Pac Munchkin

Happy Dude your Colour Test.bin was exactly what I was looking for and exactly what I needed it is in decimal so I understood it clearly and could easily convert it to binary for my bit hacking. This has been a major help for me and to show you how much check out my Fat Albert Skin Color thread. I completely hacked Fast Food and Fat Albert and changed their colors much better, also some minor but noticeable graphics improvements. Thank you so very much! Wade

I know some day I may actually understand that map! LOL You have quite a lot of experience over me I have a bunch of your hacks, maybe someday I'll be there. Right now I can't my mind says letters and numbers are two different things, I have the book Compute's "Machine Languarge for beginners" but even reading it from the start it seems just over my head, everything i read makes more questions pop in my head until I am very confused. With that said the conversion to binery table at the back from decimal, that is how i have come to understand binery but hex no way not yet at least. LOL Wade I know some day I may actually understand that map! LOL You have quite a lot of experience over me I have a bunch of your hacks, maybe someday I'll be there. Right now I can't my mind says letters and numbers are two different things, I have the book Compute's "Machine Language for Beginners" but even reading it from the start it seems just over my head, everything I read makes more questions pop in my head until I am very confused. With that said the conversion to binary table at the back from decimal, that is how I have come to understand binary but hex no way not yet at least. LOL Wade

HayHay Hay I cracked the code to Fat Albert yesterday! Yes Fat Albert is back and looks better than ever he has skin color now!!! I also corrected his robot looking square mouth opening to look more human. One last thing I corrected was that Whopper I always hated the fact that it looks like it has silver pointed junk sticking out of the top, no more it looks as good as the rest of the fast food now. Enjoy bonus I also added Fast Food with pink lips and the lips look good I corrected the sloppy looking lips took out all the holes in the graphics now they look very good and still very much like the original, whopper correction as well. Enjoy!!! oh thanks for the Colour Test.bin that made this possible, so glad it was not in hex! I gave up on hex and assembly, I found all this with Bit hacker. Wade One more time I fixed the sesemy seeds on the bun yes it could be said I am a stickler for details! LOL Wade Fat_Albert.bin FASTFOOD.BIN

Hacking color for Bit Hacker. Hacking color can take some time but it is worth it, I found all the colors in Fast food this way. except for screen color that would be too hard to find this way. look for patterns that repeat is it is a solid color sprite. like this 10010010 10010010 10010010 10010010 10010010 10010010 10010010 10010010 As you can see all lines are the same this could be a color of a sprite. Remember if it has multi colors like maybe the middle is different it might look something like this. 10010010 10010010 10010010 11100100 11100100 10010010 10010010 10010010 Wade

HayHay Hay I cracked the code to Fat Albert yesterday! Yes Fat Albert is back and looks better than ever he has skin color now!!! I also corrected his robot looking square mouth opening to look more human. One last thing I corrected was that Whopper I always hated the fact that it looks like it has silver pointed junk sticking out of the top, no more it looks as good as the rest of the fast food now. Enjoy bonus I also added Fast Food with pink lips and the lips look good I corrected the sloppy looking lips took out all the holes in the graphics now they look very good and still very much like the original, whopper correction as well. Enjoy!!! oh thanks for the Colour Test.bin that made this possible, so glad it was not in hex! I gave up on hex and assembly, I found all this with Bit hacker. Wade Fat_Albert.bin FASTFOOD.BIN

I forgot to say, if you are using hexadecimal numbers then it's easier to pick the colors you want. The values will be something like #$HL, where "H" stands for both "hue" and "high nybble," and "L" stands for both "luminance" and "low nybble." The "H" values for the basic colors go something like this: H = 0 ... gray (black-and-white) H = 1 ... yellow H = 4 ... red H = 6 ... purple H = 9 ... blue H = C ... green H = F ... brown If you memorize those numbers, then the numbers in between are the colors in between: H = 1 is yellow, and H = 4 is red, so H = 2 ... yellowiswh orange H = 3 ... reddish orange H = 4 is red, and H = 6 is purple, so H = 5 ... violet H = 6 is purple, and H = 9 is blue, so H = 7 ... bluish purple H = 8 ... purplish blue H = 9 is blue, and H = C is green, so H = A ... greenish blue H = B ... bluish green H = C is green, and H = F is brown, so H = D ... brownish green H = E ... greenish brown Then, for the luminances, we have L = 0 ... darkest L = 2 ... very dark L = 4 ... dark L = 6 ... medium dark L = 8 ... medium L = A ... medium light L = C ... light L = E ... very light Thus, $7A would be "medium light bluish purple," whereas $42 would be "very dark red," etc. In the screen shot I posted, the L values go across the screen, left to right, from 0 to E, whereas the H values go down the screen, top to bottom, from 0 to F. So for example, the color in the fourth column of the sixth row would be $56. I've added the values to the picture, to make it easier for you. In the picture labels, "x" means the part of the number that changes-- for example, row 3 says "2x," which means the high nybble is "2," and the low nybble is variable. So to get a particular color value, find the color you want in the grid, then combine the row and column labels together-- such as, "4x" combined with "x8" would be "48" (or #$48 in hexadecimal assembly notation). Michael Rideout Thanks Michel this is much better, I was just punching in bits one by one with bite hacker and testing for screen background memory.afdter I got past 16 by accident I lost track, I realized I was past and kept going for a long time finly I gave up and thought what is I fill every bit straight accross so that was when I made that discorevy. This is so much easier but it is in hex it takes me a long time to figure out the numbers although I can but it is slow for each number. Thanks very much though i can use this. Wade

