Kurt_Woloch

OK, I tried the new update (thank you for posting it!) and I think the flipper sounds are better now. Maybe the pitch could be a bit higher... if you listen closely to the video, I think it's a bit higher there. And I think I got the "up" sound slightly wrong, maybe it's better if the delay between the two "clicks" it does is shorter by a frame (some minor tweaking which you don't find out until you've actually heard it in action). Other than that, everything seems fine.

Here are my times for this past week (January 14th through 20th)... sorry, no modern games this week.

Here are my times for this past week (January 14th through 20th)... Atari 2600: Chaotic Grill (WIP) - 15 min. Giana Bros. - 5 min. Go Fish! - 10 min. Pac-Man 8K - 10 min. Atari 7800: Baby Pac-Man (WIP?) - 41 min. in 3 sessions I hope I got the names of this week's games right... today a new update of Chaotic Grill was put up which improves the enemy movement code. On Pac-Man 8K, I tried out how playing Baby Pac-Man for a long time has affected my general Pac-Man skills. As for Baby Pac-Man itself, when I played it, it was thought to be the final version, and I actually felt guilty for downloading and playing it because it shouldn't have been offered for download at all had I not stepped in, and finally Bob quit after throwing out the "final version" under protest, but has meanwhile come back. Otherwise maybe I would have played some of the games for longer, but I felt guilty for playing them at all.

Funny you should mention Super PM... I think someone earlier mentioned Pac & Pal, and I think from the engine Pac & Pal would be similar to Super Pac-Man since it has roughly the same maze structure, there's only much less fruits to get because the game priciple is quite different.

Yes, this happens to me as well. In addition to that, I've sometimes seen the enemies turn around on the spot (on a three-way intersection) which they are only supposed to do on a dead-end, and I've also seen them leaving the platform for a ladder even though I was on the same platform in front of them, or leaving a ladder for a platform even though I was on the same ladder. But with platforms, they do this in the arcade version as well sometimes, so this may not be such a big mistake.

OK... Thank you, Bob, very much for returning and picking the thread up once more. As I said, I'm not as cautious. It's a different thing if I work for someone else though, then of course I try not to leak things out. And as I said, similar things happened to me myself with the Karaoke backing tracks I'm making, but it actually only bothers me if I've done them for someone who promised to pay me, and then I don't get paid but the tracks still leak out. On the other hand, of most of the tracks I didn't actually SELL a single copy, so if I see them done out there by singers, I actually have more joy in this (that my tracks are being appreciated and used) than in a sale I could have had, but didn't have, because actually some of my tracks are better versions than the official versions of the same songs that are publicly for sale. My actual reaction to this is that I've greatly scaled back the production of new tracks, but for those I've already done, I could care less about how they spread. And I've actually never seen someone obviously SELLING my tracks (at least not alone... it could be they're for sale as part of a big library which also contains pirated copies of professional manufacturers, but I didn't catch anyone selling them this way as well), I just see them pop up here and there in the libraries of Karaoke bars and KJ's. Sometimes when such a track comes up, I will tell the people that I did them. In the end I think it's better if people get to use my tracks than to only have those use them who paid for them. If I do any protective measures, it's actually more to protect the customers who bought my tracks from unfair competition than to protect myself. But if no one actually bought a given track, there's no one to protect. If it bothers you to see your games for sale on eBay, it's your given right to step in and do something about is, or tell Albert and he will do something since he legitimately sells those games, so he's hurt by that as well. Maybe those copycats only pull their binaries from ROM sites and don't actually know that some of the games they sell repros of are still legitimately for sale and the authors are still around. I think people who post here know better and wouldn't buy from those sellers, so even if they do make money selling those, you still have a supportive base here. My actual problem was that I don't have an Atari 7800, and actually I'm trying out many games for systems I don't own by means of emulators. I'd need much space to have all those games and systems physically. It actually wouldn't bother me that much having to pay for them. Along those lines, I always liked the system in the arcade where you pay for each game you play, but you're not obligated to do anything beyond that (same thing for the shared e-scooters that are now popping up in many cities such as Vienna). Thank you for saying that nothing I ever did caused you to abandon the game. I thought so because you quoted my long response in the posting where you quit. On the other hand, you quit twice before, so I somehow expected this to be only a "timeout" rather than being permanent. And I wouldn't have posted it this way if I had known it would hurt you that much. I read that nobody from Namco ever got back to you... I guess they're fine with homebrews then. By the way, I read today that they now have rebranded their own arcade and restaurant operations as Pac-Man Entertainment... see here: http://www.pacmanentertainment.com/ You don't need to post another binary if you don't want to, I just think it would also be better if it's actually not yet considered "finished" because then we still can find flaws in it and you can try to improve them. I think the flipper sounds could be improved a bit... I analyzed the sounds of the actual machine from the video, and I think they need to be done a bit differently... the actual "click" should be shorter. I would do it roughly as follows, so it sounds more like the arcade original... First sound when you hit the button (and the flippers hit the first frame of "up" animation): medium pitch of noise, volume 5 for 1 frame, then turn back to volume 1.for 3 frames, then slightly higher pitch and turn volume to 7 for 1 frame, then volume 2 or 3 for 1 frame... end of "flipper up" sound. Then do a "flipper down" sound as the flipper gets released which is a bit lower in volume and lower in pitch than the start of the "up" sound... I'd say volume 6 for 1 frame, then volume 3 for 1 frame, then end of sound. That should sound a bit more like the arcade unit sounds, I think. Also, the arcade unit has some kind of low-pitched drone sound when no other sound plays in pinball mode. Is this going to be left out? Sorry if I hurt you again by this... if this is asking for too much, I'll accept it the way it is now. As for the "gap" in the ball, could it be that there's an error in the display list for one of the last zones? Maybe because it has more scanlines than in maze mode?

