I think the lane change option is going to end up being spinner/pop hits change the lit lanes. There's no switches available to add lane change anywhere else, and player controlled lane change would make the game dead nuts easy.

I also think maybe an occasional one shot spot on the center standup would be nice - maybe have a blinking lane travel around the playfield on your unlit lanes, and hitting the center drop spots that lane only.

I think multiball should be attainable in about 30-40% of games, not 100% of games. Even with the spot a letter in the current version of the software I have, it's still a bit easy to get it, but not 100%.... probably about 80%. I didn't really track it though.

Yes, the meteor code's free play option is just that... an option. All the original coin acceptance is still there as stock. (Minus a bug in the original software that sometimes puts a 1 in the hstd's 1's unit!).

It is 99 max credits though, so if you need a variant on that (i.e. lower) you'd have to contact me for a custom-custom rom image.

I don't plan on excising the coin handling code in anything if I can avoid it. I'll have to see how much space all the suggestions take up once I start coding the enhancements. Honestly assembly langugage and stern's bytecode pigs language are really efficient.... the things that take up space in these roms are the light shows, the sounds, and parts of the OS. The actual game code for each switch is a couple bytes. The entire coin handling is less than 100 bytes, no need to excise it unless I get really desperate. I'd take out the startup flash test first.

That would be nice to have new speech for the old stern games, and conveniently enough, although the speech rom u9 is full up, later stern speech games have u10 populated as well. I can poke around in there and see what I can find, hopefully it's like Gottlieb games and the speech phonemes are just kind of laid out in a row. The speech chip isn't a microprocessor as far as I know but I haven't really looked into that aspect too much. (I started to try and figure out how the sb-300 creates sounds, but I'm not far along into that at all other than identifying that it's programming the 6840 timer to run through a D/A convertor in the form of a resistor ladder to create sounds).

Update so far in making space in the roms, I've gained back about 90 bytes with no change in functionality, and added the lane change function to the slings, spinners, and pops. Waiting on the eeproms to arrive to stick it in the machine and make sure nothing blows up. I think the lane change will be interesting because as I was writing it, I realized you have to change what's currently lit in the blast off lane as well or it becomes meaningless.

I think I'll go with the bonus being built up to 19k instead of the other schemes like quicksilver because you're shooting all around the playfield anything on f2k to get the letters. I like the idea of the quick shot left lane to right spinner advancing the spinner as well, and I think stuff like a double spinner and bonus X advance for sweeping the right bank is a good idea too.

Of course, 2x, 3x or 4x (4x is usually easier to code than a 3x mode) during multiball was always in the cards. Identifying the progression of the multiball flags is proceeding but it's not intuitive so I want to make sure I have it 100% correct first.

It says 1.2.3.4.5, prepare mission, stand in test mode.

So, Stand? Either way, there's an entire 2k available to add stuff.

The real issue to solve remains that the game roms are just full. I'm not at the point yet where I'm going to excise things like startup test, etc. but I think at some point that's going to happen, or the rom will be weebly only (really rather not limit this if I can, though.)

A while ago I tried some bally/stern game as an 'instant on' type of thing and it was so weird that I put it back to stock. But we'll see!

Williams games I think were instant on because the Green OS rom is FULL. They did all sorts of tricks to even get it working the way it is and get it to fit in 4k.

I do have some of the speech data decoded, and can move words around.... there's also commands to change the timbre/tone/frequency of the voices, so that can add some variations.

The lane change code broke the game so I'll have to fix that, but the 19k bonus ladder adds up correctly and collects correctly.... a lot less sloppy than the effort from 8 or 9 years ago (and in the stock rom footprint).

Oh, I changed the way the 19k counts down too, in the "old" version with this it got very odd sounds, so what it's going to do is count down the 10k chunks first (so 15x10, 10k bonus lamp flashes while it's adding that in, then it extinguishes the 10k lamp and counts down the rest of the bonus normally.). Kind of like how Bally games did it for the super bonus. This way the sound effects won't get messed up.

