Baby Pac-Man

[Andromeda Stardust]

When a 7800 and a programmer love each other very much

I love my 7800 very much, but we never produced any games together...

[maxdrive]

Do you two need some privacy

[Baby Blue Azure]

Get a room!

 

I inserted the latest RPD BABY PACMAN game into my 7800 machine and it burped out this game instead.

Interesting game, but it's not a Pac-man game. The code is morphing. Good job, Kurt. You can play with

this while you wait. It has no end, except the score rolls over at a million points. I guess.

NOTAPACMANGAME_32K.a78

 

Bob called in sick today so it will be a little longer before he's done.

But then he remembered it was Saturday, so he worked anyways.

 

Things are really bad over here on the left coast. I can't see the Pacific Ocean any more. Is it still there?

The sun still comes out but I heard a report today that the GG Bridge is also missing. My smoke alarm is

activating for a fire that must be 200 miles away! I hate the noise, so I unplugged it.

 

It's now 7 minutes to tomorrow. I hope it will be a better day.

 

Have a nice rest of the weekend. /BBA

[Swami]

Get a room!

 

I inserted the latest RPD BABY PACMAN game into my 7800 machine and it burped out this game instead.

Interesting game, but it's not a Pac-man game. The code is morphing. Good job, Kurt. You can play with

this while you wait. It has no end, except the score rolls over at a million points. I guess.

NOTAPACMANGAME_32K.a78

 

Bob called in sick today so it will be a little longer before he's done.

But then he remembered it was Saturday, so he worked anyways.

 

Things are really bad over here on the left coast. I can't see the Pacific Ocean any more. Is it still there?

The sun still comes out but I heard a report today that the GG Bridge is also missing. My smoke alarm is

activating for a fire that must be 200 miles away! I hate the noise, so I unplugged it.

 

It's now 7 minutes to tomorrow. I hope it will be a better day.

 

Have a nice rest of the weekend. /BBA

 

Is it a Christmas game? You never die. The ham is shooting the Christmas ornaments. Looks interesting.

[Baby Blue Azure]

It could be. So that's what it is, a Ham shooting Christmas ornaments. Better go buy some more ornaments!

[PacManPlus]

Hey guys -

 

I got the source code back from Kurt, so I'll be getting to this as soon as I can. I want to understand what he did, so I'm not just going to copy and paste it. It might take me a bit to post something - but I made a promise that I WILL finish this and not dump it like I had twice before...

 

(Besides, I want to get back to Defender, ReZolve, and Adventure III)

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone-

Bob

[imstarryeyed]

That is great to hear Bob, looking forward to checking out all of the great additions you are going to make to the gameplay.

[+sramirez2008]

Hey guys -

 

I got the source code back from Kurt, so I'll be getting to this as soon as I can. I want to understand what he did, so I'm not just going to copy and paste it. It might take me a bit to post something - but I made a promise that I WILL finish this and not dump it like I had twice before...

 

(Besides, I want to get back to Defender, ReZolve, and Adventure III)

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone-

Bob

 

Defender...Defender...Defender!

[iesposta]

Wanted a post with all the screens:

 

 

 

[+save2600]

Oh my, that's a big outhole you have there!

[Inky]

I wonder how easy it would be to port Granny and the Gator after this is finished.

[AtariNerd]

Oh my, that's a big outhole you have there!

 

Any chance of us getting a baby bumper on the bottom, for us inept players?

[Machine]

Just saw a Baby Pacman pinball for sale locally. Man I wish I had the $$$.

[tschak909]

my god, it's beautiful.

 

-Thom

[Kurt_Woloch]

Wanted a post with all the screens:

 

551CB955-44E0-48EB-9513-F9CE6C2505F2.png

 

Did you use the latest binary for this? If so, there is a serious flaw in the pinball part which must have escaped me... it's visible in the left lane starting with "F" where one of the lights is replaced by another character. I know that a previous version had that glitch where the detection of the targets wasn't quite perfect, and if you hit the target area somewhere on the far left or right, instead of clearing a target it turned around another character. It's a bit puzzling to me that this turned-around character isn't even next to the targets, but somewhere else on screen.