Hmmm, good question. For one, I was pretty interested in Baby Pac-Man because I've played it in Visual PinMAME very much. And the fact that there were incomplete ROM's posted made me curious about what was to come, and after the maze part already turned out great I wanted to "save" the pinball part when Bob got stuck with it. Maybe - and in that you're right - if Bob never would have posted an incomplete ROM file, I wouldn't have fallen for it. I admit that. And I'm not following all homebrew actions, just certain ones that seem attractive to me, the 2nd one at the moment being "Chaotic Grill", a new version of Burger Time for the Atari 2600 by Splendidnut, and, sadly, there also I seem to have gone a bit too far by posting more than I should (not about ROM release, but in terms of "help"...). And, sadly, you're right that I'm generally not a nice person to interact with. There's no problem if I only go shopping or eating at a restaurant, that is, the waiters and clerks probably have no problem, but the more people get to know me on a deeper level, the more I seem to get on their nerves or annoy them. I've already realized that, but I'm unsure what to do about it. In addition to that, in the thread you're referring, Bob first dropped the project, and when I started to finish it, he picked it up again and regained control over it, so I felt entitled to have more say in the final outcome than those only standing on the sideline. But I guess I was wrong there as well...

OK, I think it's time for a few songs again... I think this one has been mentioned: Then I somehow had to think of this thread (since Bob seems to speak Spanish as well) when I heard this one on the radio today: Then, since the Yardbirds were mentioned, a Yardbirds cover which also somewhat depicts the mood here: And finally the song I proposed as a title song for this game:

I'm sorry, I didn't know. I just came in during the development of Baby Pac-Man and didn't follow the development of the other games very closely, though I did play some of them (Bentley Bear, Yps (Bentley Bear hack) and Jr. Pac-Man).

Apology taken. Thinkin' about the drama now... where it comes from and how it could be avoided.

OK, thank you for the investigation! I still think the "pinball only" mode as implemented by Bob enhances the game and is a good counterpart to the "Video only" mode, so I'd keep it in there, even if the original arcade game doesn't have it.

