It would likely require the data to be symmetrical between the banks, as well - u9 would stay the same but u10 could switch in and out externally.

Since the speech rom isn't full yet the main roms are, it might be a moot point anyway.

I'll pad the v3 out and get it integrated (somehow!)

Good news: New routine added, instead of 3 bytes to do a jump, added a 2 byte version - since most of the tests of the "if equal, branch <some small # of bytes forward>" are the majority of them, each of the new routines saves a byte. So, now we're at 87 bytes free between the 2 roms, before adding any of the v3 new speech in yet.

Bad news: It broke something (of course!) - I'm sure it's going to be a typo on my part or a cut-n-paste error. Now, the first ball locked says and reports ball 2 locked, and the second and subsequent balls keep saying ball one locked. Whoops.

More Good news: I've started to consolidate even more things in the self-test modes to save more space. I really don't know how much more the code crunch is going to be able to take to make more room, but the last couple of times I was sure it was full and unable to be crunched down, I got almost 200 bytes back. (Along with a lot of bugs to be squashed....)

Yep, over-zealous cut-n-paste caused me to test a flag as clear instead of as set..... doh.....

Back to regularly scheduled testing....

More good news, bad news. Either I really broke something somewhere (like last time!) or there's some serious issue with the way the machine handles the balls going into the walker.

The good news is, after some more optimizations, I've now got **566** bytes free.

Of course, the bad news is, that's because I've ripped out the entire ball walker code including multiball launch, the maze kickbig code, and the count-the-balls code. I need to obviously replace it

Before I ripped it out I was up to 145 bytes or so, so that's good.

It looks like from the code I removed which I have printed out and highlighted up that this being the first stern multiball game, management was (probably rightly) concerned about balls being lost, hung up, or hitting each other in the maze, so there's a LOT of extra flags and code with timing, re-entering the code if a ball doesn't eject in a certain time, very primitive switch error correction. All in the interests of, what happens if the switches aren't registering? (Most people just fix the switches!) I understand where they were coming from and I'll re-implement some of this.

The ball counting/handling code is especially toothsome at well over 150 bytes.... I've replaced this with about 15 bytes (so far) since it's just a mirror of the trough switches and the virtual positions in the walker. I'm sure once I've got the rest of the routines done I'll see why the original was so long and convoluted, and I'm looking at a steep debugging phase.

This has really been my biggest dread in ripping this game apart in the first place, but if I can pull it off much more efficiently, all that extra speech will be able to be put in the game, and I should have space to try and pull a sound effect or 2 from other games.

It will probably go into the machine over the next weekend as I'm about 15% done with just walker/kicker area.

Small update because it's funny:

Testing the code you start the game, and if the ball didn't launch from the trough, it would add a credit every 10 seconds or so. Also I noticed that the background sound would play at bootup.

The law of unintended consequences in software bit me here.... I was convinced there was a bug in the new audit handling code I'd re-written to save space, but the bug was still there after removing that code. Took a while to trace back, but it was from saving/loading the ball status byte that I'd added to the save/load player data routines (the stock code uses $208/$209 to save ball status, at the expense of not being able to use the existing PIGS commands to query values - which contributes to code bloat. I repurposed the maze flags to do this instead, but doing this means that the status is updated with each player coming in and wouldn't be current. I moved this code to outside of that series of subroutines but will probably just change the status code to not copy over it instead. (So it's the same for all players with no manual updates needed.)

For a first pass into the game this isn't too bad, I only blew one fuse

The other fun bug which was totally my fault is that the ball walker code worked but it ended the ball early. (I did this because some wiseacre would probably tilt as the ball enters, which normally hangs up the game if you time it right).

So, wrong state of a flag for the ball ending early, but there definitely needs to be some smoothing code for the switches in there because they react too fast (i.e. double reaction when it should be).

