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Ms.Hack (edit of Hack'Em)


Nukey Shay

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Bit test failure caused monsters to go through the bottom of the center box when leaving (one comes out, then turns around and sails right through walls). Unrelated to the previous issue, but it's fixed (I hope).

 

Accumulated-siren and double-fruit sound glitches added (double fruit is when you eat a monster right after eating a fruit...the fruit sound plays again). Intermissions polished a bit more (you can actually see her bow this time)...and the bow in general is more visible. Looks less like a fez now :lol:

 

A couple of illegal opcodes removed...I missed them the first time around.

 

No space left at all...so this might be it unless more bugs (or previously-fixed bugs) appear.

 

Remaining glitches/issues:

Changing a difficulty switch during a game immediately begins a new game with clipped music. I never found a fix for that.

Dot-eating sound effect sometimes wiped out in early stages (only once per game AFAIK). It's still audible, just very quiet.

Pausing during intermissions throws all the pointers out of whack. No biggie, since pausing is generally only needed during the actual game.

The music cues are still slightly misaligned. I don't have a good fix for this, because I'm not very good at coding audio.

MsHack.zip

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Sure. A better choice would be the title screen. That eats up nearly 2k on it's own (and it doesn't match Ms.Pac-Man's anyway). A sparse display featuring a title banner and moving "lights" could probably be done in a couple of pages. But what would all of the leftover rom be spent on? The main obstacle that I'm facing with the above issues is that I don't know how to correct them, not that I'm lacking space.

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Finding more optimizations. It's sort of like babysitting when ram is extensively shared among variables...every update needs to be checked that all of them are playing nice :P

 

Pausing during intermissions is now OK...it freezes all timers/counters used in the game, so the pointers don't get messed up. Because the framecounter is no longer able to produce the flashing color for the text, I just used the color pink when drawing the paused caption. I still need to add the caption to the intermission section, tho (but it's pretty obvious when the game is paused). You might see MsPac flip directions (depending on intermission sequence), since the reflect register isn't properly updated with the game on pause.

 

The previous version was wiping out the random seed when choosing a random fruit by improperly moving the bits around (which could have led to other glitches too, since that variable is shared with both the fruit origin and direction variables). This is fixed.

 

Scoring 10k at the exact moment of being killed or finishing a board would clip the bell sound previously. This is also fixed...and the bell will ring the correct number of times regardless of what else is happening.

 

 

A bit of space left over too.

MsHack.zip

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If you would be so kind as to indulge a bit of minor criticism from me I don't like the Pac On Crack being the default setting of Mr Hack and Hack 'Em because I always have to flip the switches to play at normal speed.

Sorry for the gripe....the game is looking great.

Wp

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That's the thing, tho...the faster-moving sprite is an easier game (you can outrun all the monsters all of the time). The slower-moving game was given the Advanced setting for that reason alone. It's only a "default" option because that is what emulators default the switch settings to.

 

 

 

walked right through pinky :evil:
That is supposed to happen (the tile-swap collision error is present in the arcade game of all Pac-variants). Collision-sensitivity is low enough to allow partial overlaps to be non-lethal, but high enough so the tile-swap glitch isn't happening all of the time.
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  • 2 months later...
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  • 2 weeks later...

Just had time to play your latest version. This is great stuff, Nukey, keep it up :thumbsup:

 

 

 

BTW: The grid on start up is really flippin' cool. Just like the actual arcade game!!!!1111eleven

Edited by brandondwright
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  • 2 months later...

Somehow I missed the update too! This is very nice... I may have to dig the Krokocart out (for the first time in forever) to give this a go on the real hardware. :)

 

Now I may have to go looking through the hacks forum to see what else I've missed in the last several months.

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Phenomenal work!

 

I love the elements of Pac-Man Plus thrown in there, and the built in pause feature for every level. The graphics and more importantly the feel of the gameplay are so much more arcade like. AWESOME. This does indeed go beyond what I would have expected possible for the good ol' VCS, which is why the following question is fairly absurd, but I can't resist asking, if only for a better understanding of what the absolute limitations of the platform are because my understanding of them were just blown away.

 

From reading forum threads about other titles it seems that available vertical lines was always a limitation, and a reason why so many arcade ports looked squashed on a home TV, aside from the obvious fact that they were taking a vertically oriented display and turning it on its side. Would it be even remotely possible to make the maze scroll up and down in hopes of expanding the vertical size of the video wafers, especially the power wafers?

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