Pinball 99

[Asmusr]

2 hours ago, globeron said:

Also going through the "wumpus" lane it accelerates the ball

Yes otherwise it would never get through.

[Asmusr]

3 hours ago, globeron said:

Do you mean like this ?

I think what @InsaneMultitasker means is that when the ball in launched it goes through the left side of the launch lane.

[Asmusr]

17 minutes ago, Asmusr said:

Well that's why the nudge function exists. ?

You actually have some control over the nudge function. A quick press moves the ball left, and the longer you hold down the key the more right it goes.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

1 hour ago, Asmusr said:

I think what @InsaneMultitasker means is that when the ball in launched it goes through the left side of the launch lane.

I was able to reproduce the plunger collision oddity in js99er.  It seems to happen when the ball hits the plunger area and the plunger has been pulled downward one or two pixels. I captured a few screenshots when I noticed the ball starting to wiggle (Maybe the nudge is interfering with collision in this area?); in this example, the ball slowly traveled to the middle of the red area before dropping off screen.

 

For the launch lane issue, the ball doesn't escape the lane, it just encroaches into the left border by 8-10 pixels. I've only seen it a few times and it hasn't affected gameplay.

 

 

[Keatah]

1- collision detection isn't perfect with the left white gate at the top, I've shot the ball through it on occasion.

 

2- a ball launched not high enough, comes back down, escapes the lane, and shoots to the left eventually going off-screen through the drain.

 

See this at 00:35 in this AVI capture PinballIssue1.zip

 

Edited July 10, 2022 by Keatah

[globeron]

13 hours ago, Asmusr said:

Yes otherwise it would never get through.

It is difficult, but I almost had them all, still practicing.  For the SAMS I think I did not manage it yet and the double scores only until 2x so far. 

(One time managed to get the XB, EA, MiniMem applications).    It is all positive feedback, really love this Pinball version with Speech, it is addicting 

like all your other games!  

[globeron]

It seems that I get a lot of "garbled" speech (I have not tested a real TI again), but in the emulators not always everything is spoken, do other people also have this ?

 

[+pixelpedant]

I will just echo the last comment here - on both original TI + speech synthesizer (as well as emulators), I do get a fair amount of garbled speech in the 1.1 version of the game. 

 

Some events seem more prone to it than others. 

 

One particularly problematic case is, when the ball traverses the "games" lane, whatever speech event is intended there seems to often freeze the game for me:

 

 

 

But note that the speech event immediately before that played fine. 

 

That is on original hardware, incidentally.

 

Another minor bug is, the ball can (but does not usually) pass in the wrong direction through the left gate at the top of the board:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Asmusr]

I have spent some time today trying to find the reason for the garbed speech. I found using Classic99 that very rarely my interrupt routine takes a lot longer time than usual, but I was not able to find out which subroutine caused the delay. If the garbed speech is not caused by that, but by a more general issue about not feeding data to the speech synth fast enough, maybe the attached version 1.2 will help. At least I didn't have any issues when I tried it on real hardware. Another change in this version is that the welcome speech is repeated each time the intro sequence starts.

pinball99-8.bin pinball99.rpk

[+pixelpedant]

I can confirm that this 1.2 version greatly alleviates garbled speech for me on original hardware.  All speech samples play understandably and no speech-associated temporary freezes occurred through 15 minutes of gameplay. 

 

At this point, the only discernible issue with speech is small skips and slightly garbled bits in a few select samples, as here:

 

 

But everything now plays, and most of them play completely without issue. 

[Asmusr]

7 minutes ago, pixelpedant said:

But everything now plays, and most of them play completely without issue. 

That's great, but I actually still get garbled speech on welcome sentence maybe once out of 8 times I quit and restart the game. 🤕

[+pixelpedant]

I see what you mean, yeah.  I'm getting that too. 

[Asmusr]

It's strange since AFAIK everything should be in the same state after a reset, so it should always say the welcome sentence in the same way.

[Asmusr]

I think I have fixed the speech issue in this version (1.3). Let me know if there are still problems on real hardware.

pinball99.rpk pinball99-8.bin

[+pixelpedant]

Nice.  Speech is mostly without issues in this version for me on original hardware. 

 

But I am still getting speech problems in two places where I've gotten them before.  And the manner of the distortion is always the same for each sample concerned, through many repetitions over 20ish minutes of play, and is always present:

 

(unsure of sample intended here):

 

 

"Game Over":

 

 

 

[jrhodes]

The first one sounds like "Balls Remaining"?  @Asmusr was this intended to tell the player the number of balls remaining?

Never mind me and my failing ears... I hear things other people don't. Of course the fact that i'm 80% deaf in my left ear doesn't help any either...

Edited September 20, 2022 by jrhodes

[ti99iuc]

ahaha the "Game Over" is so funny :Lol

It remember me Laurel & Hardy 😛

Edited September 20, 2022 by ti99iuc

[Asmusr]

The first sample is "Sorry mate" with Australian accent. 🙂 It sounds exactly as it should to me.

"Game over" sounds that way when encoded with Python Wizard. I have no idea why.

Both samples, as you can hear from the wav files, are high quality.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Asmusr

[+pixelpedant]

Hah!  Figures "sorry mate" just wouldn't process, for my Canadian brain.

 

And the samples are being encoded by Python Wizard using TMS5200 reflection coefficient values?

[Asmusr]

8 minutes ago, pixelpedant said:

And the samples are being encoded by Python Wizard using TMS5200 reflection coefficient values?

Yep

[Asmusr]

I will give it a week or so, and if no new problems are reported I will call version 1.3 the final version.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

Is there anything further to be done with the collision 'issues' mentioned in July?  Keatah and I shared a few screenshots of the plunger issue. There are other times the ball is displayed within the reddish areas of the map, most often while launching out of the plunger chute, but those haven't adversely affected gameplay that I recall. 

[Asmusr]

18 hours ago, InsaneMultitasker said:

Is there anything further to be done with the collision 'issues' mentioned in July?  Keatah and I shared a few screenshots of the plunger issue. There are other times the ball is displayed within the reddish areas of the map, most often while launching out of the plunger chute, but those haven't adversely affected gameplay that I recall. 

It's very difficult for me to reproduce, but I think it could be prevented by disabling the nudge function in the plunger lane. It never happens to me if I wait for the ball to be resting before using the plunger again.

Edited September 22, 2022 by Asmusr

[Asmusr]

Version 1.4 is an attempt to fix collision issues in the launch lane.

pinball99.rpk pinball99-8.bin

[+pixelpedant]

Maybe late for a feature request, but would you consider adding a Shift+838 cheat screen for tweaking a few key engine physics variables?  This is something included in some legacy titles, and even if the consequences of such alterations were largely silly or unplayable, it would likely serve to entertain.