Ghost "blue" time in 5200 Super Pacman?

[NE146]

This has been bugging me for a while but I don't think I've seen anyone else really mention it.. Anyone else notice that the ghost blue time in Super Pacman is extremely fast.. as if the game is set by default to a very high difficulty?

 

I mean just get to the 3rd stage (hamburger) and the ghost blue time is all of 2 seconds! Heck when you eat a power pill the ghosts are already immediately flashing. That's pretty far off the standard, and the arcade default difficulty of Super Pac was definitely not like that.

 

Maybe if the game had an actual release they would have caught that.. or given us a difficulty setting of some sort with easy, medium, hard, etc. I guess we can only imagine.. but maybe fixing it would be a good idea for a hack!

[Vic George 2K3]

The "blue time" on 5200 Super Pac-Man does seem to go rather fast.

[PacManPlus]

.

Edited September 16, 2008 by PacManPlus

[DEBRO]

Hi there,

Maybe if the game had an actual release they would have caught that.. or given us a difficulty setting of some sort with easy, medium, hard, etc. I guess we can only imagine.. but maybe fixing it would be a good idea for a hack!

I was going through one of my old A8 magazines the other day and I saw an ad where a store (I think it was B & C) had Super Pac-man as a cart for the A8. But I thought this game was never released

[Nukey Shay]

Not unusual. Many stores ran ads for vaporware titles (before it became clear that the titles were officially abandoned, of course).

[NE146]

Yes, the Blue Time is way too short.

 

Yeah man.. and the thing is it really hampers my enjoyment of the game. Of course you can't complain too much since it's amazing we even got it in the first place, but that being said now that we do, it would be a nice project if someone knowledgeable would "fix" it Sometimes I just want to pretend I'm 11, sit back with my 5200 and enjoy that Super-Pac like I really had it back in the day but it's hard when you can only be Super for 2 seconds at a time on the 3rd board up

[Nukey Shay]

Changing the bluetime is easy...but does the Super Pac time differ from bluetime in the cart? It looks like they are the same.

 

L6AA1:
		.byte $80
		.byte $6E
		.byte $64
		.byte $50
		.byte $3C
		.byte $32
		.byte $2D
		.byte $28
		.byte $23
		.byte $1E
		.byte $19
		.byte $14
		.byte $14
		.byte $14
		.byte $14
		.byte $14
		.byte $14
		.byte $19
		.byte $19
		.byte $19
		.byte $1E
		.byte $1E
		.byte $23
		.byte $23
		.byte $6E
		.byte $14
		.byte $14
		.byte $14
		.byte $80
		.byte $1E
		.byte $14
		.byte $0F

 

 

EDIT:

Try this...I didn't check out the higher levels, so I can't be sure it's bug-free. For the Super Pac time, a seperate table was added at the end of the cartridge (nearly a full page of free space there). When attaching, be sure to specify that it's a 2-chip 16k image (or the 5200 emu will crash).

 

 

NOTE:

The bluetime is stored at zero page address $84, while the Super Pac time is stored at $98. The former is reduced at $833E, the latter at $7ECD (following a comparison). So emulator cheats can be done in Atari800Win's monitor mode if desired. Press F8 to enter the monitor, enter the code, and type CONT to resume:

 

Monsters stay blue until eaten:

c 833e ea ea

 

Infinite Super Pac time:

c 7ec9 a9 80

Super_Pac_Man__Adj.Bluetime_2_chip_image_.zip

Edited September 16, 2008 by Nukey Shay

[NE146]

Changing the bluetime is easy...but does the Super Pac time differ from bluetime in the cart? It looks like they are the same.

 

In my experience, yes, the blue time and super-pac time are similar if not the same on each level.

 

Nukey my man... I can't try this until tonight but if you've fixed the blue times you've come through friggin once again you Atari-All-Star you That fix alone would make 5200 super-pac 100% more enjoyable (and the one that should've gone on the carts.. but oh well )

 

Can't wait to check it out

[slampam]

Same thing. Bigger package.

Super_Pac_Man__Adj.Bluetime__32k_.zip

[jwierer]

I've been playing this version and it's been bothering me that the only way to clear the bonus levels was to wait for the timer to expire. I couldn't remember if this was always the case so I checked it against my proto and there the bonus levels works so I checked the differences between the two files and it appears in the 2nd table the times should not 00 for bonus levels which are level 3 and every 4th level after. Hacking these back to the original values fixes the bonus level.

 

00003F80: FF F0
00003F81: FF D2
-> 00003F82: FF 00
00003F83: FF B4
00003F84: FF 96
00003F85: FF 96
->00003F86: FF 00
00003F87: FF 78
00003F88: FF 78
00003F89: FF 78
->00003F8A: FF 00
00003F8B: FF 78
00003F8C: FF 5A
00003F8D: FF 5A
->00003F8E: FF 00
00003F8F: FF 3C
00003F90: FF 3C
00003F91: FF 3C
->00003F92: FF 00
00003F93: FF 1E
00003F94: FF 1E
00003F95: FF 1E
->00003F96: FF 00
00003F97: FF 3C
00003F98: FF 1E
00003F99: FF 1E
->00003F9A: FF 00
00003F9B: FF 3C
00003F9C: FF 1E
00003F9D: FF 3C

 

Attaching a hacked binary and a 32K version for folks using an emulator.

 

Super_Pac-Man_(Adj.Bluetime_2-chip_hack).bin

Super_Pac-Man_(Adj.Bluetime_2-chip_hack)(32k).bin

 

EDIT: In case anybody else wants to improve on this, level 9 should be a radish and level 15 should be a galaxian. Other changes would be to correct the intermissions to match the arcade, ghosts should change directions after eating an power pill, and if you die while the bonus star appears, it should not reappear once gameplay resumes.

 

-Jeff