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Papa

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Posts posted by Papa

  1. I took a Ms Pac-Man cabinet and rewired it for Jamma, then I made a Jamma adaptor for the Ms. Pac-Man board. Why? So I could play Super Pac-Man with a Jamma adaptor. Super speed was wired to player 2 start. I couldn't bring myself to drill a button hole. If you're going to upgrade, keep it classy.

    Putting an xx-in-one board in a cabinet is kind of like putting a flashback board in a VCS shell. I get the convenience factor, but it somehow doesn't feel like the real thing.

     

    Data East curved topped cabinets are very good for these as they have two buttons on each side. The joysticks may not be the best as you'll want a restrictor plate (back off Neo American Synogogal Church of the Ascended Redneck, I mean for joysticks!) stick that can switch between 4 and 8 way for that near-authentic Pacman feel! Mine was a Robocop cabinet, but I think they used the design for others!

    • Like 1
  2. The only problem I have is that I just keep shitting on all three cops as fast as possible and then yelling "I WIIIIIIINNNNN!!"

     

    I live in a big house with lots of woodland creatures all over the place and I just gotta say that the main character needs to be a raccoon (or a raccoon should be selectable).

  3. People asking astronomically high prices for this stuff are dumb, but they've been trained by things like Antique Roadshow to believe there are rich fortune hunters looking for old games. SNES games are silly overpriced from my perspective right now.

     

    Despite seeing the high prices of wishful thinkers everywhere, I'm still shocked and amazed that the old games cost $30 for what feels like little minigames nowadays. I never get tired of looking at the old Sears Wishbook prices.

     

    I don't see how people who are young and getting into old stuff can look at the SNES with a straight face!? I mean, it looks like a pastel purple Lego brick with a bunch of little, boxy Lego bricks to stuff into it. Most of the best stuff from it's library other that Nintendo specific character worship games were made better later on newer systems. Chronotrigger, most of the Final Fantasy series, Breath of Fire, the myriad of classics collections everywhere. I feel like when I play one it's like I walked back from a rock concert and now this little wind up jack in the box will do fine. :roll:

     

    The Super Famicom looks dope, though. It's sleek and rad like the 1701-D. They also had a lot more anime specific titles for it's Japanese target audience that would have totally rocked as translated games. I guess we were all just too dumb to like those games!? :dunce:

  4. Those patents and laws that protect the games don't really exist in the countries where these things are put together (and are LOOONG since not applicable in courts of law regardless due to the time on the patents running out). Many of the 'commercial', especially disk driven, ones I've played had long loading times, poor emulation, etc. Much of the Neo Geo library IS faithfully reproduced in those Elf carts and such. I feel like the original Neo Geo multicarts are the basis for these expanded ones. Someone just saw how much they could tack on after the fact and ended up with a mix of anything from acceptable to shoddy. Put a Neo Geo X or (and this is just plain WRONG!) a PS2 SNK Classics disk next to one and watch the HORRIBLE and TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE frame rates and music that THE COMPANY THEMSELVES SOLD TO YOU! The only way much of the Taiwanese hacks of the Street Fighter games are still around IS because of these Chinese multicart makers like the ones who brought us "Just Another Pandora's Box" or the "Blue Elf" series. Games where fireballs have wave patterns or you can jump and do tornado kicks that disappear and reappear all over the place. There are a LOT of manipulated and hacked up versions that have unique changes that seem to reflect what was done later in sequels.

     

    Now that I see you are most likely only referring to the 'Games Family 60-in-1 Multicade' I am reminded of the day I bought my two cabinets. The dealer said that they burn up those HD ones all day long and that he's pretty sure ALL of them are 'pretty much not legal'! Even the Multicades. AND, there are different quality issues with different versions of that card as well (later, cheaper versions I guess). I asked him if he'd ever heard of the "Blue Elf" series and he said, "No, and those might not be illegal because it's made for China.". This was a guy who's been dealing arcade cabinets and 'upgrading' them with hard drive based multicarts since the beginning!

     

    I bought my cabinets unaltered and did the work together with my wife.

  5. Stella isn't cycle accurate so far as the ARM code running behind DPC+, so the only real way to know your code doesn't have cycle issues is to run it on real hardware.

     

    I know, right? It's hard to impress people with the enhancements when they all reside in emu land. My stuff is flickery and slippery on Stella, but looks REAL GOOD on a VCS!

  6. You freal want a Dynamo HS-5 or equivalent to have much fun with this and the bigger carts. If you want 60-in-1 Games Family stuff you can obviously have way more breathing room, but your gonna want to clip a JAMMA+ and wire it for multicarts to get the most out of these thousand game setups.

     

    It's a no brainer when you only have room for one cab and your not planning on collecting a bunch of 'em. The real drawback is emulation and it's usual degrading of any and all continuous frame-rate. The HD driven ones burn out, the SD ones usually have weak computers that provide weak emulation. Just Another Pandoras Box keeps upgrading and adding more games, but also seems to be gliding away from cabinets and prodding users toward SuperGun-like setups that use monitors and external power.

