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Baby Pac-Man


PacManPlus

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Got the spinners going. However I did still use the sound for those I came up with, only because to me it sounds a little bit closer to the real thing.

 

Also, we must be watching the same video. This morning I had noticed that the 'even up' causes the energizers to even up as well, and I caught that by accident actually. That was fixed this morning as well.

 

On to the fruit advance and tunnel advance!

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@imstarryeyed - nevermind about the sounds. I forgot I have PINMAME installed and I can make the sounds on my own. Thank you anyway, and I hope you didn't go through too much trouble.

For those of you who have PINMAME:

 

Once you are in the 'pinball section' you can hit the following keys:

QG - Bumper

QJ - Spinner

WJ - Tilt

WK - Slam (same sound as tilt)

EA - Energizer 1

EF - Energizer 4 (same sound as 1)

EG- Tunnel Rollover

EH - Fruit Rollover

EJ - Pacscalator / 'Even Up' rollover

RA - Drop Down (all but middle)

RD - Middle Drop Down

RH - Ball Drain

RJ - Exit to maze through right saucer

RK - Exit to maze through left saucer

 

I'll add more later.

Edited by PacManPlus
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Not to go too off on a tangent, but definitely in the realm of topic, I thought this post is really cool:

Here is my Baby Pacman 100% controlled by PinMAME $100 worth of boards from Ultimarc.com and a custom driver board I built. Thought you guys might be interested. I modified the PinMAME source to allow it to control the Ultimate IO board. The solenoids will be triggered by an Ultimarc PacDrive board, which will connect to the custom solenoid board. I found there was a problem controlling the solenoids directly from the Ultimate IO, so I am changing that.


There are a few videos and some good captures in the aforementioned link. In fact, most of the "Baby Pacman Club...waka waka waka" thread it belongs to is full of excellent material.

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Yeah, actually I thought of recording the sounds off of PinMAME as well, and I thought there would have to be a sound test feature or something, but I didn't know you can activate it by pressing different keys (actually I think the keys simulate the respective contact being made rather than only triggering the sounds, right?). For some sounds you would then probably press the keys multiple times in order for them to come up (like completing the spelling of PACMAN or achieving an extra baby).

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What I actually had in mind for a long time is a different tune... a title song which plays during attract mode. But I couldn't think of a fitting tune for a long time. The most obvious one would be "Pac-Man fever" by Buckner & Garcia, but this is more about the original Pac-Man, not Baby Pac-Man. But while testing your latest build, I had this tune popping in my head which I rediscovered recently, "Baby when the lights" by David Guetta. I think that would be a good song since it starts with "Baby" like the actual game, and there are lots of lights in the pinball section. And it should be fairly easy to adapt to the TIA since it's fairly repetitive and has got a simple chord structure. However, in order to take advantage of the repetitiveness, the music routine should support some kind of patterns, so I amended it a bit in order to support some additional commands. You currently have 00 for ending the tune and $FF for repeating it. I've introduced $80 for returning and anything from $81 to $FE for "calling" another tune as a pattern. The way it works is if a "negative" value other than $FF is encountered, rather than restarting the same tune, the byte is ANDed with $7F and the result gets used as the new tune number. Before initializing it, the current positions are saved in "return address" variables. If a $80 is encountered, a "return" is performed by fetching the current positions back from the "return address" variables. Now I "just" have to put in the music data... ;-)

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Just to note, I have the following sounds completed:

- Transition sound from maze to pinball (the sound made when you first enter pinball mode)

- Pacscalator

- Drop Downs (except the middle blue one, which has a different sound)

- 'Fruits' rollover

- 'Tunnel' rollover

- 'Even Up' rollovers

- 'Tilt' (that one sounded like an Atari sound anyway)

 

Working on the Bumper sound.

 

Some sounds on the arcade have a more 'harsh' texture to them (for example the transition sound from maze to pinball mode), whereas the ones here are more 'tonal' (for lack of a better phrase).

trying to use other voices just sounded horrible, and I couldn't get the textures to match. So, I opted for correct notes over textures.

I actually took my guitar out (although I don't really play any more) to match the notes as closely as I could.

Edited by PacManPlus
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In my opinion, many of the pinball sounds actually are polyphonic, that is, they should use both channels at once. One technique to achieve this might be to play basically the same notes on both sound channels with different voices / repeat rates. For instance, for square waves, there's one lower setting and then another higher setting which has got exactly three times the frequency of the lower one. On some effects such as the fruit and tunnel rollovers, it might work well to use both settings on the two channels playing the same period values. On other like the transition from maze to pinball, the pacscalator and actually the spinner, it seems like the two channels should exactly be an octave apart which could be achieved by using the same "voice"; but double the period. And in some which change frequency rapidly, such as the one when you're earning a power pellet, it might be a good idea to mix in some noise at least in part of the effect.

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Video of the most current build.

Not crazy about the bumper sound, and that the 'pinball entry' & pacscalator/evenup sounds are so similar.

This is really fun to play repeatedly and I'm excited about the new new sounds being developed.

