Pitrex and Mine Storm 2

[Loccy]

Hi all. I've got a Pitrex up and running, which I'm enjoying so far. Haven't had any issues with it other than one strange foible.

 

If I try playing the image of Mine Storm 2 through the Vectrex emulator, it all works fine for a couple of mine fields. Then, suddenly, the screen will go black and a series of descending tones are played. At this point I can press all four controller buttons to suspend the game, so it's not like the hardware has hung or anything. A couple of times it's crashed in a way where the screen flickers as if it game has slowed down to a frame every second or so. Sometimes if I leave it for five seconds or so, it comes back and starts playing normally again.

 

Googling around I can't find anything remotely like this being experienced by anyone else. Are there some settings that I've not set that perhaps I should? Or is this a known thing? 

[playvectrex]

I'm not entirely sure if you are having the issue on Pitrex, or with a PC emulator... but there is a known issue with the original Mine Storm II where it glitches out if you shoot one of the fireball mines too quickly, but also are playing it on an emulator or flash cart that doesn't pad the unused memory with 0x01.  Some of the older flash carts simply leave the unused memory as 0x00, so this causes the crash when the game tries to read memory outside of it's own address space.

 

Here's a patched binary you can try, padded with 0x01 in the unused memory all of the way up to 32KB:
https://playvectrex.com/gameroom/gce/minestorm2-fix.bin

[Loccy]

Yes, I meant on Pitrex - as I understand it when you play Vectrex games on Pitrex you're actually running an emulator on the Pi and the Pi is driving the display hardware. 

 

And the patched binary worked a treat - that was obviously it! Many thanks for that, much appreciated. Not that I'm good enough at Mine Storm to need the Mine Storm 2 bug fixes just yet...