As some of you might have guessed, I'm working on a modification to the Last Action Hero firmware to address some things that I feel could have been done better. Number one on that list was the lame wizard mode, World Premiere. My goal has not been to significantly change the game, just make some of the less interesting modes more fun.

Change List:
*Improve World Premiere - now a multiball mode; 1 ball is added to play every 10 seconds; shots to the ramp add 5M to the award ceiling; collect at the scoop
*Special is awarded when bonus value exceeds 25M; this was never lit before if your game award wasn't set to special.
*Tilt warnings adjustment is now 0-5 inclusive; was 0,1,or 3
*Go to the Movies Mode - starts as a 2-ball multiball; hits to the captive balls award 5M X number of balls in play
*Knocker fires for Extra Balls as well as replays
*"Special" animation plays for special even if award type is set to extra ball
*Time based ball saver added, including flashing Shoot Again insert while active; ball saver restarts after ball lock and after LAH 6-ball multiball
*Match percent can now be set as high as 50%
*Ripper bounty increases 4X faster than before; now it's an award you might actually shoot for sometimes
*Second cousin frank award increases 4X faster than before; now it's an award you might actually shoot for sometimes
*Slightly longer ripper save, for when that ball shoots straight between the flippers and lingers just long enough to not get a "don't move."
*Modified "extra easy" mball captive hit requirements to start MBall. Now 2 hits lights MBall, 1 hit automatically awarded for each new ball; subsequent MBalls take 2 more hits than previous.
*Added 8 new voice quotes to various modes of the game.

You should be able to spot (and hear) some of the changes in this short video:

Anyone have any other ideas of things to add to this mod?

I am curious how many of you are interested in getting this when it gets released, so chime in. Also looking for beta testers that own an LAH, don't mind the slight risk of running modified code (I always test it first), and have access to an EPROM burner and a blank EPROM.

Thanks for looking.
caker137

More details and download instructions here:
https://sites.google.com/site/lahpinballmod/

Answers:

They were unused quotes in the original ROM.

I noticed that when I was testing too. I'm looking at that now...

I guess the main goal is to make it more fun. In terms of too easy, I guess play testing will tell for sure, but I basically I just focused on modes or features that I used to just avoid or wait out (or that you never got before). Now I think they might be interesting enough to try for.

I don't own a BTTF, but I imagine it should be possible. You really need to have a working knowledge of how the game plays to be able to begin working on modifying the code behavior. I encourage you to try!

Anything is possible; give it a try!

So no mod requests from the peanut gallery?

Just a quick update. Beta version is ready to go out. I've heard from a few people, but are there any others interested in beta testing? If you are very familiar with the stock LAH gameplay, and own one, but don't have an eprom programmer, we might be able to work something out. Shoot me a pm.

Also, this is your last chance for feature requests... I'm listening

It's still coming; stay tuned....

The project is not dead. I promise! I look forward to the day when I can announce the release. Thanks for your patience.

Hey guys,

I'm looking for a volunteer to help me test something out for this project. I need to find someone in / close to Chicago with a working LAH willing to install my mod'ed eeprom in your machine. There's a free copy of the mod in it for your trouble. PM me if interested for details.

Turns out there are only a few modes that don't already stack, and they are the ones that involve multiballs. It wouldn't really be feasable to stacks these without a major overhaul of the game code.

Wheels are turning. If I could give an eta I would, but I don't have a firm date to announce just yet. Stay tuned.

Not yet :-*

Thank you all for waiting patiently on this mod. I have been hoping / working towards an official release on this firmware version for nearly 2 years, but at this point I have decided to provide my work as a patch file that you may apply on your own. I know this makes the mod more difficult for some of you to enjoy than simply clicking buy-it-now and having a shiny new eprom show up in the mail, but at the very least, many of you can enjoy the mod, with a little extra effort. You will need an eprom burner, or a friend, or service that will burn your image after you create it with my patch file. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I believe this is the best way to proceed given certain distribution obstacles. Please post comments if you do decide to try this out; I am anxious to hear your feedback! My cohorts and I at the Aker Arcade have been playing the mod'ed firmware for 2 years now and I hope you enjoy it as much as we have.

More details and download instructions here:
https://sites.google.com/site/lahpinballmod/

Take a look at the link I posted; it has some instructions. You will need to apply my patch to the stock 1.12 CPU ROM, and burn that file to an eeprom.

I left the "hard" and "extra hard" multiball settings alone, so you can go to adjustments and change that setting to increase the # of hits to qualify mball.

I went back and forth on this setting. On the one hand more experienced players like the multiball to be more challenging to qualify; on the other hand, novice players (I have several who play @ my arcade) who are used to the multiball really miss it if you make it hard to qualify, and the captive balls are some of the hardest hits for novices to hit.

The compromise was 2 hits for MBall #1, 4 for MBall #2..etc. This way novice players get mball maybe 25% of the time, good players get it more like 75%, and experts should really be trying to get at least 2 mballs per game.

If anyone without a burner is still trying to figure out how to get this ROM onto their machine, shoot me a pm and I might be able to point you in the right direction.

You should be good. Pinmame does a full hash on the file to make sure it is exactly the same file it expects, and it doesn't expect 1.13. The actual hardware simply does an 8-bit checksum, and this checksum is valid for the 1.13 version.

So has anyone made it to the new world premiere mode yet? One of my favorite improvements.