I'm thinking of adding an option for a more difficult multiball start since countdowns should always start at 10 and run down to 1..... so you have to complete the 5 bank twice to enable multiball start. Maybe only for the second multiball..... or maybe do it once 10-9-8-7-6 to enable multiball, but if you wait and do it again 5-4-3-2-1, 2x will be active at the beginning of multiball instead of having to shoot the ball back into the walker.

Here's all the available words by game that could be put into f2k. There is also a talking calculator rom and I think some other ones that could be sourced from other products if needed. And of course pure_penalty is working on creating new words from scratch as well, so taking suggestions on words/phrases that could be applied to the game.

FLIGHT 2000
one, two, three, four, five, prepare, mission, stand, by, all, systems, go, first, stage, second, blast, off, player, commence, countdown

FREEFALL
one, two, three, four, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, hundred, found, altitude, diver, divers, ready, free, fall, geronimo, all, jump, jumper, player, take, off, go, standby, beat, high, you, win, ?bade?, game, sky

LIGHTNING
thor, odin, freyr, earth, fairnadfak?, skold, valkyrie, warrior, journey, capture, begin, over, out, time, left, seconds, valhalla, godess, angered, pleased, welcome, unleashed, the, hammer, of, twenty, ten, thirty, one, two, three, four, five, returns, continue

SPLIT SECOND
S, L, P, I, T, E, C, O, N, D, go, all, ball, score, great, shot, second, good, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, shoot, again, high, gate/date?, start, extra, time, over, ladies, gentlemen, excellent, perfect, fair, split, fold, hurry, mystery

CATACOMB
prisoner, escaping, from, catacombs, one, two, three, four, captured, use, right, flipper, flip, action, advance, lights, with, left, get, them, you, win, an, extra, ball, a, free, adventure, once, back, beat, high, tilt, returned, shoot, fast, or, lose, shots

BERZERK
help, kill, attack, charge, got, shoot, get, is, alert, detected, the, in, it, there, where, humanoid, coins, pocket, intruder, no, escape, destroy, must, not, chicken, fight, like, a, robot

ORBITOR 1
shot, you, score, take?, I, me/the?, player, game, pin, stern, matched, it/get?, bonus, coin, tilt, wow, play, ball, beat, shoot, win, lose, try, R, is/S, set/get?, go, got, thank, M, please, aim, times, nice, high, good, free, great, next, extra, super, again, two, over, B/Bay?, if?, up, hello, for, very, much, out/ouch?, the, down, drop, target, lit, flashing, bye, in?, it?

You wouldn't have to actually clear the locks out there is no/little advantage to launching a ball via the maze vs. shooting it from the plunger.... you're nudging to get the lit lanes either way. It's already set to not pay the 10k maze kicker if the current player up didn't earn those locks.

There would be no point to keeping your qualified locks if you have to physically put the ball back into them, you're getting credit for the lock anyway when you shoot it. (although it would affect the 5-4-3-2-1 countdown bonus 10k/20k/30k/40k.)

It wouldn't be difficult to add the lock no-carryover feature except for finding a free dip switch to enable/disable it. There's already no lock stealing in the game stock, since each player has to physically put a ball up into the top of the walker to get credit for a lock - it's just what happens after that that might make a difference. There IS a setting game to game for that (also stock), where each player will get credit for whatever was locked the last game, but most people have that one turned off. I happen to have it on right now for testing, but my normal mode is to have it off.

It's not as easy to replay multiball once you play it as stock, because the spot blast lamp does NOT light after the multiball any longer - it's only lit as part of the quickshot. And it only spots ONE letter, not the entire word like stock.