Still debugging the lane change. The stern pigs command to branch to a subroutine that's in assembly is .... strange.... in its behavior. It works 100% flawlessly for some things, but some stuff it just breaks itself. In the case of the current subroutine it breaks the score queue timing, even when it's not running. I suspect that I might have something that doesn't relocate properly, although that would really only be the sound data at this point... unless there's a couple more hardcoded tricky things lurking in the code! Found another one yesterday, it was rather clever the way it was done to dummy up a new return address for a bunch of sound routines. Stern should have let Pfutz modify the original pigs code but I think that just got plugged in as a module. There's a lot of improvements (well, space saving) to be made there.

example-
Every Stern game has these 3 lines in it:

lda $0038 ;currently up player
ldb #$6F ;$280 (start of player save area)-$11
lda $0038 ;currently up player

So they load the accumulator from $38 twice..... in the same routine. You'd think someone would have audited it way back when.

There's also artifacts of probably debugging going on, odd NOP's inserted, a mix of assembler directives that mix 3 byte operands with 2 byte when a 2 byte would have sufficed. I remember assemblers back in the 80s on home computer and most were shit. The really "good" ones were hundreds of dollars. The worst was the Atari 800 Assembler-editor cartridge. Hand assembling was almost faster

Since the 6502 was designed as a 6800 killer, that's probably why.... Chuck Peddle worked at Motorola and left with his team because he wanted to design and sell $25 cpu's. Motorola at the time was getting $200 or so for the 6800. It actually interesting that Bally and Williams even went with the 6800 instead of the 6502, but I've no idea what the quantity discount pricing would have netted them.

Both processors certainly have their shortcomings, the 6803 addresses some of them, and the 6809 is the best of them all in the 8 bit arena. At this point I prefer the 68xx branch to the 6502 for most things, my complaints usually boil down to minutia about the index register limitations in both. Too bad you can't pop a 6809 into the 6800 socket and adapt code away

Testing will be needed at some point. I plan on releasing all the source code once it's in shape to do so and people can certainly add any rules I choose not to implement. Over the next couple days I plan on putting in the timed left inlane to right spinner combo, debugging the automatic lane change, and further deciphering the complex set of flags the game settings to virtually keep track of the balls and where they are. (Or, more accurately, where it thinks they are).

Of course also shaving a byte here and there to save more room for these changes.... I think an entire rewrite of the self-test area might be in order. It's the only major sub-section I haven't hit yet in the quest for bits.

AS02 with a custom macro file for the stern macros.

I picked up several 68xx era books from amazon but the one I use the most is Tocci/Laskowski Microprocessors and Microcomputers the 6800 Family. The instruction set reference section is a nice layout for when I need to reference individual instructions.

It helps that I knew 6502 from way back when although not to the extent as I do now for the 6800.

Update, finally got the alpha software into the machine, after a left turn putting a different board in there (board in it died in an odd way) -

Working:

Quick shot from outer inlanes to right spinner advances right spinner value. Unfortunately, since they are the 'same' switch, the B standups at the top will also advance the value if you happen to get to the right spinner quickly. To try and mitigate this, a hit to a pop bumper or the 3 bank drops will zero the timer that measures if you hit the right spinner or not. This most likely will make the quick shot not really doable during multiballl.

Bonus ladder advances to 19k, working.
Bonus ladder collects from 19k, working. The 10k element collects first, for as many multipliers as you have, then the 9k elements collect as well, to prevent a strange sound effect over a certain amount.

Self test 'burn in' mode eliminated ok. First press of the self test goes into lamp test. This saved about 30 bytes. If you need to use this, you can put the original rom back in to burn in if you want, or any other stern mpu200 rom.

Several of the new techniques used in the meteor and 9 ball projects are also working here, this is all backend stuff that's not user facing in anyway, but are adding up to saving about 100 bytes overall.

Not working:

Lane change does not work as expected. The letters rotate as they should, but are not 'kept track of' properly. Eventually, what happens is lit lanes will not turn off.
There is likely a separate register somewhere that controls this. I'm not so sure I like the idea of lane change, still.

I do like the idea of spotting a letter somewhere, maybe on a 'quick shot' from the inlanes to either the center spot target, or the lock shot. Maybe a sweep of the 3 bank would spot as well? Most people have agreed that a spot from just hitting the lock lane is too easy, but the element of quick shot would negate that ease.

Forgot to test: (Whoops!)

Free play. I don't see why it wouldn't work, but I do need to specifically test it. Next time I'm in the gameroom I'll try it. (It's the exact same routine as other free play stern games, like meteor I've been working on).

