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Pursuit of the Pink Panther ROM Released!!


Dutchman2000

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so i think i get it- Pink Panther requires an extra chip that harmony cart is not setup to reproduce?  do you think itll require changing the game or upgrading the cart cause i have not messed w/ any upgrading the cart or firmware on cart yet, dont really know how that works yet-- 

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9 hours ago, chewy said:

so i think i get it- Pink Panther requires an extra chip that harmony cart is not setup to reproduce?  do you think itll require changing the game or upgrading the cart cause i have not messed w/ any upgrading the cart or firmware on cart yet, dont really know how that works yet-- 

How old is your Harmony cart? You need BIOS 1.05 or higher to play the ROM posted above. Basically, if you bought your Harmony anytime after around mid-2010 you should have the correct BIOS.

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Poking around a bit in the RAM for this. Score is stored at addresses $A2 through $A4.

 

I think the game variation is stored at address $C6, with values incrementing by two when you hit select (so game variations #1-4 = $00, $02, $04, $06). Setting $C6 to $10 makes the timer go to zero almost instantly. Setting it to $08 makes it tick down quickly (but slower), but I can't see the bricks as they fall. And setting it to $FF makes the game go completely nuts. :D

 

EDIT: Getting the jewel in variation #1 sets address $C6 to $01, while getting the jewel in variation #4 sets address $C6 to $07. So, $C6 increments by one every time you loop the game.

 

Beating the game for an eighth time leaves address $C6 unchanged, still at $07. So the eighth loop -- or the second one when starting on variation #4 -- appears to be max difficulty. And while the first and second screens are still playable on the eighth loop, the jewel/vine screen is pretty ridiculous.

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1 hour ago, thegoldenband said:

Poking around a bit in the RAM for this. Score is stored at addresses $A2 through $A4.

 

I think the game variation is stored at address $C6, with values incrementing by two when you hit select (so game variations #1-4 = $00, $02, $04, $06). Setting $C6 to $10 makes the timer go to zero almost instantly. Setting it to $08 makes it tick down quickly (but slower), but I can't see the bricks as they fall. And setting it to $FF makes the game go completely nuts. :D

 

EDIT: Getting the jewel in variation #1 sets address $C6 to $01, while getting the jewel in variation #4 sets address $C6 to $07. So, $C6 increments by one every time you loop the game.

 

Beating the game for an eighth time leaves address $C6 unchanged, still at $07. So the eighth loop -- or the second one when starting on variation #4 -- appears to be max difficulty. And while the first and second screens are still playable on the eighth loop, the jewel/vine screen is pretty ridiculous.

I want video of that.  I tried the fourth variation but couldn't get the jewel

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Oh, I used savestates, since I just wanted to see whether there was a difficulty cap. I didn't savestate after each jump, though -- I did the jewel scene in one continuous set of jumps.

 

If I were playing legitimately, I'd estimate I could probably beat the jewel screen on Level 7 (i.e. Variation 4) maybe 1 time out of 20 attempts, and on Level 8, maybe 1 time out of 100. The water height changes so quickly, and even if you make it to the rope, you only have 1-2 seconds before the Inspector severs it.

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I didn't know the Time Machine existed -- thanks for that!

 

That said, just hitting F9 allows me to record a savestate immediately after every game event that happens successfully, and since the interval between starting the jewel level and finishing it is only a couple of seconds, it wasn't a problem (all my investigations today took ~20 minutes total).

 

I'll have to check Time Machine out some more, though.

 

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18 minutes ago, kevtris said:

Is the mapper for this game documented anywhere?  I looked but didn't find much.

 

Oh yeah, and why is the ROM size off? it's 8195 bytes vs. 8192. 

https://github.com/stella-emu/stella/blob/master/src/emucore/CartWD.hxx

https://github.com/stella-emu/stella/blob/master/src/emucore/CartWD.cxx

 

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16 hours ago, Shawn said:

 

Do you think you could use your magic touch to convert this to an atari standard backswitching method? F8, F6 or something like that?

The biggest problem is that the cart has an extra 64 bytes of RAM. It may be impossible to convert it to any format that doesn't also have extra RAM.

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On 10/15/2019 at 12:35 AM, kevtris said:

thanks!

Before you put too much work into the extra 3 bytes:
I am now pretty sure that these bytes are superfluous and their influence on 0xffc..0xffe is most likely wrong. Instead I found that the byte at 0xffc is always set to 0, no matter which slice is put into the last segment.

 

Now I am only looking for an explanation why this byte is set to 0. I suppose this must be a technical issue, the game never addresses that byte.

 

Also slices 2 and 3 seem reversed in the dump (and current implementations).

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/12/2019 at 3:16 AM, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Thanks for the compliments. With today's knowledge and equipment, it wasn't all that hard anymore.

 

This is how you do it:

  1. Put a SaveKey (or AtariVox) into the right port of your Atari 2600
  2. Start a cart (e.g. Harmony) with my RAM based dumper program (especially tailored to the PP bankswitching) loaded
  3. Hot swap the cart with the PP cart (since my program is running in RAM, it will continue to work)
  4. Press fire (this dumps the ROM onto the SaveKey)
  5. Attach a 2600-daptor II flashed with the AtariVox firmware to your Windows PC
  6. Attach the SaveKey to the 2600-daptor
  7. Use the EEPROM utility from the same page to download the SaveKey content onto your computer
  8. Finally convert the downloaded data into a working ROM
  9. Release! :)

So no rocket science. With the right, currently easily available hard- and software everybody can dump a cart. And for the other steps I can help.

 

Does this work for dumping any 2600 cart ?

 

point 5 & 6 can be replaced with an AtariVox instead ?

 

Cheers,

 

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50 minutes ago, devwebcl said:

Does this work for dumping any 2600 cart ?

Almost any. I am pretty sure ARM based games can be dumped that way, because the 6507 has no access to parts of the ROM.

 

50 minutes ago, devwebcl said:

point 5 & 6 can be replaced with an AtariVox instead ?

Yes, makes no difference.

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