I'm still debugging the new walker routines, it's a real bear (see the screen shot for the decision tree transcribed from my sloppy note paper to the code) - I can see why the original code was really convoluted as well, although I think there was some bloat involved there.

walker decision tree.png

The removing the lock memory ball-to-ball is no problem, there actually code stock to do this - any time a player starts multiball, as part of MB start the game clears any and all locks from the other players. The only difference at ball end if that I'd add a routine to check a dip switch, and if it's set, run that subroutine, then move onto the next player/ball. I suppose the argument could be made that after playing multiball, and relocking balls, other player's status should be returned - the lock removal code should be changed to remove locks that are missing in the walker from other players' at ball's END instead of while the multiball is starting, otherwise a player that starts MB and re-locks 2 balls HAS disadvantaged other players who had 2 locks collected as well, because as far as the game knows, they never had them. This I will note and look into changed once I have the walker/multiball code debugged.

Yes, I get where you are going with the locks and attempting to level the playing field for all players; however, it is impossible for a player in multiball to end their ball with balls physically still in the lock with the new software. Balls shot to the walker in multiball will start 2x/3x playfield scoring for a short time, walk through the walker and get ejected from the maze (these DO score the 10k each for the walker shot, and each of the left/right kickouts, because it's the same for all players)

There are tons of early solid state games where players get disadvantaged by what other players do with respect to physical ball locks, and it doesn't stop tournaments from using them. One of the things I'm going to change on Black Hole when I get around to it is to figure out how to get rid of the need to eject the ball in the left capture lane when you lose a ball without collecting it - I always thought all those gottlieb system 80s that did that were goofy, ball on playfield during a valid, non-tilted ball to me means you should be able to flip at it.

The only advantage a player gets with stock software and someone else loading up 2 balls in the walker is the 10k maze eject "bonus" vs. plunging, and that was eliminated a long time ago (the current downloadable version 35 has this for instance).

Extensive playtesting is starting with the walker code replacement. It's not 100% (I *really* wish there were a way to get switches in the lock mech!) yet so won't be posting the update just yet - and there's a couple of bugs to be worked out (of course!) - currently there's about 140 bytes free for the additions of more speech/maybe some other games' sound effects grafted in (this will not be as easy as the commands are different for most games, and flight2000's appears to be unique as the original programmer needed to save space and this is where he did it).

There's definitely some timing things to tweak. I was tilting creatively as well during various walker states to ensure that the game recovered nicely. Need to add the start game switch logic still - could use the speech 'standby' to indicate that the game is acknowledging you hit the button while balls are walking out of the maze.

I also doubled checked that the clear the lock switch 24 still works at game start; just need to add the clearing of it to ball end in the edge case Da_Vagrant suggested, where relocked balls after a player's multiball would transfer back to players that earned them on their balls, and to add a dip switch somewhere to enable clearing all locks all balls for the masochistic level of multiball.

Added speech, both from pure_penalty and myself
tilt, coin, detected, in pocket, X, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, ball, skill, extra, lit, shoot, is, wow, again, shot, escape, earth

I'm working on adding the new word "orbit" (as in "escape earth orbit") but the B isn't coming through very well. There's still about 200 bytes free in the speech rom. I was able to consolidate some of the data from the original modified rom as it's the same data to save space.

I don't want to overload the talking though, just because it's there. For instance, it's tempting to have every ball start with "shoot skill shot" - but that will get annoying quickly.

Will likely add something like "you beat high score" and still want to merge the L into the word "fight" from berzerk to make "flight", and work the word thousand in there (from a calculator rom).

Orbitor 1 has "super"
Catacomb has "fast"

So yes, this could happen. I've already added in when you have the new dip 23 to pay an extra ball 'extra ball lit' (I wish the PF said WOW there instead of special).

Now with the calculator roms it's conceivable that the multipliers could get a call out too, like 13x, 15x etc. although that's kind of tedious. Maybe 'advance X'. There's actually lots of speech from other things that would 'make sense' until there's overload on the talking.

Nothing is more annoying that Split Seconds' hurry.... hurry.... hurry.... ugh. I kind of wish I had the game back so I could fix everything that's wrong with it, but the gameplay was just Meh to me.

Maybe I'll acknowledge a made skill shot with Got skill shot?

Using the spin counter after it stops maybe rate the spins, "great spins" or something like that. Adding the S onto the front and back of "pin" from Orbitor should be doable.