@Imstarryeyed: No? No pinball only mode? Maybe this was a misunderstanding, but according to the manual the arcade machine has a DIP switch #16 called "Playfield video adjustment". But according to the game manual, this is for troubleshooting only. If it's on, it says "Playfield will operate only", and off means "Playfield will operate with video". However, since they talk about "for troubleshooting only", this might not be an actual different game mode, but they only switch the video off, but still the game is playing like if the video was there, it's just not visible, not the way Pinball only mode works now in the 7800 version. Could you verify this?

I didn't feel like he was saying anything negative about this forum in specific, he was complaining that people made and sold physical cartridges of his games, no matter where they got the binaries from. It might even be from here, but not necessarily done by someone who participates on this forum. Remember anyone can read the forums on Atariage and download the binaries posted here, even non-members can do so. And then there might have been steps in between like some people searching this forum for binaries and posting them on ROM sites (without charging for it) and other people downloading them from the ROM sites and making their illegal repros.

OK... I may have my binaries now, but I'm certainly not happy about the way they were posted... basically under protest, and by throwing in the towel. I meant to post something different, but it seems to be too late now. I wish we could have settled this in peace, but apparently it wasn't possible. All I can say now is that I'm very sorry about everything that happened. I hope I didn't ruin too much by my long posting, and I hope there will still eventually be an agreement on a cart release because I still think there are many people who would like to own Baby Pac-Man on a physical cartridge. As of now, I'm ready to agree to any terms presented in case my agreement should be necessary. Do you think I can do something to remedy what I've just destroyed? To answer some of the other posts, yes, I could have tried to settle this privately with Bob instead of doing this long posting, but I wanted to answer to Bob's comment that he was sure I would want the game to be protected and to the other post questioning if I would have any say... that's why I started posting it, and then it became far too long because I posted all the points that came to mind... About the question if I have any tact and about the way I make other people feel... I'm sorry, but as a functional autist I have certain problems communicating, and it's hard for me to anticipate how someone else may feel about something I say, and also sometimes hard for me to not say something because it might make somebody feel a certain way. Actually, I already had the feeling to have played a big part in ruining everything the first two times Bob dropped the project, and that's actually why I felt obliged to put that much work into it myself in order to make up for that. As for Bob's comments that this game hasn't been enjoyable, this puzzles me a bit. When Bob contacted me about sending back my nearly completed work on the pinball part, he said he was looking forward to do work on Baby Pac-Man again, and then on the other games thereafter like Defender. Looks like that has changed...

Well, 10,000 is obviously a pretty high mark... but there have been schemes where the ROM was released 2 or 3 years after the sale of physical copies started, and I could live with that. From what Bob wrote, however, as I read it, it means there will NEVER be a ROM release. And this would mean that sometimes in the future, there would actually be people trying to find out how Bob's custom bankswitching scheme works in order to preserve the game for later generations. By the way, is bankswitching needed at all on this game? The Atari 7800 natively supports 48 K of ROM, doesn't it? And this game doesn't have more than that... and I took extra care not using up too much space for the pinball part in order to have it all fit in. So what would bankswitching actually be needed for, other than to prevent piracy? And I contributed a bit more than math only... I ended up supplying pretty much all of the code that controls ball movement (except for a basic routine which moves it based on given x/y velocities) and detects collisions and also the upper ball which works on a different scheme to the main ball. I think it was about 100 to 120 hours of work, all in all... I'd have to check how much it really was.

I don't plan on withdrawing my support... having the game not released at all is the last thing I would want since my work would then be for naught as well. I also didn't say I wouldn't want a cart release, I only think that the cart shouldn't be the only way to enjoy the game.

