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HSC18 [Aborted Round 8]: PATENT POLE POSITION


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PATENT POLE POSITION

 

patent_pole_position.png.2d4082edef2dea90eb0fb7ea52e817ff.png

We'll give Patent Pole Position V6 a HSC airing, not sure how difficult it will be or if there are any corrupt graphics but we'll see. I've arbitrarily created some races, if we decide the game is not up to much we can switch to the original PP and start over.

 

If anyone only has the original PP on cart then let me know and we can run a side table for that too. We'll have to add some fiddle factor for NTSC vs PAL times/scores; in PP on NTSC it was something like you could only crash once and make the lap but twice on PAL so it was never the same, even with the timer adjusted "Marius version".

 

Settings
From the menu screen [Select] the track 1-8 then press [START], when you see the game press [Select] to set the difficulty e.g. Atari GP and [Option] to set the number of laps.

 

Compete in as many as you wish:

RACE A - TRACK 2 - MALIBU GP - 2 LAPS

RACE B - TRACK 3 - NAMCO SPEEDWAY - 3 LAPS

RACE C - TRACK 4 - ATARI GP - 4 LAPS

RACE D - TRACK 8 - ATARI GP - 8 LAPS

 

Controls

Use U/D to change gear and fire is brake!

 

Scoring

will be made up later!

 

If you can please post additional info like seconds left at the end of the race and number of crashes so I can see how NTSC and PAL compare.

 

Downloads

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-patent-pole-position-version-06_14263.html

http://a8.fandal.cz/detail.php?files_id=5161

 

Round ends

Monday 10th May 10pm UK time (possibly sticking to Monday's for now)

 

Everyone welcome to play, any problems just post. Have fun, and avoid those sign posts as trbb plunges the HSC into it's usual driving chaos!!

patent_pole_position_version_06_2.gif

Edited by therealbountybob
Round Aborted!! See new round 8!
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After investing half an hour onto Patent Pole Position, I can tell as much:

 

Qualification race: You need a perfect lap to advance. Perhaps on the original Pole Position you could afford one crash, but not here. Playing on PAL, I found that 21 sec left yielded me starting position 6, 24 sec left for position 4 and 27 sec left for position 3.

 

The actual race: Pretty much the same seems to be true here. Perhaps if you're very fast you could afford to crash once without missing the checkpoint, and that is on a slower PAL machine. I didn't manage to finish a single lap on the race yet. Assume that you need perfect laps to finish this game.

 

I played Race A on the given settings and scored 20950 pts almost finishing one lap on the race. Not very pleasing.

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6 minutes ago, carlsson said:

After investing half an hour onto Patent Pole Position, I can tell as much:

 

Qualification race: You need a perfect lap to advance. Perhaps on the original Pole Position you could afford one crash, but not here. Playing on PAL, I found that 21 sec left yielded me starting position 6, 24 sec left for position 4 and 27 sec left for position 3.

 

The actual race: Pretty much the same seems to be true here. Perhaps if you're very fast you could afford to crash once without missing the checkpoint, and that is on a slower PAL machine. I didn't manage to finish a single lap on the race yet. Assume that you need perfect laps to finish this game.

 

I played Race A on the given settings and scored 20950 pts almost finishing one lap on the race. Not very pleasing.

I can tell you that on NTSC, I crashed on the 1st lap of the race and I ran out of gas as I crossed the finish line, granting me extended time.  I forget what my qualify time was.  I'll watch more closely next time.

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I have don't the abillity or the skills to download games, so i'll have to manage with my sio2sd witch was loaded with games when i bought it.

I have Pole position in a coupple of versions, but i don't think the version we play here are on my drive..

 

The PP xex file here, i guess is the original game. I can play that.

 

Please, give me some input here.

 

20210427_204830.jpg

20210427_210044.jpg

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The qualifying race is no joke. Atari was like, oh you wanna play Pole Position? Not so fast. Cool kids only. 

 

Race A - 20,700

Didn’t make it through :(

B0AA2297-154D-47ED-AAFC-D2F0583FEABD.thumb.jpeg.b6629fc4284ddb3bec2a14f36ec001ec.jpeg

 

I’m so good at crashing into cars, I should play some Bump ‘N’ Jump...

 

The xex worked for me on my ultimate cart, but not the rom file. What’s the difference between this and the original A8 PP? Played mostly on 2600 and a little in the arcade. 

Edited by fakecortex
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3 hours ago, tompateus said:

I have don't the abillity or the skills to download games

If you have a memory card reader on your main computer, it isn't so difficult. Remove the SD card from your SIO2SD when it is turned off, put it into the card reader. It will eventually pop up as a device of some sort (assuming you're playing Windows, might be the same about OSX and frankly I think even Linux will more or less automount removable media). I have created a speciial #HSC folder on my card where I plop in all the competitive versions we're playing, to keep separate from the game directories A-Z it came preloaded with. Many of those files may equal the versions we download for each game, but not always those versions are to be found plus that sometimes games have been bug fixed in the last few years.

 

Once you're done with the SD card, find a feature in the Windows Explorer (or Finder if you're on Mac) to eject the card (Mata ut in Swedish). Once you have completed that task, you can safely remove the card and put it back into the SIO2SD. Just watch out so you don't accidentally select to format the card though.

 

But yeah, perhaps we should play Pole Position X instead of Patent V6. I saw that trbb has gone to look for Patent V1 - V5, in case those have hand crafted tracks that are challenging but playable.