Removed speech escape, earth (each took up a LOT of space, for not much results)

Added Danger, power, bonus, score.

Going to add to the main game tilt warnings (that's what the 'danger' call out is for).
Power will go with the 2x/3x scoring - "2x POWER", "3x POWER"

"bonus" will be for hitting the quickshot standup, "nice" bonus, or "super" bonus, etc. - or maybe "super bonus" if you drain with 19k bonus or something like that.

I might add skill shot too but not sure where that should end up - there's already a lot of speech at game start. It would be "player 1 prepare for mission shoot skill shot"

Maybe on a made skill shot "nice skill shot".

Thanks to Quench for sending me a bunch of other roms that use the same speech chips to cull words from. Eventually I'll post a separate thread with all that information for people to play with.

I do think it would be possible to modify the speech board to bank select, if one of the speech roms he sent is any indication it's much larger and the data layout looks like it's already bank selecting. If that can work, then other mpu200 games that have full speech roms can be modified as well for more speech.

No, I'm now rolling my own. PM me your email and I can send you the disassemblies of the sound roms Quench sent me (and the current version). I used a clever way to find duplicate sound data (ok, it was multi-line 'find' haha) and eliminate it.

I still have some unknown rom and a calculator rom to go... and back to fixing bugs in the code. (And adding the sound callouts, which hopefully I'll have space to use....)

That's a good idea and hopefully can happen. I don't doubt that there's some data they had in there that was just canned and copied from other roms. What I did was search for the next 'reference' in the word recipes to see if it was referenced or not - if it wasn't, I assumed that $10 wide block was part of the previous blocks' data and I copied it all over.

Once you see the current version you'll see what I did in reference to that (along with commented out stuff for words I ended up removing, until/unless I can get some kind of bank selection going on.... would have to be external since I don't think there's anyway to have the chip do it, although the digitalker rom appears to reference stuff outside.)

The timing and data arrangement would be tricky for sure. I might just stick with what's going on now and maybe sacrifice some things (the danger callout while nice for a tilt warning, is its own unique set of data that doesn't match anything else, and so takes up a LOT of space.)

Ditto with the full 10-1 countdown - that might not be needed. I'll have to play the game with the rule in place to see how it plays. Currently, I'm going to implement it as 10-6 lets you start multiball if you want, but if you then drop the 5-4-3-2-1 the game will give you either 2x or 3x scoring right off the bat (for the normal timed countdown period)

Changed dips 15/16 formerly HSTD credit, dip 16 acts in conjunction with dip 6 (replays).
Dip 6 off=no replays for HSTD
Dip 6 on, dip 16 now selects # of replays for HSTD, on=3, off=1 (no longer able to select 2)

Dip 15 is now tilt warnings per ball, set off=no tilt warnings, any tilt activation=instant tilt (factory behavior)
Dip 15 on=3 tilt warnings per ball, any tilt activation="DANGER" callout. There is a short timeout between tilt activations so that the bob will settle slightly.

Somehow with yet more rewriting of some routines, there is now 123 bytes free in the lowrom area, 2 bytes free in the upper rom area, and 48 bytes free in the now-doubled speech rom.

Also added but needs testing the non-removal of ball locks from subsequent players after one player gets multiball, but then also relocks one or 2 balls, as suggested by @da_vagrant. (This change actually saved some valueable romspace - the game always checks at ball start if the ball locks are still valid, so it's not needed to specifically clear them. This seems like this whole routine was a deliberate decision on the original programmer to bone over players when one player gets multiball and the other loses their locks).

