, as they lost the rights to anything Pac-Man related in late 1984, and a full bootleg cab is unlikely too, as Ms. Pac-Man wasn't exactly the newest game around when this cab appears to have been made, so there'd be no real incentive to bootleg it. Plus, if someone were to make a bootleg, they, as you mentioned, would remove Midway's name from anything they could find, rather than adding to them. That's what I think it most likely is, but, in the end, who knows?

Gotta say, the "cue-and-response" gameplay style they mentioned really reminded me of Dragon's Lair. I wonder if the game can be reconstructed to some degree from the source code fragment above.

Revision 3, and possibly the last: Edit: Never realised how awkward my initial post was... Edit 2: For comparison:

I See. Seems odd that Atari would go to all that effort with manuals and such, just to can it for something that's arguably inferior.

Are there any gameplay differences or is it the same as the other version?

59244 plays as of whenever the meter was unplugged...

It was another incident where the same thing happened with a Q*bert, causing the power supply to blow up. I remember hearing that it happened at Galloping Ghost, but it must have been somewhere else...

I hate to say this, but, my vote's on the NES. Don't get me wrong, I love the thing to pieces and I respect it and its legacy. It's just that I'm tired of people near worship it gets/used to get. There's just something about people trumpeting how it 'saved the industry' that drives me up the wall. The NES only became a huge deal because they had the right stuff at a time when there was no real competition. If another company, say Sega or Atari, beat Nintendo to the punch in 1985, then it would have been them who enjoyed the fame. In fact, this was even one of the reasons for the NES failing in Europe; Why? because Sega had already released the Master System. Again, don't take this as confirmation for me hating the NES, I love the thing to no end, and I'm more than happy to collect for it. I just dislike the fanfare it gets. </rant> Edit: Sorry for the essay, I just couldn't summarise my opinion without feeling like I was being ignorant.