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2 minutes ago, carlsson said:

If you have a memory card reader on your main computer, it isn't so difficult. Remove the SD card from your SIO2SD when it is turned off, put it into the card reader. It will eventually pop up as a device of some sort (assuming you're playing Windows, might be the same about OSX and frankly I think even Linux will more or less automount removable media). I have created a speciial #HSC folder on my card where I plop in all the competitive versions we're playing, to keep separate from the game directories A-Z it came preloaded with. Many of those files may equal the versions we download for each game, but not always those versions are to be found plus that sometimes games have been bug fixed in the last few years.

 

Once you're done with the SD card, find a feature in the Windows Explorer (or Finder if you're on Mac) to eject the card (Mata ut in Swedish). Once you have completed that task, you can safely remove the card and put it back into the SIO2SD. Just watch out so you don't accidentally select to format the card though.

 

But yeah, perhaps we should play Pole Position X instead of Patent V6. I saw that trbb has gone to look for Patent V1 - V5, in case those have hand crafted tracks that are challenging but playable.

Thanks carlsson for the info, it will be usefull in the future for me when i'll have a computor with internet?

My computor skills are less then poor.

But for now i only have a phone with internet?

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Aha, I wasn't aware. I suppose if you were really die hard about it, you would use a micro SDHC card with an adapter for the SIO2SD, and then be able to pop in the micro SDHC card into your phone (assuming it is an Android with room for a memory card -- Apple doesn't believe in external storage so iPhones AFAIK don't support adding a memory card which is why storage space is so important and expensive on iPhones as there virtually is no way to expand it after purchase).

 

Someone skilled would probably point you to a networking solution for the Atari that would allow you to download files directly to it, but it would require you to have at least a wi-fi router or similar. If you're only using mobile Internet through your phone provider, that wouldn't work unless you configured your phone temporarily for Internet sharing, turning it into a wi-fi router on its own. I use to do that sometimes when I'm at a distant place without wi-fi but need to use both my phone and laptop, and I'm having reception on the phone. It is far from a permanent solution but works in a pinch.

 

</offtopic>

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Out of curiosity I downloaded the Pole Position Race Designer and have made the following conclusions:

  • Each circuit consists of 27 segments.
  • Each segment can be straight or curve to the left or right in the range of 1-20 each.
  • Each segment has a given length, and the total length of all segments must be 326.

First all the curves are listed (27 bytes) with the following values used:

 

Straight = $00

Left 01 = $01, Left 02 = $02 ... Left 20 = $14

Right 01 = $81, Right 06 = $86 ... , Right 11 = $8B, Right 16 = $90, Right 20 = $94

 

Then there seems to be a padding $00 byte followed by segment lengths (27 bytes) encoded as hexadecimal so 12 = $0C.

Finally there seems to be a magic sequence $0C9B (unless that comes from Atari DOS?).

 

After teaching myself how to add XEX files to a DOS image, I managed to boot it on an emulated 800, create test tracks saved to disk and from there extract those files out of the ATR. I had a brief look at the Patent Pole Position file, but unfortunately I could not find the magic sequence which makes it harder to locate exactly where the tracks are stored. In principle I suppose one could count corners and look for combinations of $0x/$1x and $8x/$9x. Or just disassemble the code I suppose.

 

The Race Designer has a play testing mode but it doesn't center the car and it only seems to run on an 800 (not XL/XE) but I imagined if the location and format of tracks can be found, the Patent one could be injected with more thought out tracks. I would assume this is information previously documented, i.e. in the modifications mentioned by Marius?

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Aha, enabling disassembly within Altirra was much easier, as the game waits for SELECT or START.

 

Current track is (temporarily?) stored in $611E.

Then there is a list of offsets at $5AD3: $1B, $37, $53, $6F, $8B, $A7, $C3, $DF which happen to be exactly 28 bytes apart.

 

At first I supposed that the first circuit starts at $5ADB + $1B, but it really seems to begin at $5ADB with the second track at $5AF6 or thereabouts.

The game then copies the circuit data to $B25F + $1A = $B279 before the game is booted. It doesn't seem like the length of each segment ever is injected into the main game, so it probably is the same for every circuit, possibly different from the original game.

 

I managed to change track #2 into almost only mild left turns, to prove my point. It is like NASCAR Light, but unfortunately I must have gotten some offset wrong so there is one nasty right turn right at the end of the lap... I'm not saying this is competitive, but proves that with some more tuning, it would be possible to create our own tracks with challenging but not random curves.

Patent_V07.com

 

Edit: Just for fun I ran 4 laps at Malibu difficulty (assuming that really is what it is, not track selection). Unfortunately I catched up on a whole slew of opponent cars right before the last turn and crashed once which affected my score a bit. Note that it is not a HSC entry, just testing my hack.

bild.thumb.png.b18424a6f3363bfcb98980544bfbf1e9.png

Edited by carlsson
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2 hours ago, carlsson said:

So since nobody reached the checkered flag, we gave this patent (leather?) one the boot...

 

I'm still intrigued about the circuit design and maybe I'll see if I can come up with something of my own that we can play just for fun next to the standard track.

Checkout PPX+ as this is the most promising version (we played it a while ago) - if you so some using the course designer (think fandal fixed it) - I had disassembled PPX+ (I think it was X+) and was looking at the code (ages ago) I made some minor changes and was working on possibly changing the courses, probably can get someone to change the course graphic on the menu screen.

 

There are also "track hacks 1-7" maybe these are the Patent versions - perhaps post something on the main forum about Patent?

 

We can re-visit this next time we play, perhaps end of season!

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Yeah. I had a brief look in disassembly between the original ROM version, the Patent V6 version and the Race Designer version but even after fully booting the game, structures seem to be located at different addresses so it would take more work to figure it out. If you already disassembled X+ it probably would be a small task to make new tracks for it, even if the title graphic doesn't represent the actual tracks.

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