Dips for speech and background sound - to save room in the rom, the game will assume that speech is always enabled, as it background sound. I maybe revisit how these work in the future as it's not too much space (maybe 15 bytes) to leave them in.

Still to be written:

The speed spotting as detailed above

Knocker code for specials and replays, using the coin lockout circuit. (All other solenoid drives are used already in this game).

Multiball code involving no re-locking.

Multiball code for 2x/3x scoring.

Spinner counters, for fun

Ability to set the standup special to pay an extra ball independently of the outlane specials, so you can earn an extra ball. Will change criteria for lighting the special possibly to something other than what it is now (I think completing blast off the second time after starting multiball lights it now?)

Anything else that sounds fun and exciting from this thread so far. You can't get REALLY complex because there's simply no more resources available (mainly Ram) to do so. Everything so far tags onto something that's already existing in the code.

I have 138 bytes currently free at the top of u6 to do this. Doesn't seem like a lot but it should suffice. The largest code block will be the spotting of letters, the rest of the stuff to be added can utilize the already existing code for other things, and the stern pigs language can be very efficient in its space requirements. Not quite as efficient as Williams' Pinbol coding, but close. (For instance.... in pinbol, the command to spot the next letter in a string would be 2 bytes. In Pigs/assembly, it's going to be more than that although how much more remains to be seen. Spotting BLAST code already exists so just have to right "off" code.)

Wait, the spot blast when lit standup spots the entire word??!?! That's ridiculous. Shows how much I shoot that center target.... it's a drain monster on mine/tight shot.

So no reuse of that code that makes it kind of easier as the code will be the same for blast off spotting, instead of 2 separate ones.

Who thinks I should swipe the "hurry" speech out of Split second and add it to the quickshot options?? (just kidding, that drove me crazy on that game when I had it).

The blast standup has the advantage of already having text that indicates it spots something. The old way I did it in 2012 or so was just to spot a letter on every lock shot after you had 2 locked, but that ended up being a little too easy.

The relock issue is most of the reason why I'm even doing this (well, that and 2x/3x multiplier during multiball).

You could always set the 2 F's to be collected together although that just means you have to get at least one of them.... at least they were cognizant back then that collecting the F was difficult.

It's funny how the first solid state multiball games were so difficult to acheive multiball on, and they were short when you got it. I think Black Knight's default lock on at all times was a direct reaction to firepower's difficulty. But it was new so maybe it took a while to get the balance.

That's a good idea. I already have the time to shoot it VERY short, as in, you better it hit it first try. No trapping up and measuring your shot.... that cuts down the ability to nail it. I'd recommend everyone reset it each ball as well. The drop bank sweep being lit is a good idea too, I'll add that to a dip setting so people can use/not use it. Maybe even add a double advance if you sweep the right bank since it's so hard (independent of the quick shot). I'd love to be able to change the sound effect for the sweep to the big game 25k sound effect, but there's no room for that in the rom (sounds are pretty memory intensive.... that's probably why they reused the kapow sound so many times in f2k).

Not any more it doesn't

It's most like they realized it was going to be a grind to get multiball so they gave you a carrot afterwards.... to make up for the frustration of multiball being over with relocks.

You can, since the software is exactly the same. I plan on adding compiler time directives to the code so I can slice and dice the options anyway I like, I find that much easier than maintaining multiple codebases now. There wasn't that much space saved by removing the dip code for speech anyway, so it could probably go back in... still have about 70 bytes available. Chasing a couple bugs right now that are most likely caused by my sloppy programming (I'm sure we don't want the right outlane special lighting on the quickshot routine....)

Now tested and working:

Freeplay on/off tested working
Dips for background and speech being eliminated work (i.e. speech and background still there, might add these back in later if I don't need dips or about 10 bytes)

New features, outer inlanes light the quick shot on the right spinner and the center blast. Center blast standup spots the next letter in blast. Right spinner quickshot advances the right spinner. The quickshot timers are different for the right spinner (short) and the center standup (longer)

Fixed the right outlane special bug.

Changed the 10k bonus sound effect to be the regular bonus countdown sound, so that a full 19k*15x bonus collect will 'max' out the sound like the original 10k*15x would have.

There is a bug in the quickshot code, if you don't already have the B or the O collected, you have to collect it and then the quickshot will be available. Clearly an error in execution order on my part.

What do you want the skill shot to do? One lit lane at the top would blink, has to be a lit lane or it messes up the blast off sequence of letters. So once you got LAST there would be no skill shot available.