 

Oh my, that's a big outhole you have there!

 

Well, it looks big, but actually the flippers have a pretty steep angle compared to other machines, so if they go up, they are much closer to each other, with only a few pixels of room for the ball to fall through.

[PacManPlus]

 

Did you use the latest binary for this? If so, there is a serious flaw in the pinball part which must have escaped me... it's visible in the left lane starting with "F" where one of the lights is replaced by another character. I know that a previous version had that glitch where the detection of the targets wasn't quite perfect, and if you hit the target area somewhere on the far left or right, instead of clearing a target it turned around another character. It's a bit puzzling to me that this turned-around character isn't even next to the targets, but somewhere else on screen.

 

 

I see that on mine as well. Damn. ...and it's not consistently reproducible.

Something I need to look at ...

 

EDIT - Interesting... It happens in ProSystem, but I can't get it to happen at all in MESS. Ugh.

Need to try it on the real thing.

 

EDIT2 - Nevermind... just got it to happen in MESS.

Edited November 21, 2018 by PacManPlus

[PacManPlus]

OK, I think I got it.

 

This is the main loop for the video mode of game play:

DOPLAYGAME
	LDA PB_HOLEPAUSE								;IF THE GAME IS PAUSING TO SHOW A MONSTER SCORE, TAKE A DIFFERENT ROUTE
	BNE DOPLAYGAMESCORE
	JSR CHKBLUETIME								;HANDLE BLUE TIMES
	JSR HANDLEPLAYER							;WORK ON THE PLAYER (MOVE, ANIMATE, COLLISION WITH DOTS)
	JSR HANDLEMONSTERS							;WORK ON THE MONSTERS
	JSR HANDLEFRUIT								;WORK ON THE FRUIT
	JSR FLASHENERGIZERS							;FLASH THE ENERGIZERS WHEN IT'S TIME
	JSR CHKBOARDCLR								;SEE IF WE ATE ALL OF THE DOTS
	JSR BGNDSOUNDS								;WORK ON THE DRONE SOUNDS IN THE BACKGROUND
	JMP MAINLOOP 

What was happening was, during the 'handleplayer' routine, it checks to see if the player entered the pinball drain. If so, it jumps to set up the pinball screen and changes the mode of the game to 'Pinball'.

As you can probably see, the issue is that all of the routines after the 'handleplayer' routine still get called one last time. So, I rearranged the routines to make sure the 'handleplayer' is called last. The issue does not seem to happen any more, so I believe I got it.

Edited November 21, 2018 by PacManPlus

[Kurt_Woloch]

OK, I don't quite get it yet... so let's get these things straight:

 

Bob, if you say "I see that on mine as well", do you mean the version you had before I started working on it, or the one I sent to you lately? If it's the former, this means that the error was already in there before I even started working at it, and it doesn't have anything to do with something I've done to it. Your solution for the problem hints to that...

 

So... according to how you fixed it, I suppose the error lies in the transition from maze to pinball part, right? If so, it should be visible immediately on entering the pinball part, without having hit any target. And it probably should only come out if you select the "full game" and then go from the maze to the pinball part, right? To be honest, I didn't test it that way most of the time, instead I went straight to the pinball part because I figured the transition to the maze part wasn't finished yet anyway...

 

However, I tried it that way in MAME 0.169 (which is the version I use for testing), and I don't get that error. Is there any speficic way to reproduce it, or do you just have to be lucky because it only pops up once in so many times?

[PacManPlus]

Hey Kurt:

 

Yes, the error was there before you even started working on it. But I found it and took care of it.

Also, you are correct on your explanation. It appeared there immediately after transitioning to the pinball portion.

 

It is VERY difficult to reproduce, but I know it happened outside of drawing the pinball field because of debugging I have done. That told me where to look.

 

Thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Bob

[iesposta]

I’m glad my pictures helped squash a bug!

(That was just ProSystem run from RetroArch on Jailbroke iOS 11.3.1.)

[Kurt_Woloch]

OK, here's my version of the current project status... I'm actually still working on cleaning up the code. I'm currently at 38.1% of the code, however, I only changed code between the 28.3% and 59% mark, the code before and after that mainly belongs to the maze section. So I've updated roughly a third of the code by now.