While toying around changing background colors for Alien I discovered Atari has 255 colors! In an on line manual it said 16 colors, not only this the list of colors was all wrong. Is there a hacking tool to pick colors, in other words you use it in your emulator, press the select button this jumps through all the colors and shows the number of each color in binary and decimal maybe hex too. With this many colors there is no way to make a list, like I saw dozens of Blues and I had to say they were all blue I am limited in describing colors. So how do you know which you want you need to check each color out by putting it in the code but that takes a long time, if there were a program that did this for us and told us the number that would be so much easier. Thanks, Wade

I was attempting to change Fat Albert to skin color instead of Purple. I found a game callled Muncher that changed the purple lips to a yellow Pac Man, so I did a comparison between the two to find differences there are a huge number of differences between to code of the two so finding the place I can change the bits to change Fat Albert's color to skin color right now is very difficult there is way too much changed code to find it unfortunatly. I may find it but it will take a while. Wade PS If I can find a hack where someone only changed the color of the lips in Fast Food very few changes I can lock down on the address to change.

I downloaded Pinapple 2000 and in the picture it shows all the invaders are fruits and vegtables. I thought cool I would like to see that! After I downloaded it I noticed it say Pinapple 2000 RadioF When I went to play it the invaders did not look like fruits and vegtables but looked like the letters RADIOF! Which I am sure to the hacker that means something but to me I was expecting the fruits and vegtables from the screen shot. Was that screen shot just a fake or is there a real Pinapple 2000 around someplace not changed into RADIOF? I downloaded this from the forms not the files section. Wade

Sure do! They make for an excellent interface for other input devices too. I made an 2 Atari joystick input box which with it and it works great and then I found.... ^^^ This. The Stelladaptor is awesome! ~telengard Yes you have me seriously considering buying a Stelladaptor, just the thought of using my paddles again after all these years is exciting, wow Kaboom the way it was meant to be played instead of using the mouse!!! The only thing is I remember the last time I actually used them they were very jumpy and almost impossible to use. So I may need to by some potentiometers to fix them and I don't know much of that stuff. Also Indy 500 driving controllers I never had would the paddles work as well? Thanks again. Wade Oh wow i just thought on something I have track balls I have not been able to use for years would Stelladaptor even work with those, i found out on my I-PAC it doesn't work because I need the 5 volts of the original Atari pin lay out.

For the new Hot Munchkin and Hot Pac'em with a Black background please see the Back in Black thread. Wade

You're very welcomed, looking forwards to seeing your first hack. Mine are Pac Munchkin (Pac man hack), ET's Candy Bars (Pac Man hack), Hot Munchkin (Alien Hack), Hot Pac'em (Alien Hack Hack of Pacmanplus's Alien Pac Man), and Tank Patrol (Tanks But No Tanks Hack Hack of TanksDX) I just switched Hot Munchkin and Hot Pac'em to black back ground. Wade