See the other reply regarding the double F setting.

That is not a software issue.

One thing a lot of people overlook when they adjust slings is if the blades are mangled, you're not going to get the proper adjustment. I replace the blades on all my slings with new, straight blades, and the activation one should just be touching the rubber. Perfect sensitivity and hit with no machine gunning.

I suppose it depends on how good you get at shooting the quickshot right spinner to advance it. Regardless, not removing the dip switch setting to reset/leave the right spinner value so that would be up to the owner which way they prefer.

2000 is still a lot for a single spin, especially one that's really accessible. If it was just the drop bank advancing it I'd say maybe, but I think people are going to practice and get good at the quickshot.

Right now as it stands as well the spot blast is lit for quite some time you could probably trap up and hit it.

So what should the award be? Points, spot a letter, advance the right spinner, spot a letter in OFF instead of blast?
It's surprising how easily a skill shot can be added - if it's more than 10 bytes I'll be surprised. I added one a long time ago to a game and it was 4 extra bytes....

That is already built into the software, but due to the speedy response needed for slings and pops, it resets really quickly. Adding anything onto it is going to change the feel of the sling. Once the code is done I plan on making the source code available so you can play with this if you want, but I don't think that re-writing software to handle what is essentially a hardware issue (and a marginal one, at that) is the goal here. Now, if this were a new game going out on location and I was trying to make it the most reliable possible, sure, why not, but presumably most flight2000's are in people's homes and they should know how to fix the switches properly.

Done, one letter L-A-S-T will be blinking at ball launch (not sure yet if I want to have ANOTHER skill shot after a ball lock.... need to play it a bit first).
If you hit the blinking lane, it will spot a letter in blast off, if that's already completed, it will spot a drop target 5-4-3-2-1, if the countdown has already been completed it will award 25k. Of course, it will also award the blinking lamp if it hadn't been lit previously.

Not sure yet how I feel about the partial step back on the spinner - it really depends on if I can get dialed in on the quickshot to advance it. (I have a fatter post/rubber than normal protecting that shot on mine so it's not a gimmee). I think that might be confusing to some if you advance the spinner to 4.5k and it doesn't stay there OR reset to zero.

There are some new bugs as I've progressed with testing, not a bug necessarily, but the blinking lamp on the top lane blinks WAY too fast (about twice as fast as the drop that's blinking) so I'm going to change the blink rate for that lamp. Secondly, and obviously more serious, is that the multiball start no longer works. I'm going to temporarily blow back an older version of the code into the game to try and determine when and what I did to break this.

Since I now archive EVERY build of the game I can compare at least and not have to re-create source code that's been supplanted/updated, this might be easier, but there's been probably about 100 test builds of the software so far so I hope this is just some boneheaded mistake instead of something endemically wrong with the code shifting/reassembly. I did notice as well that spot blast still lights at the start of the non-starting multiball, and I specifically turn that off (since its now part of the quickshot routines).

I haven't, I have to modify the code first that checks for max credits to repurpose the coin lockout - believe it or not, they don't check the max credits by comparing one value (the max) to the current credits.... they look at the status of the coin lockout instead! Probably because it's easier to do that in the pigs code vs. straight assembly. IIRC in later games that eliminated the coin lockout entirely, they still use it as if it were there the same way.

Codebase is starting to get full again, the skill shot was a wee bit more than the 10 bytes I was hoping for, even if it was just canned at one award. Still 67 bytes available though.

Update, so, in my zeal to cut and paste things, I put a label in the wrong spot, so the 'binc' command was never actually incrementing B. It's only used ONCE in flight 2000, and it happened to be at the multiball start. But now, there's another issue, the left spinner once multiball starts, scores 500 per letter, so the multiball start you get a TON of 500 points just being added. (This is the routine that the binc is in....) So there must be a flaw in my logic.... I added a slight delay loop to the left spinner and if you start multiball without hitting the spinner (obvi bypassing it in test with the glass off), works fine. The spinner will spin, but never scores, and eventually crashes.

At least I've got a starting point to fix this.

Found a couple more bugs in the way the skill shot is handled, that I'll have to nail down. Roughed in a bit of code to allow the knocker to be installed although that's not completed yet.

Glad I got the eeproms so I don't have to periodically load up 40 into my eraser like I used to