Great discovery! Wish I had this game...

D. Vader - "Impressive!"

Very nice add-on. It's a mod that's worth getting. Too bad I don't have a SW yet.

Nice work!

WAY AWESOME!

Congrats on this. As a SW developer, I'm highly impressed by this task. Those that don't write SW may not realize how impressive this is. To decompile the code, sift through it to make changes, make them, recalc checksums and program new chip to test is definitely a lot of work. Are you using pinmame to test your changes easily? Finally, are you going to submit your updates to ipdb?

Holy smokes Chad that's fantastic! Is there a chance you could find the speeder mode and do something with it? I have a rom burner so I'm ready to test whatever you need on my own DESW!

I love it! I'm going in to my gameroom right now to try grabbing the ball as it goes up the shooter lane and dropping it in the drain just to see the DMD image.

Very nice. My suggestion is I would like to have to do something to enable the ramp awards rather than always being available. Completing the drop target banks or a number of pop hits or entering one of the holes or whatever! Basically anything to make you do something other than hit the right flipper repeatedly.

Funny.
I just did this also...and it works!
Alot of people that play this game in my gameroom always complain that it has no ball save.Now I can tell them it does LOL

They mean times ball save of course. I don't consider that a real ball save. That's why Chad made modifications to the code.

Please add a feature where pressing both flipper buttons will abort the current DMD animation. For example, when multi-ball starts. That death star blow up thing is cute, but it would be nice to be able to abort it and start play.

You sir, are a genius - great work!

I'm with Clay on this one. Seen it once and it's cute. After a few hundred times you're like "ugh lets go already!"

This is great! Keep up the good work!

Perhaps you can fix the bug where the game stops offering extra ball as a force reward. After a handful of games the feature is turned off and the only way to turn it back on is to do an audits reset.

If possible could you finish the speeder mode video mode? I think the concept would be simple, like The Shadow Phurba mode, where you are using the flippers to dodge trees for a test amount of time.

The cancel flipper suggestion is a good one as well.

If possible just turn off force rewards from the ramp, if you want the rewards, shoot the force...

This sounds like a lot of work and I'm sure it is, but I'm just throwing in suggestions

I have been waiting so very long for this. Thanks so much for working on it!

I was actually just thinking about SW rules yesterday and had a thought. Personally I would like to see the skill shot be expanded. You can barely wing the tie fighter and get the skill shot. I'd like to see the shot be broken into maybe 3-4 zones where a direct hit is worth more. Would make more sense than the current shot which is 1 million x ball number. I would like 5 million for hitting the thing dead center!

Just my thoughts.
Dan

I wonder if poor chad doesn't regret making his original post as everyone now seems to have feature requests. You guys do realize that it's not so easy to add features to disassembled binary code, right? It's not like Lyman working on his stern source code from home. I think just adding the ball save timer was remarkable. Rather than flooding feature requests, perhaps you might want to ask if he plans to share his work at all.

Nice work! great machine

Impressive. The force is strong in this one.

Great work

Ok. Awesome

Its 6809 code correct? Did you use IDA to dissasemble? What did you use to recompile it with? I'd love to know, I have an SST that I'd like to RE and look over some things.

I like SW a lot the way it is, so don't want to come off as one of those people who bash it. I play it tons, and it's one machine that will never leave my small collection.

That said, I think restoring the ball save is (obviously) a great feature. Hard to say why this was taken away, but I'm sure it had to do with a deadline to get the game shipped.

Since the speeder mode is another item that was cut due to deadlines, it's an obvious candidate for any rules update. Yes, I agree it's a massive undertaking. However, there are many programmers on the forums, including myself. I'm more than happy to help, and I know others have offered their skills in the past. Let's set something up!

Speaking of the missing speeder mode...It's always bothered me that we have this lever with a trigger and don't get to use it, so I would love to see that controller get implemented into whatever becomes speeder mode. Keep in mind that the playfield doesn't say "Speeder Mode" (it says X-Mode) so we could re-animate that mini-game as a DeathStar trench run animation sequence or whatever else we chose.

Regarding scoring tweaks, two things have always bothered me. First of all, it is not necessary to hit "The Force" scoop to get all the awards since the center ramp just gives them to you. Zero incentive to master that shot. I'd like to see this changed so that you actually need to hit "The Force" to collect these awards.

On a side note, I don't mind the ramp spelling STARWARS. I would be against cutting this out. Keep in mind the playfield said says it will spot you two two letters by shooting the left loop after getting a ramp.

Anyway, my number one biggest gripe about SW rules is...

03 ramps for 03 Million (03 Million total)
07 ramps for 07 Million (10 Million total)
14 ramps for 14 Million (24 Million total)
21 ramps for 21 Million (45 Million total)
etc...

This keeps growing and quickly becomes WAY too many points. It negates the significance of the jackpots and penalizes you for shooting the more interesting shots in the game.

All of these are MHO. Take it for what it is.
Thanks again to Chad for figuring out how to do this.
Dan

Great job! It's been a few years since I sold my SW, but I remember accidentally discovering the ball save while working on the game with the glass off! I was amazed and did it over and over again, and I began testing to see if specific switches deactivated it.

While I had the game, I came across "Twin Combo" only twice, but I don't know which two shots awarded this. Animation of both Luke and Leia would come on the screen. I tried to recreate the combo with the glass off, but I was never able to recreate it. I thought I tried every possible combination.

