Does Pitfall contain a VCS emulator?

[doctorclu]

Does Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure contain a VCS/2600 Emulator to run the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall?

 

I don't think so. I would like to be wrong.

 

Over the years Activision has managed to port Pitfall fairly faithfully from the Atari 2600, Atari computers, Intellivision, all while looking about the same. They took a slight divergence with the ColecoVision, but all this to say Activision has had the ability to port their games and keep the same look and feel. So to me it was not surprising that they could do it yet again with the Atari Jaguar.

 

And that's all fine and good, but what I am bringing to this age old debate/mystery? Since this is practically hexediting/emulation month for me (sprite hacking in past months) I thought I would look for the hex values of the original 2600 Pitfall.

 

 

Now previously I had said on the VirtualVCS thread that I looked for these values in the Jaguar Pitfall image and did not find them. Then I realized that the Jaguar cartridge image was in a compressed format.

 

At one time I was guided to use a program called Multi Ripper or "mrip260.zip" as it can be found on the internet for unpacking a compression format that Imagitec tends to use from the Rob Nothern Computing or RNC for short. The multiripper can look for these files and it spits out... a bunch a files with the .RNC extension. This worked really well in breaking down Bubsy: Fractured Furry Tales into graphics, map, music, and other files, though I had to pull (with help) the file directory to rename most of those files. Still have some to identify or file, but found like 90% that way.

 

So I did the same to Pitfall tonight and looked for the opening "78D8 A200" characters of 2600 Pitfall throughout all the RNC files that Jag Pitfall spit out annnnddd... no match.

 

 

But this might not be the end. As you can see in the picture above there is the RNC in the text portion, leading me to wonder if this needs to be further unpacked?

 

But tonight I took it through at least one level of compression and found nothing so far.

 

(File contains the unpacked files I looked through if others want to do more digging and comparison.)

Pitfall.zip

Edited March 30, 2018 by doctorclu

[sh3-rg]

It doesn't. It might be emulating the logic or they might have ripped and translated that for an authentic feel, but it's not natively running the 2600 ROM.

 

Just compare footage of the real game vs the remake in the Jaguar game - it's similar, but sprite positioning and other things are inconsistent. If it was emulation it'd have certain things pixel-for-pixel identical, and almost everything has differences. Check the screenshots of the 3rd screen, you can see the relative position of game elements, while they look superficially similar at a glance, are not consistent.