As one beginner to another I'll tell you how I made Pac Munchkin (My first real hack) First I found something called Showgfx Editgfx these are two programs that work together. I copied Pac Man from my ROMs to a folder on my C: drive I used for 2600GFX. Important these work in DOS I had to rename Pac man.bin to one word 8 characters or less, I may have chosen test1 I think. so I renamed it test1.bin After that I clicked on my DOS shell typed CD.. CD.. to get me out of the windows directory into C: after that I typed CD 2600GFX then I typed DIR to list the directory. And Showgfx test1.bin 0 4096 > test1.txt After this I closed the DOS or popped it down and opened note pad loaded test1.txt and I looked for all the graphics, these are all upside down in this but you can see them when you look if you look for patterns that look like the ghost or pac man. now you can change these but deleting the capital Xs or adding capitol Xs. if you make the sprit too big you will see it when you play the game and know you need to cut down. I'll give you a short cut Pac Man can only be 6 pixels high because the maze is that high so it was programmed that way, you can't change that just doing graphics hacking. After you find all the characters and the animations and made all your changes go back to DOS and type Editgfx test1.txt > test1.bin Your are now ready to copy your test BIN back into the ROM folder of your emulator and try it out, you wont get things exactly on your first try but you will know where you want to go from there each time. That was how I did pacman to pac munchkin. For something like color you need to find a hack that was changed and the original and get a file compare I got on free at download.com this will find the differences between the two and where to change to be more like the hack. For color bineries I looked those up on the net but I wrote them down on my back in black thread. If you don't know binary that is ok for now you can just do graphics hacks, one more thing always remember what you changed if you accidentally changed something you shouldn't had you can change it back. Here is a short lesson on binary the computer counts in 2's not 10's like people do each is on or off there are 8 bits is these they are called 8 bit processors starting from the right to left these go from low to high. 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 so to start 0 is zero 1 is one 10 is two 11 is three 100 is four these would like like this in full 8 bit 00000000 00000001 00000010 00000011 00000100 the first bit can be 1 or 0 the second is 2 the third is 4 the fourth is 8 the fifth is 16 the sixth is 32 this continues to the eighth bit at 256 see how each bit doubles in value? so to make the number 463 would look like this in binary. 11101111 256+128+64+8+4=2+1=463 That is how the computer sees 463 in the txt file it would look like spaces and Xs. Hack-O_matic is fast so is Bit hacker no conversion to work with just hack he ROM it self. Make a copy hack the copy always not the original, unless you don't want the original anymore, but if you mess up it is nice to have the original to go back to starting over again. Pac Man is a good first hack very easy to hack graphics, Alien is much more advanced, I hacked Alien on my third hack and was near pulling my hair out with it! LOL Do even try Lock n' Chase when I tried and gave up that is one hard hack for graphics! Ok that is the easy stuff. Oh to show you graphics in the game Pac man this is a demo these numbers are wrong 000000000 ---------- 000000001 --xxxx-- 000000002 -xxxxx- 000000003 xxxxxx 000000004 xxxxxx 000000005 -xx-xx- 000000006 --xxx-- Pac Man closed mouth up side down. 8 bits across 6 bits down Good Luck Wade

Ok here they are that was easy once I found the address, I could use bit hacker, also corrected a graphics glitch in Hot Munchkin The word MUNCH Both are Back In Black! Wade Hot_Munchkin__Alien_Hack_wc_6_25_06_.bin Hot_Pac__em__Alien_Hack_wc_6_25_06_.bin

Ok I found it using a comparison between files it is at address 0e44 it should have a value from 0 to 15 but strangly the original has a value of 132 here is the original 0E44 10000100 here is black 0E44 00000000 This is the change between the two caught by my comparison software. so to make any color from 0 to 15 0 00000000 Black 1 00000001 Gold 2 00000010 Orange 3 00000011 Red Orange 4 00000100 Pink 5 00000101 Purple 6 00000110 Blue Purple 7 00000111 Blue 8 00001000 Blue 9 00001001 Light Blue 10 00001010 Turquoise 11 00001011 Green Blue 12 00001100 Green 13 00001110 Yellow Green 14 00001110 Orange Green 15 00001111 Light Orange Starts dark goes to lighter So I should have them back soon in black. Wade

Just use distella, they are both 4k games so it should not pose a problem. just change the playfield value from whatever to 0. Thanks Shawn, I had no luck eyeballing it side by side using two note pads, I don't know what Distella is but I'll look it up and give it a try. If it is a dissassembler I feel I wont know what I'm looking at. I know some assemble language like jmp is like goto jms is like gosub rts is like return but stuff like this confuses me a lot LDA load the accumulator (tells the computer to remember some number) STA Store the accumulator (tells the computer to remember some number) So are they the same thing? no otherwise there would only be one of them. Confusing. Thanks anyway I'll give it a try. Wade I was going to look for a program that compares two text files if one exist. I tried Distella I disassembled it but have no idea what I'm looking for, also I checked technical information acording to the technical information it should be easy all I need to find is this Colubk that is the back ground color it says, but I can't find that anywhere I even did a find search for it, it doesn't exist acording to the search. I am going to try to find something that compares two text files and go back to binery. Wade

Wow even suport for paddles and driving controlers too, this is the best way to go for Stella! Thanks Remo! Wade

For a patch what if you had a txt file of the parts you changed. In that case all you would be giving is parts which is not the whole game, if people downloaded the original and they wanted your changes all they would need do is open your txt file and use showgfx for the original. Then just highlight your parts copy, highlight the parts on the original at the same addresses and paste over them with yours. After everything has been changed they can use Editgfx to make it into their own game.