     

    It's good to keep the cab as original and untouched as possible. I left the Street Fighter Alpha 2 cartridge in there (acid switch bitch that it surely is) with it's CPS2 cradle and just set the multicart on top with my custom wired connector. I have a Games Family Original 60-in-1, Blue Elf 2 with over a hundred games, another Blue Elf '09 with over four hundred (and seriously dirty games and twisted SF2 hacks that make it TOTALLY WORTH IT! King of Gladiators anyone?) , and a Just Another Pandoras Box that really needs a different monitor and is waiting for a custom cabinet I'm eying right now.

     

    Stay away from too many of the older hard drive ones as they just eat hard drives for breakfast, and don't expect perfection.

  7. I can help you learn to write code. It's fun and easy. For instance, the code above seems like it doesn't need the second label (Frame 2) because the code will run to the next line with or without the label. Maybe later you would add drawscreen to paint the picture for each frame and this would use that extra label. When I draw two sprites at once to make one big sprite with two color definitions I have two instances of drawscreen happening. If you do this with both sprites then you can have two sprites made of two sprites each. I think of 'tiles' like what sixteen bit programming would use and this is basically a caveman way to get two color coded tiles at once. Once you are drawing many sprites like this it gets all flickery and messy.

     

    My style of coding revolves around controlling timers and counters with variables. I am an artist first and a mathematical programmer second. I am not interested in using sine code to make mathematical fruitiness happen magically in 2k! I use up space, bankswitch, and aim for the TOP. In cartridge creation the fattest, easiest chunk to make Atari VCS games in is 32k with the standard kernel (VisualBatariBasic, I'm not ready to help out VWBasic users, YET!). People pass around ideas about makeshift 256k carts and stuff. That is cute but probably expensive. If you want to make a game with the DPC+ kernel you will have more options but the cart will be more costly as it uses an ARM processor. You don't have to bankswitch and the game would then be very small.

     

    I program my own games all the time, too (Sega, Atari, PC, etc..). So, just 'handling' all the code for someone else is probably not possible for me.

     

    I wouldn't mind conversing via PM where I could give backup BASIC code from projects I've worked on to look over. There is a wealth of knowledge right here, though. The funnest and easiest way to do music, for instance, I learned right here on the forum. The DPC+ startup that RT made (after you get the jist of programming) is like a little assembly line (pun intended) for popping out games!

  8. Good character animation! Right now it seems that you need to really watch the sky and be ready to react from the middle point of where the celery will fall.

     

    Cute concept!

     

    FUN FACT!!

     

    Celery actually uses more calories to chew than is in it! You burn calories every time you eat celery!

     

    (maybe make it so he starts really fat and slow and then drop different vegetables but when celery appears he can eat it to get skinnier and faster! Then he could 'hate' MOST vegetables and avoid them but only be interested in the weight loss aspects of celery!!)

    • Like 1
  9. The DPC+ kernel is very easy!

     

    I did THIS WIP with it:

     

    http://atariage.com/forums/topic/240290-street-fight-world/page-2

     

    and my traveling game, Run Out, was done with it.

     

    It's really just relearning how to deal with the player1 (NUSIZ and other registers are different) stuff and it introduces stacking, trading unused mirror sprites for variables, and let's you waste more time in the vblank because of the ARM speed boost.

     

    I may start a blog detailing the final touches on Street Fight World before it is possibly released and most likely spirals in flames downward into a nuclear smoke stack. :-D (I.E. my wife says it's going to be BIG!!)

  10. Crimping sounds like it will avoid a LOT of future problems. If someone buys one and a button doesn't work or something it would likely just be either a switch swap-out or a loose crimp. No soldering would be required for the end user. I always use crimps to the switch and solder to the boards in my custom cabinets. If an end user likes to play around with button colors, arrangements, stick choices, etc., it helps not to immediately need soldering equipment/skills.

  11. We have to look at what Street Fighter did for arcade gamers. Before SF2 there weren't too many games that utilized huge sweeping circular motions combined with button presses to do special moves. Really only Street Fighter did this previously and very poorly. AFTER SF2 everyone and their grandma was quarter circling fireballs, z waggling dragon uppercuts, charged moves, half circle moves, rapid button attacks, and, of course, COMBOS in every fighting game from every game company! SF2 introduced (albeit accidentally) the COMBO SYSTEM that later basically ruled all arcade versus fighting games!!

  12. WOW! That game looks fabu..uh.. Really awesome!

     

    These are just mock up screens right? Is this playable?

     

    I've been thinking of a Zelda-like game for some time using the DPC+ kernel in VisualBatariBasic and I like what this looks like a lot! I don't think I would be nudging or prodding you at all to still do my own above head game as mine is quite a departure from The Legend of Zelda and also not a kyewt kitteh 'venture!

     

    So you've got your graphics in binary externally? This reminds me of what might be done with TinyBasic.

     

     

    OH...and on thoughts about what could be done different:

     

    1. nothing

     

    2. maybe two sprites overlapping for a couple more colors!?!

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