Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

Propose new game/software design concepts or new game/software ideas. They can be as whimsical as you like, just be careful you don't ask someone to make it for you...
highrise
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

Post by highrise »

both tunnels now working for Pacman and the ghosts. Now to get those power pills flashing.
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

Post by highrise »

the addresses for the power pills, which are flashed using only attributes are held here:

$5EB7
$5EC0
$5EC9
$5ED1
highrise
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

Post by highrise »

ok, the dots are sorted. The game is more or less complete and playable now, bar a bit of polish. I'm going to send it to my Patreons now to get some feedback and then put it out shortly after that.

Thanks for the suggestion Stu, it was a fun challenge. Don't worry about the money, but feel free to buy some of my games or support me on Patreon yourself :) www.patreon.com/happycodingzx
highrise
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

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by the way Mat, how did you go about finding where the map was located?
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

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Thanks, no problem. I kind of dropped the Rally X mode of Terrapins when someone made a pretty nice version of Rally-X. I guess I might come back to it at some point.
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MatGubbins
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

Post by MatGubbins »

Map finding can be a hit or miss situation. I use EmuZWin 2.7 emulator (on Windows XP) and scroll through the memory map.
Tools > Sprite Finder
This will bring up the entire 64k of Spectrum memory (ROM, Screen Ram and above). By using the width setting it allows you to put bytes side by side (upto 32 bytes) and if you're lucky there might be something that looks like map data.
If you can't find a map in a certain game then it will be compressed, stored as a bitmap, or just a random jumble of data.

The memory address is located at the bottom left and will update when the mouse is moved over the data - it doesn't show the byte value though.

The you can either use the Debug Window to change values, select Dec or Hex values with '10' on the menu bar, and test the map, the assembler allows you to extract the map data as a text file (use the disassembler) with all the DEFB bits put in.

As with every emulator, they take time to learn how to get data in/out of a game.
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highrise
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

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I see. I used a similar principle, but small routine that I put at the top of memory. It fills the screen with vertical lines, then goes through memory dumping 768 bytes to the attribute memory each time you press a key. In this way you can see data emerging. This is how the map data comes out on screen when properly aligned.


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highrise
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

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here is part one of the 'Let's Hack' video.

https://youtu.be/o9XS6JxfUBo
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

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This has now been fixed. As a special bonus for those who support me on Patreon, I also added some panel artwork to make it look like a tabletop.


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MatGubbins
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

Post by MatGubbins »

f you move the hi-score one char to the right then it'll look cleaner. Yeah, it's a bit more code hunting, but you're enjoying it.
highrise
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Re: Stu's Incredible Pac-Man Hack Challenge

Post by highrise »

nah, I'm done now, moved on to other things.
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