RE: Multigame update!

G'day folks,

>From my days at William's, many games have an "octopus" move (pushing a
large number of buttons and all joysticks at once) enabled only during
attract move to show credit screens, special messages to friends, etc.
(Boy, do game designers love to show off these "secret" things...almost
like someone showing off the latest MK6 move they found.)

Of course, the game designers have the source code, so making something
only available during attract mode is quite easy. My point is, can we
solve the problem of routing to the menu in software instead? Perhaps,
add some code to rewrite the vector for NMI only during attract mode
(and then write it back to the proper value when the game starts)??

Of course, this approach means that you've created a new version of the
software. But you are doing this already to add the menu, eh?

                Steven S Ozdemir
                sso@dsc.com

>----------
>From: Clay Cowgill[SMTP:clay@supra.com]
>Sent: Monday, June 02, 1997 4:52 PM
>To: vectorlist@goonsquad.spies.com
>Subject: Re: Multigame update!
>
>>> 1) When P1 start and P2 start are pressed simultaneously and held in for
>>>1sec
>>> NMI is asserted which calls the menu program. (neat, huh? :-)
>>
>>Holding P1 start and P2 start are commonly used to skip quickly through the
>>games test mode, so I don't think this is a good idea (coming from a guy
>>whose
>>had to go through test mode +1000 times and couldn't live without this
>>feature...). I vote for reset (or can't this be done?)
>
>Ahhh, hmmmm. I don't really care *what* switches they are, just as long as
>all the games had them and it was unlikely that the combination would occur
>during game play (that was the idea behind the "press and hold for more
>than a second" thing. I can do P1 start plus "fire" just as easily. That
>shouldn't clobber anything...
>
>Using reset instead... I'll have to think about that one. The handy thing
>about the NMI was that it's a nice little hook already built in for me.
>All I do is replace the vector for NMI in each game to point to the menu
>code. The menu code is mapped in at locations 0xF000-0xF7FF which are
>normally unused. The menu system sets a bank select/parameter register
>pair that switches the low ROM area (0x0000-0xBFFF) to the appropriate
>game, tells the Controller Controller what's going on, tells the screen
>rotate logic whether or not to kick in, and then just jumps to 0000 to
>restart.
>
>>> 3) Remaps Impulse/Fire on StarTrek to match thrust/fire on the rest
>>>(yeah,
>>> it's nit-picky but would bug me to no end if I didn't do it. ;-)
>>
>>Totally agree; it's a pain to switch these wires when I play Star Trek on my
>>enhanced Tac/Scan control panel.
>
>Good. It wasn't just for me then. ;-)
>
>>> 4) Provides quadrature outputs from SF/Elim rotate buttons. (So the
>>>rotate
>>> buttons on Space Fury and Eliminator can be used instead of the
>>>spinner
>>> knob.)
>>
>>Optional right? (So you can use an encoder wheel if you have one)
>
>Right. This was for Space Fury/Eliminator people that want to try
>Zektor/ST/TS but don't want to switch control panels and/or don't have a
>spinner knob around.
>
>-Clay
>
>Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
>_______________________________________________________________________
>/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
>\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
>
>
>
Received on Mon Jun 2 14:03:11 1997