The only thing that I think might need going back to clean up in the graphics, if possible, is how the flippers often overlap with the ball. I don't know if that can be cleaned up or not. I have noticed it in gameplay, but it was hard to describe such a fleeting and random occurence, except that it seemed the flipper interaction with the ball seemed unnatural sometimes, like the flipper was made of Jell-O. Also, I've just gotten to where I can play up to 400,000+ points, so when your concentrating on the game, and the game is short, its hard to define it. It is a little clearer what is going on in a video of extended gameplay, like this. For example, at 1:10, it looks like the ball goes through the flipper tip, while at other times it goes through it, but then the ball goes up a 100 ms later, and at 3:30, it looks like the ball goes through and under the flipper and then goes back up through it to move up the table. Still, I am loving this 7800 pinball/pac-man fusion.

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Video of the most current build.

Not crazy about the bumper sound, and that the 'pinball entry' & pacscalator/evenup sounds are so similar.

 

Just watched the whole video. It's amazing to see the progress; the game really is looking great.

 

Regarding sounds: would it be possible to see a build in action where the 'siren' background sound in the video portion has its volume reduced by about 15 percent? It seems like it overwhelms some of the other sound effects in that mode slightly at times.

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Just watched the whole video. It's amazing to see the progress; the game really is looking great.

 

Regarding sounds: would it be possible to see a build in action where the 'siren' background sound in the video portion has its volume reduced by about 15 percent? It seems like it overwhelms some of the other sound effects in that mode slightly at times.

 

I have to agree with this. Per the video the siren sound is much too loud...

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I just want to express a little something... I am extremely excited this project. Partially because SiO2 recently rocked my world with a 7800. Partially because the amazing talent that's going into it... but also for one other big reason...

 

I own a complete but non-working Baby Pac-Man game.

 

I went to great lengths to find one several years ago, as I love both Pinball and Pac-Man and unusual things that are awesome. I have every intention of fixing it. I'm no stranger to fixing pinballs. I have a Black Knight, Black Hole, Playboy, Caveman, and several more under my belt. It just so happens that this game is the next one on my list, patiently waiting for me to get back to it (this aspect of my hobby took a long break due to recent fatherhood). Of all the pinballs I've had my head inside, I know that Baby Pac-Man is probably going to be the hardest. I've been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading tackling it.

 

I've only played a 100% working Baby Pac-Man machine on one session many years ago. As I said, I'm extremely excited about this 7800 version- for a variety of reasons but also because I hope to use it to actually playtest and troubleshoot my arcade machine.

 

If anyone in this thread ever wondered if this game, once completed, might be used for this purpose- I can assure you that yes... it will be, sooner rather than later I'd say.

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Hi guys...

Thank you so much, as always, for the kind words.

 

Siren volume reduced from '$07' to '$05'.

I'm going to re-visit the bumper sound to try and get it closer, and make the 'enter pinball mode' sound more distinguishable from the 'pacscalator/evenup rollover' sound.

 

Regarding the flippers, I'm not sure... I definitely don't notice the 'overlap' while playing, but I can see it somewhat in the video. (keeping in mind that youtube takes 60 FPS videos and cuts them down to 30 FPS, so there are frames missing).

 

Still working...

Bob

Edited by PacManPlus
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Video of the most current build.

Not crazy about the bumper sound, and that the 'pinball entry' & pacscalator/evenup sounds are so similar.

This is WOW! I can't wait to play this. If WATCHING gameplay is this much fun, I can't wait.. Thank you PacManPlus and all involved for the hard work!

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OK... the overlap is definitely my work, and it's true that it sometimes may occur. There's a reason for it though... basically the ball should move up at the speed the flippers are moving up. However, they are moving slightly too fast, so I've capped the speed to which they can accelerate the ball upwards to 8 pixels per frame. If they move faster than that, the ball can't keep up and appears to overlap with the flippers for one or two frames until it has reached the flipper surface. That's the reason why the overlap may sometimes occur. What was more important to me when coding this was that the direction and the speed the ball is shoot by the flippers should look convincing and realistic, and I think I've achieved that.

 

Now for the sounds...

I've got some more ideas on what could sound good there after recording and analyzing some of the sounds from Visual PinMAME myself...

The bumper could maybe sound good if it plays a sound that consists of white noise (distortion #8) sweeping up and down (vibrato) over the course of about 7 frames, decaying over the course of about 1.25 seconds (which is 75 frames in NTSC or 62 frames in PAL). Well maybe not with this voice, but the vibrato part sounds right to me.

 

For some sounds, I think 15 would be a good distortion value, especially for the Fruit and Tunnel rollovers. I think this distortion is closest to the "voice" actually needed for those rollovers.

 

Hi guys...

Thank you so much, as always, for the kind words.

 

Siren volume reduced from '$07' to '$05'.

I'm going to re-visit the bumper sound to try and get it closer, and make the 'enter pinball mode' sound more distinguishable from the 'pacscalator/evenup rollover' sound.

 

Regarding the flippers, I'm not sure... I definitely don't notice the 'overlap' while playing, but I can see it somewhat in the video. (keeping in mind that youtube takes 60 FPS videos and cuts them down to 30 FPS, so there are frames missing).

 

Still working...

Bob

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