OK, seems like I'm late to the party again, and someoine already said we should stop it, but I still want to say somehting BECAUSE I'M KURT... While I do agree that making unauthorized copies of the game and especially selling them is bad, I think the measures you take in order to prevent this are far overblown and deprive many other people of the fun they could have by downloading the ROM and playing it on emulators (without having any commercial interest in it). I'm actually very angry about this happening... when you said "someone else can finish this", I thought I would really be the one who finishes it, and I would have continued to post binaries right until the final version. But that was reverted pretty quickly... I actually didn't foresee this coming since previously you released binaries and even the source code for all of your games. But maybe it was just the fact that I "took the source code and ran with it" that made you think twice about sharing any more of your work... I have been raised with a mindset of sharing... now that my mother is dead, my father even wants to have joint money with me. Back in the day, I hardly bought any software for the C-64 which I had back then, but I still accumulated a collection of hundreds of disks with basically pirated software, and I basically did the same with any computer that came after it. When the Internet came about, and with it MAME and other emulators, I jumped all over it because I actually was looking for ways to re-experience all those old games, and with emulators I could do so, while especially for arcade games, most of the old ones have long since disappeared from the arcades we have here in Vienna. But I always felt guilty for playing all those games without paying for them. On the other hand, the same thing happened to me when I produced CD+G Karaoke backing tracks which I found to spread wildly (at least the really popular songs), and there has also been instances, and that's when it really gets nasty, where there was an agreement that I would get paid for doing songs someone else wanted to have, but in the end that someone bowed out of paying me one way or another despite of me having done the work properly. In my contribution to Baby Pac-Man, I saw a way to give something back to the community which has supplied me with so many games to play basically for free, and I didn't think it would end up in a game where just this way of playing is being blocked. If I had known this, I probably wouldn't have even started making contributions. Actually I regret having taken part in this thread at all, and I've also considered doing the same thing Bob has done... closing my account and leaving Atariage for good. But this would probably take it too far, I guess, so I probably won't do this, but I do consider stopping to play video games totally. What would we do if the actual copyright owners of this game, Namco and Bally, were enforcing their copyright like this? They could easily send cease-and-desist letters to Bob or Al in order to prevent them from selling unauthorized ports of THEIR game. (OK, so Bally isn't around anymore, but Namco is, and they at least own the Pac-Man character). In the end, they could decide only to do what's commercially viable for them, which probably isn't putting out a new game for a long-dead console. I can actually see that things are generally going in the opposite direction... in the early 2000's, record companies attempted to add copy protection to audio CD's in order to prevent them from being copied and shared, but that quickly went away. Lately, Youtube has started to auto-generate videos for just about all content that's available on digital platforms (you can usualy find those videos made by "#Artist# - Topic"), so now you can listen to just about anything that's available for sale on Youtube for free (with a bit of advertising). Which for me as a Karaoke singer is a godsend because there's now backing tracks for many songs which previously haven't been put out on Karaoke CD's. What's being done for Baby Pac-Man here goes into the opposite direction, sadly. As for the royalties, I never asked for a part of the royalties, but instead I would like the binary to be released. So I'm offering to relinquish the part of the royalties I'm offered on the condition that the ROM file be released for free download at the time the cartridge hits the AA store. You still can go after "douchebags" SELLING unauthorized copies of the game, I don't object against that at all. But... I agree that in the end it's Bob's project, so it'll probably end up as it often does with me... I get fed with a lot of money which I can't use because I already have enough of it, and the things I want don't happen. If this happens, I consider how to make it hard for Albert to send me my part of the royalties... I could refuse to give him my account number and have him send the royalties as dollar notes in an envelope by snail mail instead, because that's equivalent to how this game now gets distributed. This has been a "lesson learned" for me, and I guess I will never contribute to a project again the way I did here... I'll rather try to finish my own projects now. Yes, I've thought about this all night... Sorry for the long rant, but even if it's Bob's project, I think as a major contributor I'm at least entitled to rant...

So this means that the final version will only be available in physical form, not as a ROM image? Or will the ROM image be made available as the game hits the AA store? Or will we have to wait until someone dumps the cart, and the ROM makes its way to various ROM sites (as eventually Red Sea Crossing did as well)? As for the pinball only mode, @Imstarryed, maybe you can fill us in on how this one works and what the differences to the regular mode are? As a wild guess, I would speculate the following: - The player starts in pinball modes and has as many balls as there would normally babies. - A ball counts as drained with the same rules as normally, that is, there are 3 tries to get it going until something else scoring than the left bumper has been hit - When the ball hits a hole, it never goes up to the maze, but the ball always gets spit out again - The fruit and tunnel levels of course don't make that much sense, but the arrows in the middle still advance and eventually give an extra ball after all have been lit One problem I see is how the player should keep track of how many balls are still left... in the original version, the video screen probably is still active, but in the 7800 version, the extra lives only get displayed when in maze mode. Maybe this could be added to the scoring line, or the number of extra balls could be displayed in place of the tunnel speed (with another ball replacing the fruit indicator)?