One extra note I use the +5 volts pin 7 as an extra fire button, that gives me four. Wade

Hey everyone I was thinking as I was playing some of the newest hacks I have downloaded, most people can not enjoy these game like the original Atari like I do. I want to correct this problem for you now, would you like to use Atari joysticks with your computer, I can use mine with every emulator and even games on line! Now for my secret I bought this thing called an I-Pac it plugs into the keyboard port the keyboard plugs into it, the top has screws for wires I bought a small project box and a 9 pin D male connector. I soldered wires to every pin drilled a hole in my project box filed it out with a file until it was shaped pretty close to the size of the D connector, screwed this in place I drilled two holes in back for the keyboard in and out ports built into the I-Pac. I drilled 4 holes in the bottom and screwed the I-Pac in place tight all I needed to do was connect the wires to the connectors on the I-Pac chip easy those are screws so it was a snap to get them all. The hardest part is soldering the pins in the D connector I screwed up 3 D connectors soldering pins together then melting the plastic trying to get them un soldered they are very close together. Any way once you have it all together plug in your joystick plug in the key board and the I-Pac to the computer where the keyboard would normally plug in. now all you need to do is bring up note pad press Ctrl Alt P this will bring up a menu, press the joystick up then press the up arrow on your keyboard, repeat this for all directions press fire button and press the space bar for Stella emulation if you use another press appropriate key. when you are done save and exit you are now ready. Pressing up on the joystick is the same as pressing the up arrow on your keyboard. here is the nine pin lay out 1 up 2 down 3 left 4 right 5 can be used as extra 6 fire 7 +5 volts 8 ground 9 extra button. I have every one wired so when I want to use my four button arcade joystick I made all four buttons work. But also my old Tac 2 Suncom joystick with my Stella X emulator. I have no schismatic this I just put together easy because it is right on the I-Pac which screws are for up down fire button one etc... I hope you enjoy as much as I do, look it up you will be happy you did. Wade

Cool Cartridge picks! Also Cool conversions I love what you did with the black games! Wade

Just use distella, they are both 4k games so it should not pose a problem. just change the playfield value from whatever to 0. Thanks Shawn, I had no luck eyeballing it side by side using two note pads, I don't know what Distella is but I'll look it up and give it a try. If it is a dissassembler I feel I wont know what I'm looking at. I know some assemble language like jmp is like goto jms is like gosub rts is like return but stuff like this confuses me a lot LDA load the accumulator (tells the computer to remember some number) STA Store the accumulator (tells the computer to remember some number) So are they the same thing? no otherwise there would only be one of them. Confusing. Thanks anyway I'll give it a try. Wade I was going to look for a program that compares two text files if one exist.

Hello everyone, After going through the hacks form archives, I found Neo did a whole bunch of ROMs back in black. These are so cool I also found Alien in Black! So I am thinking of doing Hot Munchkin and Hot Pac'em with black mazes. It will take a while to do though since I need to compare which bits where changed in binary I don't know assembly language so I need to do it the hard way with showgfx and note pad, but as soon as I find the address and what is different I'll make the new versions. Coming back in black Cool! Wade

Well I am just a beginner so I believe what you say maybe you or someone else could do, I know Nukey could nail it! Any way you are right all the dots do move I know I accidentally moved them all when I changed a bit I thought was a part of a graphic, the entire screen of dots moved a quarter screen right. The maze staid right where it was, but the dots every one was moved. BTW the tanks I was trying to emulate (in my second Take Patrol attempt) were not from a game called counter strike, don't even know if that is a game they were from Strategy X, those are awesome tanks in that game. PS Do you like what I did with your Alien Pac Man changing it into Hot Pac'em I smoothed out all the graphics made Pac Man a little rounder made the ghost a little thinner changed the dying sequence to be a little more like Pac Man and of course changed the maze to look more like Pac Man, Also changed the reserves to look more round, that was a chore, I was finely down to three pixals wide and there it was perfect. I was thinking if I cut off any more it wil just be a line! lol I have your original rev2 also, untouched except for the wall. Wade

Hmm... I never received a Private Message from you Sorry if I seemed hard to get a hold of... BTW, that invisible wall was a mistake that I forgot to put back Cute graphics for the 'Hot Munchkin Alien Hack' Bob Oh wow it's you, hay man I learned so much from your Alien Hack and if it wasn't for that mistake I may not have ever got into hacking! So I owe you a great deal of gratitude, actually I didn't know you were in here and I had to be a member to find you, so this is all good. Pac Man was a breeze to hack the graphics, wow when I tried Alien I kept saying I got to respect PacManPlus he must really know his stuff. I had to keep going back and forth to see how you did it, there are some really weird sprite rules in that like the duplicates that must be cut off on the bottom, and that the sprites must start at the top line. So many times I thought I had it and I would look and say where in the world is that garbage coming from! Thanks to your original hack Alien Pac Man I learned a lot for hacking Alien! Oh and thanks for the complement that means a lot coming from you. Thanks Wade