Digital Copies of Upp Stuck at Title Screen

[+Gemintronic]

I've been getting feedback recently that digital copies of Upp/Upp Plus are getting stuck at the title screen.

 

In the instances I've seen the first controller has been detected as paddle in Stella.  The only solution I've found is to set the first controller port to Joystick manually.

 

To be clear I don't think this is a bug in Stella.  My hunch is that I have some code in Upp that triggers paddle auto-detection in recent Stella builds.

 

 

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

 

1 hour ago, Gemintronic said:

My hunch is that I have some code in Upp that triggers paddle auto-detection in recent Stella builds.

Is the binary available? Then we can check. Else you have to check the pattern in Stella (ControllerDetector) yourself.

[+Gemintronic]

13 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

 

Is the binary available? Then we can check. Else you have to check the pattern in Stella (ControllerDetector) yourself.

 

Yep.  The ROM is here: https://theloon.itch.io/upp?download

 

Do you have a link to the ControllerDetector utility?  Sounds handy for future use

[Thomas Jentzsch]

At  $f0b6 you are doing:

lda INPT0,y 
bmi ...

Which is typical paddle code.

[RevEng]

Looks like the kernel code for the "readpaddle" kernel option was compiled in. Double-check your kernel options.

[+Gemintronic]

Thank you for the second and third pair of eyes!  RevEng gave me some huge clues earlier that helped.  I redacted some paddle code from bB.asm and renamed some labels in the paddlemini.asm.  After that Stella 6.5.1 seemed to stop auto-detecting it as a paddle game.

 

Think I'll make a further improved version with more levels (and gameplay) to celebrate!

[chewy]

could we get a genesis controleller hack for this?

[+Gemintronic]

19 hours ago, chewy said:

could we get a genesis controleller hack for this?

 

The actively used parts of the joystick are LEFT, RIGHT, FIRE and RESTART  Plus the difficulty switches for easy/hard mode.

 

If either difficulty switch is set to A you start at level 8.  The laser launches really close to your position from now on.

LEFT/RIGHT steers your ship.

FIRE thrusts your ship up.  Also starts the game.

 

What would the extra Genesis button do in your vision?  The Genesis d-pad is one of my favs.

 

UPDATE:  Found a way to use the Genesis button!

DOWN or Genesis button C thrusts the player down.

[chewy]

does it get stuck on the title screen on harmony- can i play w/ genesis controller as the game is now?

[+Gemintronic]

 

On 1/30/2021 at 3:24 AM, chewy said:

could we get a genesis controleller hack for this?

I'd still like to know what your original idea to use the Genesis controller was.  I love feedback to improve my games!

 

1 hour ago, chewy said:

does it get stuck on the title screen on harmony- can i play w/ genesis controller as the game is now?

Most 7800 and 2600 systems use original Genesis d-pads but games must be specially made to understand the "extra" buttons.  

The Harmony cart doesn't run using Stella so my extraneous paddle related code shouldn't effect it.