OK, sorry for continuing this discussion here (I've realized by now that this is the tracker of the old year), but I think pinball SIMS on PC or consoles should qualify as video games because they're not really physical pinball games, and thus qualify for the trackers (depending on how new they are), shouldn't they? I would think it's odd excluding "Pinball Construction Set" or "David's Midnight Magic" from the tracker because they're the "wrong" genre...

Oops... I accidentally posted my times in the tracker for last year, so here it goes again: Here are my times for this past week (January 7th through 13th) on modern systems... PC (Windows up to XP?): Visual PinMAME - Baby Pac-Man - 65 min. in 4 sessions Visual Pinball - 8 min. I've included the Visual Pinball and Visual PinMAME times from the Classic tracker here as well since I'm still not sure how to count them... Visual PinMAME probably works on the Windows 9x family and definitely works on XP, though I don't know if it runs on Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10 as well since it uses COM objects for connecting the ROM's to the pinball tables. The ROM for Baby Pac-Man is definitely a "classic" game though...

Here are my times for this past week (January 7th through 13th) on modern systems... PC (Windows up to XP?): Visual PinMAME - Baby Pac-Man - 65 min. in 4 sessions Visual Pinball - 8 min. I've included the Visual Pinball and Visual PinMAME times from the Classic tracker here as well since I'm still not sure how to count them... Visual PinMAME probably works on the Windows 9x family and definitely works on XP, though I don't know if it runs on Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10 as well since it uses COM objects for connecting the ROM's to the pinball tables. The ROM for Baby Pac-Man is definitely a "classic" game though...

Here are my times for this past week (January 7th through 13th)... Arcade: Burger Time - 78 min. in 2 sessions Atari 2600: Chaotic Grill (WIP) - 13 min. Atari 7800: Baby Pac-Man (WIP) - 55 min. in 3 sessions PC (Windows 9x): Visual PinMAME - Baby Pac-Man - 65 min. in 4 sessions Visual Pinball - 8 min. I continued playing Baby Pac-Man, but not to the extent I played it last week which I had off from work. By now I managed to "roll the fruit", that is, come to the point where the fruit would change for the 8th time, but that doesn't happen because then the fruit remain bananas. I also played the version in Visual PinMAME which runs the original ROM's in order to compare it to the Atari 7800 and version and help Bob improve it. While I was at it, I also tried two other tables coming with Visual Pinball, but they don't use Visual PinMAME because there's no original ROM's for them. Since this is essentially one game (as Pinball Construction Set would be one game), I didn't count the tables separately from each other. Similarly, I played the original arcade version of Burger Time in order to help SplendidNut develop his Atari 2600 version called Chaotic Grill, which I also played.

By the way, I created some pseudocode as well in order to see how huge it would really get... If I didn't make any mistake, the code for the enemy incoming in the "up" direction would be the following: if ladder_up and not ladder_left and not ladder_right then move up if not ladder_up and not ladder_left and not ladder_right then move down if ladder_left and not ladder_up and not ladder_right and ladder_down then move left if ladder_right and not ladder_up and not ladder_left and ladder_down then move right if ladder_left and ladder_up and not ladder_right and player_left then move left if ladder_left and ladder_up and not ladder_right and not player_left then move up if ladder_right and ladder_up and not ladder_left and player_right then move right if ladder_right and ladder_up and not ladder_left and not player_right then move up if ladder_left and ladder_right and not ladder_up and player_left then move left if ladder_left and ladder_right and not ladder_up and not player_left then move right if ladder_left and ladder_right and ladder_up and player_left then move left if ladder_left and ladder_right and ladder_up and player_same_ladder then move up if ladder_Left and ladder_right and ladder_up and player_right then move right Since this duplicates many checks, this could be folded into: If ladder_up then if ladder_left then if player_left then move left else if ladder_right then if player_same_ladder then move up else move right end if else move up end if end if else if ladder_right then if player_right then move right else move up end if else move up end if end if else if ladder_left then if ladder_right then if player_left then move left else move right end if else move left end if else if ladder_right then move right else move down end if end if end if In this code ladder_xx means there's a ladder or platform in that direction leading from the intersection and player_xx means the player is in that direction seen from the enemy. This pseudocode is in VB style... in C style it would look a bit differently. :-)

