For the possible 300 other people out there that own a Dragonfist (I know of at least one that was parted out) - here are some things that were changed:

(1) Fixed the drop handling bug where only the lit X bank (or 7x) adds a bonus step. Should you desire the original style, dip selectable.

(2) Added free play 2 ways, one just a dip. Credits accumulate as normal. Second way, set max credits (new setting) to 00 and it will just be freeplay without credit accumulation (similar to williams system 6/7).

(3) Fixed the background sound ramping up while the ball is sitting in the shooter lane to ear splitting levels. The background pitch only changes as the bonus X changes, every switch hit in the game returns the ramp up to that level, so it wasn't necessary to ramp it.

(4) Added the ability to go 'backwards' in replay levels, in case you overshoot the level.

(5) Extra balls can be completely turned off for tournaments

(6) special for 20/40/60/80 spins can be turned off

(7) Fixed phantom drop banks on reset, sometimes the upper right bank would score on the reset stroke.

(8) Fixed a possible stack crash on bonus collect due to too many routines stacked

Those are the changed items... the following are the new items:

(A) Added a sweep award to the drop banks of 25k (dip selectable)

(B) Added a unique sound effect for extra ball award (was none, previously) Reused this sound effect on the coin up sound if people just want to hear it.

(C) Added spinner counter >100, will record spins up to 199 and show on the player 4 display whenever high score to date is shown there.

(D) Added ability to carry over bonus ladder. Bonus ladder down count down slightly differently than stock (multiplier will flash while counting down, and the timing between the speedup/slowdown is slightly different)

(E) Different attract mode, more eye pleasing (IMO, of course).

(F) Eliminated game over lamp effect where you could not start another game until it was done.

(G) Drop banks only reset if at least one switch is down at ball start.

Download link at:
http://tsqmadness.com/slochar/ZIP/DRAGONFIST_VB14.ZIP

Zip file contains description, files for mpu200 2716x4 or 2732x2, or weebly board 512 socket.

http://tsqmadness.com/slochar/SOURCE/

Added source code for this here. ^^^

This one is interesting because I took ideas from other pinball OS's like lamp strings (williams/gottlieb), short skips (gottlieb), switch resets/trip (williams), probably others, and added that functionality to the game..... there's a lot of coding that took place finding the next lamp to light etc. in bonus strings, left ladder that just suited themselves to doing it some other way. (i.e. replacing specific routines with generic ones, saves TONS of space.)

I will say that after doing several of these games, and almost all of them requiring some kind of rom crunching, that the best thing I ever came up with is taking a 2 byte checklamp command like this: db $21 $15 (which translates to checklampvalue $15, check lamp $15) and crunching it into: db $95 which translates as the same thing, is the best bang for the change, saving usually > $100 bytes in all games since checking a bit value is the most common thing you're going to do on a game.

A lot of assembly optimization sites are geared towards cycle shaving in video games or something that needs very quick, very precise, timing (the CRT electron beam waits for no man....) - which a pinball machine just isn't. Sure, you can't bloat out the display interrupt with tons of stuff, but the timing is kind of loose for a pinball machine. It's really loafing a lot of the time.... think about how many times you're seen a machine just start to react slowly (that's not the 555 timer giving too many interrupts!). Doesn't really happen.

Have not heard that yet do you have any more information on game state when this happens?

Did it tilt in the countdown sequence? That would fit the counting down but not scoring scenario.

The direct link in the thread might cause you issues going from https: to http: on the http://tsqmadness.com/slochar/ZIP/ site, but just go directly there and click and you should be fine.

Any of the hobby rom burning sites (astill entertainment pinballrom.com will do it for instance) can burn you chips.

It's my fault for linking it as 'http:' instead of 'https' - browser complains that it's not safe as going from secure on pinside to insecure link there. You can override it at least on firefox. Not sure about chrome or edge or other browsers as I don't use those.

Do you not have background sound on? I was going to have you go into switch test when the error was happening, but I never added the 'show all closed switches' patch to this game (no room). You say a similar issue, was it doing the same thing last time or just not scoring correctly? What are your dip settings exactly (just list the dips 1-32 on/off) - I can't say every dip combination was tested 100% with multiplayer games, but certain combinations of switches were tested with 100s of games (multiplayer/single player.... usually when I test myself I play multiplayer games on any initial builds.) - 2 different machines with 2 different people (me and another) as well. (And me watching a stream of the other person, which is usually how I pick up bugs that others don't notice).

What mpu board are you using mpu200 or weebly?

ok, so your dips are basically the same as mine except the bg sound and standups, I don't think either of those would affect it, but I see something else in the outhole routine that would.

To duplicate the issue you posted on v14:

get the bonus relatively high like 37k. Something that the animation routine to add bonus would have to go through a lot of 1-2-3-4-5 etc.

hit something that will add more than one bonus step and drain the ball quickly. The bug should happen, I think. The outhole routine doesn't check the timer for the add bonus step - I guess stern didn't think this would be an issue, and it's not something I changed when I rewrote other parts. But it's changed now, I have NOT had time to test this in the machine so you will be the first.

Normally, the outhole looks at a couple of other timed routines, and waits for them to finish before proceeding. The add bonus animation wasn't one of those timers, it is now. That is all I changed and hopefully this is it. If you verify the bug in 14 with the above and get it consistently as an error, and doing the same verification in v15 no longer does it, I think that is the issue.

b02.15 is posted at:
http://tsqmadness.com/slochar/ZIP/
(the v14 is actually 'beta.14' - the alphas were 1.xx, the betas are 2.xx. Nothing every really comes out of 'beta' IMO as there's always other stuff to add and play around with. I need to get the extended switch test working.... I'm not sure why I dropped it. Probably some dumb reason)