nesdev.com

Quality is why I iterate.

• Restored Karate Kick
• Updated Super Tilt Bro., Lala the Magical (1.1), Spacey McRacey
• Removed debugging "feature" at title screen to hold Up to corrupt graphics
• exitpatch: Fixed marking exitmethod=none banks as already patched
• a53build: Allow insertion of ROMs as unreachable data banks

Just found an A53 exclusive bug in Waddles - if you start waddles, reset, then reopen the game you may not be able to beat it! Trying to figure out what to do about it.

I had a feature in the original rom where if you reset, your collected gems would stay collected. I store this data in $400-$4ff, including a special byte I set to a known value at startup. If that special byte is set, I don't clear $400-$4ff while clearing ram. This works great in isolation, but it seems like the menu software writes to some (but not all!) of these bytes. This results in extremely high gem counts on reset - also making the game unwinnable.

I guess I see a couple options:
1) If there's $100 or so bytes the menu doesn't use, move the gem data there, and call it a day.
2) Kill that feature entirely for the multicart, and add a 3rd start menu option that allows returning to the title. (If you reset, you're just done.)

I haven't spent much time with the A53 sources, but I suspect I might be able to get away with using $700 or so. But then, I'm not sure how fragile that will be. It seems like killing the feature is the safer option.

I'll try to fix this in some form in the next week or two. I'd welcome any thoughts other folks have.

@cppchriscpp I responded in the game thread.
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Here's My long report of testing this build on Power Pak. I posted the important bugs that I believe needs attention in each of their respective threads. The rest of this post are kind of cosmetic stuff that I quickly jotted down.

I was did not reach the end of Wo xiang niao niao, Haunted: Halloween '85 Demo, or Zombie Calavera. So I might be missing some things in those games.

# Twin Dragons
There's some sort of PPU glitch (color line stripe, accidental scroll) at the end rescue scene.
The second to last fire ball in Level 2-2 initially spawns at the bottom of the screen, but it fixes itself when it lands in the lava.

# Filthy Kitchen
There was 3 momentary glitches that I couldn't reproduce, so unfortunately this report is not going to be much help here.
At one time some garbage was written in the score area. At another time the fly swatter went crazy for a bit. and I think the fly swatter hit the boss by warping around from the left side.

# Lala the Magical
I find it odd that releasing (instead of pressing) the A button advances the dialog.

# Cheril the Goddess
likewise with the dialog.
Twice I encountered a moment where a column of 2 metatiles loaded visually and physically incorrect. It's easy enough to just step back to reload it again.

# Wo xiang niao niao
I find it frustrating that the jumping fish still occasionally hurts Lin Lin even though she stomps them.

# Sinking Feeling
Some bizarre visual stuff happened when I think I got 2 achievements simultaneously. I'm not sure as it just happened once.

# Karate Kick
Background occasionally starts orange instead of black.

# The Paths of Bridewell
I understand that the sources to this was lost, so I don't expect anything about this game to change, but here's a list of oddities anyway.
Game briefly shows the OAM from the Action 52 menu with the Bridewell tileset before loading the title screen.
The title screen arrow blinks in time to the music (doesn't on emulator).
There's some sort of frequent miss set scroll for occasional video frames. I suspect (but did not verify) the music/sound engine load has something to do with it.
It's quite odd that the point to check tile effects (like water or ice) is a offseted point in front of billy instead of his center.
Billy can walk horizontally into a solid block as long at there's two ice tiles above him.
Billy can creep along a wall to the right to avoid the fast charging baddies.

# Spacey McRacey
Player 2 wins in the case of a tie between player 1 and 2.

# Waddles the Duck
The action 53 TV screen appears for a frame before the game starts loading graphics.
The game slows downs at two particular portals (I forgot to write down which ones)

# Haunted: Halloween '85
The camera starts way off to the left at a particular check point showing the tile columns getting loaded on the right of the screen, but the game does this in the retail version as well.

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Just for kicks I tried the "slow button" on the NES advantage controller. "slow" works by turbo pressing the Start button. The actual effectiveness of this varies for each of the games.

