Super Pac-man mystery crash solved...sort of

[DEBRO]

When was the last time you looked at Matt's http://www.atariprotos.com site?

 

I went over there today (for another reason) and saw he had updates for Super Pacman. The programmer put in copy protection so the game couldn't be hacked for the A8. It apparently does a checksum with the EPROM.

 

I've looked at Super Pacman (but not real close) and never noticed this. What's interesting is this apparently causes the game to crash on the Multicart but it doesn't crash in an emulator

 

The other thing I don't get is the Multicart boots up the game and crashes on the title screen later. So it's almost as if the check is done while the game is running and not boot-up.

 

Can anyone chime in on this? Where do you think he put this code? I don't remember seeing anything like this in a DLI or VBLANK.

[MrRetroGamer]

The game works fine on the menu driven multicart by classics - I don't know if he modified the code or if he did anything else special to get it to work.

[Dutchman2000]

The game actually has 3 forms of protection. The Sean Kelly Multicart would crash from the first one. It checks the CRC of the EPROM. Since the multicart uses a much larger chip the game sees this and crashes. The protection was created to try and stop the pirating of the game.

 

I'll have to look at my notes to tell you about the other 2 protections. The new version found has all protection disabled.

[holygrailvideogames.com]

I first played Super Pac-man back in the 80's on the Atari 8 bit computers. I am almost positive that my copy was by "Glenn the 5200 man" and it was the 5200 version converted to the Atari 8 bits. My cartridge version of Super Pacman for the 5200 seems to have some bugs in it. I am going to have to check out the version on the multicart to see if it shows the same bugs that the cartridge version has.

[Shannon]

Odd... I dont ever remember the "glenn the 5200 man" version crashing..