1st). If anyone knows the shots to get "Twin Combo" with the Luke/Leia animation, please let us know.
2nd). Chad, maybe make that "Twin Combo" a little more available with a couple of combos.

Word. Other DE games do this too, Lethal Weapon 3 as well. I played one my friend had just picked up and shot the LW3 ramp *93* TIMES in one game. My score was just shy of a billion points.

I've never played DESW, but if the ramp shot is as easy as LW3...that needs to be changed.

Nice work! Great pin

Never played LW3, but SW is makeable from both flippers and pretty wide so it doesn't have to be a very exact shot from either.

Have a similar experience to the *93* times thing you mention. If you just hit the ramp time after time the game is pretty boring but you can get insane scores. Still, there are a lot of nice shots in SW and some pretty cool awards (especially if you are a fan of the movies). I think what Chad is doing will help it quite a bit to make it a more complete game and to actually make it deeper.

Thanks again. Can't wait to get this in my machine!

I like both of those ideas. I'd be up for whatever others think since either is an improvement.

Did I tell you how happy I am to finally see this is being done? Man, I've been waiting for this since I got my SW a few years ago. Just thanks, thanks, thanks!

Chad, will you incorporate your changes into the Menu system, so options can be chosen?

Really impressive. Funny that it's a feature that got screwed up and it's bring fixed all these years later.

I wouldn't stray too far from the original. If you just fix the real problems I could see these changes being accepted as a legit update to the software. If you go too far it might not be as accepted.

The again, I don't own it - so go nuts!

Speeder mode: I remember playing a Star Wars when it was brand new on location. I can't tell you how many quarters I pumped into that sucker! Anywho, when I always encountered this mode, I was like am I suppose to be doing something else? Am I suppose to be hitting the T-lever plunger? It wasn't till the early internet days, I knew it was just a flashy animation.... Does anybody know what this was originaly intended to be. (Hit this many switches or a actual video mode?)

As far as the ramp scoring... Doesn't most early of the D.E. pins suffer from this flaw?

No one has info on the "Twin Combo"?

Hmmm. never heard of the 'twin combo' shot?

I didn't see it in Tom's guide either..
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.pinball/browse_thread/thread/7cdce52ff7ef1532/2e1aafd0255b3131?lnk=gst&q=star+wars+combo+shot#2e1aafd0255b3131

I put something on the facebook page for the game. Maybe somebody will know how to get to it or if it exists.

oooh thats hard style (I remember writing programs with debug.com in dos... lol)

check this out;
http://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/index.shtml

disassemble to source. supports 6808, 6809 etc. heaps of stuff. oooh just realised you have to buy it for like 500$ bucks.. price has gone up since I remember in the dos days.. I'd probably just write my own 6802 decompiler in ruby or python or something...

recompile with crasm maybe? http://crasm.sourceforge.net/crasm.html
lets see, 6808 is a 6802 without 128bytes ram.. 6802 is a 6800 variant... crasm should be ok.
(I see http://www.sbprojects.com/index.php but dont know much about it).

As I mentioned in my first reply, I got it at least twice when I had my SW, and I know I didn't imagine it In fact, I think I actually got it 3 or 4 times.

Back in 2007, I posted on RGP about it in a "Freeze" thread, but no one knew what I was talking about. I posted again in 2008 in another thread with no luck then either.

It was a still animation of Luke on one side and Leia on the other with "Twin Combo" and the points in the middle.

I think it has to be two shots that happen quickly that are not likely to happen. If it's "Twin," maybe it's the SAME shot that happens really, really fast, and usually times out before it can happen.

I wish I still had my SW so I could continue to recreate.

On pinball.org, the rule sheet mentions a combo shot for ramp and left orbit, but I don't think that's it. I wonder if it's two combo shots very quickly (four shots). Or maybe ramp/left orbit/ramp/right orbit, but getting the right orbit from the right flipper is too difficult. I don't know, but it's driving me crazy that I've done this more than once and NO ONE knows what I'm talking about.

i believe that is correct....ramp, then left orbit.

i'll go check it on mine....gimme a few.

well, it ain't ramp/left or ramp/left/ramp....or left/ramp or left/ramp/left. i know exactly what you're talking about, but i can't get it to work now for the life of me. i swear i thought that rule sheet you referenced was correct....i had never seen it before and never hit it during play, but i have done it with the glass off.

uggghhhhh....now this is gonna drive ME insane as well.

Trying now....

please post when you can...wondering here.

no dice. Is there an easy way in visual pinball to press switches in a kind of "glass off" mode? If so I can try tomorrow during my lunch at work.

So awesome... Makes me want to buy the game.

Wow that's awesome, thx for sharing..

Ok, Schusler's link to Tom's guide DOES explain the "Twin Combo"! Tom just doesn't call it twin combo. He says, "How to obtain: Inner orbit, to ramp, to left orbit...Sometimes it is hard to know if you got it, but you’ll hear a weird “whoom” sound and briefly see Luke and Leah on the display."

THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT!

In that same post, Tom mentions Super Combo, which shows Luke and Vadar when completing: Inner orbit, to ramp, to left orbit (same as Twin Combo), to Force Scoop. I've seen this one a few times, too, and I think it's animated with the light saber (I think).

Could someone run through each of these sequences and post a video? Please? (Inner right orbit, ramp, left orbit (twin combo), Force hole (Super Combo).

Thanks! I thought I was going crazy!