- Karate Kick, Sinking Feeling: Works perfectly with no audio distortions.
- Button Logger: I designed this specifically for the "slow button".
- Nebs 'n Debs, Cheril the Goddess, Flappy Jack: Works decently with audible annoyance.
- Jupiter Scope 2: Works without audible or visual changes, but unfortunately drops input.
- Twin Dragons, Filthy Kitchen: Works but with some dropped input making it sometimes difficult to do things.
- Rock Paper Scissors +: Auto advances the "press start" notice.
- Super Tilt Bro: Oddly enough, only your character walks slow.
- Lala the Magical: Game remains stuck in pause if you try pressing any buttons.
- Musical Controller: I guess that's an interesting musical effect?
- Wo xiang niao niao, Brick Breaker, The Paths of Bridewell, Zombie Calavera (Prologue): Does not pause, thus "slow" does nothing.
- Waddles the Duck: The pause menu eats all your jumps and pressing down while in "slow" will reset the level.
- Haunted: Halloween '85: Sound becomes garbage and eats your inputs.
- Spacey McRacey: Enforced minimum pause time makes the "slow button" awful.
- 240p Test Suite: "slow" causes unusable repeated flashes of menu and test loading.

I also tried "The Game Handler" which, among being finicky with it's directions, it allows me to press left and right at the same time. Most games just have some button priority where left overrides right and sometimes vice versa. The exceptions being:

- action 53 menu, Jupiter Scope 2, 240p Test Suite: Left + right is canceled into neutral.
- Nebs 'n Debs: Retains momentum while moon walking to the right.
- Flappy Jack: Walks in place
- Rock Paper Scissors +, Super Tilt Bro: Stops all input until Left + right stops happening.

I'm impressed, that's some quality testing that I never expected anyone to bother with You're absolutely right, later players always win in a tie:
I figured ties are extremely unlikely in actual play, so didn't care to build-in a tiebreaker.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to do the in-depth testing of all the games!

_________________
My games: http://www.bitethechili.com

Thanks for testing.



Oh, that glitch again. I thought I had sorted it out (in fact, I thought I had sorted it out with each new version, as It got reported every single time and I changed the scrolling engine every time, tested, couldn't reproduce, and thought it was solved - but no). I really don't know what's wrong. It seems stray data left on the nametables when you change to other level which doesn't get overwritten. I'll keep working on it.

_________________
http://www.mojontwins.com

I've updated Karate Kick a tiny bit, hopefully helping with some of its issues.

Wow, thanks for all those tests !
Which version did you try ?
I just saw that version 0.073 was available on the forums, but the "official" entry version is 0.074 (downloadable here), and IIRC, the PPU glitch was in v0.073.
I just updated my messages on the forums by the way.

Have not seen the garbage in the score area, but that sounds strange.

Fly swatter goes crazy has a fix for it.

Fly swatter going left and hitting the boss.... I think I'm okay with. Honestly seems like a neat trick.

Even though the code freeze happened March 31, we can still submit new versions, but only for bug fixes?

Sorry everyone that I didn't respond until now, busy week and all that.


I checked with a binary comparison and found we're using 0.074, but I found that there's inexplicably 1 bit of difference. In version "page 7" of a53games.nes, byte 0x06c031 is 0xad whereas in Twin-Dragons-20170131-0.074.nes byte 0x00c031 is 0x8d.


Yes, we have been accepting bug fixes.

Easily explicable.

From roms.cfg:

From the filename in rom=, we see the use of 0.074. The patch1=C021=AD disables setting the outer bank. A standalone game using the Action 53 mapper needs to set the outer bank, but it shouldn't when included in a multicart.

The reset handler is at $C000, and it includes mapper initialization code starting at $C01A that disassembles as follows:

ahh, sorry about that.
I guess today ended up being a day where I did everything the stupid hard way with stupid stuff like hex-editing via cut and pasting bitmaps, and where I didn't even bother to look at the blatantly obvious info already available.

I believe I figured out how this may be done. This is my suggested change to the description of Button Logger

I'll trust that the user will find that the Zapper button also works, and I think that explanation of Start is not necessary as A is the recommended pause button.

Midnight repost: B button grammar

If you want to burn PRG space, somebody should yell "ACTION FIFTY-THREE!" in a Crazy Taxi-style voice.

While searching for a post to quote in another thread, I found this post:

Maybe this could be included? I dunno.

I also have this wishlist (from when I previously looked for space fillers) of things I would like to have on Action 53 eventually, but probably never will due to licensing and/or contact issues.
- Alter Ego
- Inversion
- STING

I don't think Shiru will object to the inclusion of Alter Ego.

_________________
http://www.mojontwins.com