OK... as they say, a picture says more than thousand words, so I just sketched up a diagram of the possibilities which may occur... The first up arrow gives the direction the enemy comes from, black arrows give the following direction if it's not dependent from the player position. In the right 3 pictures, the colored dots give possible player positions which give the new directions pointed to by the arrows in the same colors. An asterisk says that the mirror of this case may occur and has to be accounted for as well. To explain this, there are six possible patterns an enemy may encounter on an intersection... 1. Continuation... in tnis case, continue direction 2. Dead end... in this case, reverse direction 3. L piece... in this case, continue along the L (this may have to be mirrored to a left or right L) 4. T piece with possibility to continue along the same direction... here the direction depends on the player position, and this pattern has to be mirrored as well. 5. T piece leading left or right... here, again, the player position decides which way gets taken 6. Intersection with all ways open... here, again, the player position decides which way to go All of those possibilities can occur relative to any of the 4 directions the enemy may come from. In the pseudo code you've given, I think the "L" is not properly accounted for in all cases. Let's take, for example, my 3rd drawing, and let's assume that the player is to the upper right of the enemy... in this case, your pseudocode does the following: At intersection: Current Direction LR? CUD (No, it's up) Current Direction UP? CLR (-> CLR) CLR: Compare with player X (which actually should be irrelevant here because there's only one way to continue) If Left, switch to left if possible, exit (no, player is right) If Right, switch to right if possible, exit (not possible) Check current direction, if can't move, use opposite direction. (this would take the opposite direction, not along the L) Sorry for critizising you...

Well, I thought a bit about what a more code-based solution could look like, and it doesn't rule out tables beforehand. In my original proposal, you probably would have needed up to 4 bytes (one for each direction) to keep score, and then, temporarily, two more to keep the best value so far and which direction it belongs to. You could spare some of the bytes by doing all the checks for each possible direction at once, scoring it and then check if it's better than the previous best direction. That way you would only need 3 bytes total (one for the running total for the currently checked direction, one for the best score so far and one for the direction it belongs to... and you could probably pack the last two values into one byte since the best direction only needs 2 bits and the score only needs 4. The flicker management probably is a different beast... the question is, what do you need all that RAM for? I think you should differentiate RAM that has to be retained from frame to frame (while other logic is being done) and RAM that only gets used temporarily. In this case, the 3 bytes for doing the direction scoring only are being used temporarily... once the enemy has decided where to go, all that needs to be retained is its direction, and the other bytes can be reused as temporary storage for another enemy or a different block of logic. As a more code-based solution, you could of course also do a decision tree of sorts, but this could get HUGE... example: Current dir. right? -> CR Current dir. left? -> CL Current dir. up? -> CU Current dir. down? -> CD CR: Ladder up? -> CRLU Ladder down? -> CRLD Platform right? -> CRPR Platform left? -> move left -> move up (out of bounds) CL: Ladder up? -> CLLU Ladder down? -> CLLD Platform left? -> CLPL Platform right? -> move right -> move up (out of bounds) (The "out of bounds" code applies if the enemy has been knocked to the plates and has to return to the proper maze - this would probably move it up). The further labels not displayed here then would do more checks for the other ladders / platforms and the player position in order to come to a decision. That way you would probably use the least possible number of checks, but also much code duplication.