 

However, Bob requested me to send him what I have early so that he can see if it fits into his confines. But I still continue to clean up the code because I'm afraid Bob still might not understand the part of the code which I haven't cleaned up yet. If all goes well, I will complete the cleanup over the next weeks and then send him the updated version of the code. What I'm doing now is solely for Bob... if I were to finish the game myself, I wouldn't bother cleaning up the code but just continue coding.

[Baby Blue Azure]

I hear you Kurt. I'm in the same boat as you are. There's a lot of pressure to get these games off our plates. My family left town to go celebrate some holiday while I stayed home to work home fix-it projects during the day and Atari at night. It's working real well for me after yesterday one of my partners showed up unexpectedly and we finished 3 projects at the house. I have 2 games I want to release NOW, but neither are ready. But I slept on it last night and I have a plan of attack I'm working right now. I cleaned up some code and built a new sprite, did the full deal on documentation, and one game is ready to go. For me, January 1 is where I look back at 2018 to determine if anything was a success for me. I was murdered on the stock market, but I think the rest has mostly fallen into place. Plus it's one month to Christmas today so there's loads of time for other great things to happen.

 

Quite frankly Bob solicited your support and you've done a fabulous job. I know Bob is chomping at the bit (and bytes) to get his hands back on the BPM code, but you should be allowed to finish what you need to finish to present your final result to Bob. Housekeeping is essential! It sounds like you have a calculation to completion which must be way under (I hope) 100 hours. JUST DO IT! Bob can wait, IMHO. He has a list of other games he wants to finish and he can be looking at one of those, to get refreshed on that in the mean time. Of course now the phone will be ringing and it will be Bob asking what I think I'm thinking about. I'm thinking of his well being as well. He should get the best of the best to continue his work. It's not that important BPM gets launched by Christmas or New Year's. We already have a game we can play with. Oh well, that's just a few of my thoughts. /BBA

[R.Cade]

Hey guys,

 

I had a chance to play the test version (hopefully it was the newest build or close) and I had a couple of comments on the pinball part.

 

1) It's awesome- great work.

 

2) Some things happened that aren't normally possible. Example - hitting a ball with the right flipper as it goes over it should not be able to direct the ball back to the right. At best, it should go up the middle or to the left side.

 

3) I was never able to hit the ball on the top and knock it across to the other side, which is how you get back to the maze. I tried for 10-15 minutes, never hit it once. It needs to be easier or at least possible.

Edited November 25, 2018 by R.Cade

[Andromeda Stardust]

Any chance of us getting a baby bumper on the bottom, for us inept players?

That's a great idea actually. A lot of early era pins have the extra wide flippers with the peg in the middle. If you get a sdtm (straight down the middle), you gotta resist the urge to hit the flippers until it bounces back up, otherwise it will go underneath the flipper and drain.

[Kurt_Woloch]

Unfortunately, I disagree with both of your points...

 

2) Some things happened that aren't normally possible. Example - hitting a ball with the right flipper as it goes over it should not be able to direct the ball back to the right. At best, it should go up the middle or to the left side.

 

3) I was never able to hit the ball on the top and knock it across to the other side, which is how you get back to the maze. I tried for 10-15 minutes, never hit it once. It needs to be easier or at least possible.

 

As for 2), I deliberately included the ability to hit the ball "backwards" because a video that was posted here contained some pinball tricks, among them the "Post pass", which works by hitting the ball backwards towards the bumper. It doesn't work here because the bumper is too far receded though, but in order for it to work, it has to be possible to hit the ball backwards. It's also possible in David's Midnight Magic where on the upper stage you can use the left flipper to hit the ball backwards into the multi-ball area.

 

3) It should be possible though to hit the upper ball... there is a window of about 5 pixels you must hit (your ball should be no more than 2 pixels offset to the position of the upper ball in order to hit it). It's not easy, but it's possible. I don't know if it's maybe a bit easier on the real machine though...

Or did I mess up just this binary, and it isn't possible to hit the upper ball there? Has anyone else tested this with the latest binary?