In the process of adding the "full" countdown function, 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 with voice call outs for either the second multiball, a more difficult setting, and/or the ability to have 2x available at multiball start instead of on a relock type situation. With 125 main rom bytes free this should be possible. Each 'number' callout is 4 bytes now (instead of 6) so adding 10-6 is 20 more bytes, then of course the support code to use it. I've found even more free flags in the game that were never used individually, oddly. (I'm kind of surprised at this, but not really because Pfutz uses Flags in very strange ways in all of his games.... in pinbot he uses them to track the vortex multiplier values and energy value, despite having a slew of free locations elsewhere to do so... probably for convenience)

I still need to tweak the multiball starting special effects show, it just seems "off" to me - the blast off seems to count down less (score indicates otherwise) and the timing needs tweaking.

Also, at first boot, if there are balls in the walker, the game will prevent starting until they end up in the trough. If you press the credit button during the ball return time but before they are all in the trough, the game will say "BALL" to indicate it is waiting (I guess I could use "STANDBY" instead there instead). This is only for the first game after bootup, if you want to break the game at other times when the balls are in flux you can still do that.... not sure what advantage that would/could give.

I'm at a decision tree.... for all the extra options, I'm out of dips to repurpose.

I should think about dipping into the coin ratios (I know I said I wouldn't do that unless needed.... but unless I 'can' some options to values that people might not like, I have to do something.)

And I have some more debugging to do! The 10-6 count worked but then it counted down the 5-1 immediately without resetting the drop bank and starting you back at 5.... oops. I'm sure that's a dumb error (like most of them end up being....)

Oh, and the "unused" flags I thought I'd found? Nope, they're used for something.... but what, I do not know yet. Regardless, I found a free flag to use for the 10 countdown routine (the former $3a flag that's for the stock replay knocker that was never installed).

Most of the complaints in the past about the rom mods did center around the removal of location friendly options. People actually put modded games out in their barcades or locations especially if there a tournament element involved.

I'll try to come up with something if I cut 1000 bytes out of the code I'm sure I can figure out a couple options.

Small update, tweaked some speech, the full 10-1 countdown is working, need to keep testing the changed multiball carryover stuff. Extensive playtesting is commencing and once it's solid-ish this will go onto the site for download.

Found out what the original code was doing with the unused flags - they were all for choreography of the multiball start in the ball walker. Not needed with the new ball walker code.

Been playing with the harder setting on the full countdown 10-1 - it's really not that much harder than the original. Maybe just implement it in the 2nd multiball, or have an option to do so. I can possibly open up 4 NVram locations to add some options there instead of on the dips. (For tilt warnings for instance, that way you can set how many you want instead of the canned 2). I plan on adding an nvram clear function once all is said and done for convenience purposes.

A made skill shot now says 'skill shot' with the same sound effect I had been using.
Tilt warnings if set will call out 'danger' (1st), 'danger danger' (2nd) and 'tilt' (3rd).
Extra ball on standup if set will call out 'extra ball lit' and 'extra ball' when collected.
Shoot Again will call out 'shoot again'.
Quickshot made on standup will call out 'good shot'. If quickshot standup won't spot a letter because you've got them all, it will give you an extra bonus multiplier.
2x/3x scoring during multiball calls out '2x power' and '3x power'. When decayed to 1x, just says '1x'
Game over now says 'mission over'.
Ball waiting at bootup says 'standby ball' while ball(s) returning to outhole.
Zero credits at game over will trigger the 'coin detected in pocket' speech. This unfortunately is a top candidate to be cut. It is however the main reason I wanted to fool with the speech roms anyway, for a joke on a friend because I won $20 from him in the 80s when he bet me that Gorf said this, not Berzerk.

Current inventory of speech on the rom:
one, two, three, four, five, prepare, mission, stand, by, all, systems, go, first, stage, second, blast, off, player, commence, count, down, tilt, coin, detected, in, pocket, X, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, ball, skill, extra, lit, shoot, is, ready, again, shot, score, bonus, power, over, danger.

Not implemented yet from the speech rom:
Bonus - need a good place to put this.

Not in the speech rom but can be implemented but at the expense of something else:
flight, wow, escape, earth, enabled, (working on: orbit)

OK, more good news/bad news.

Good news, is that instead of fooling around with dip switches for some options, since I got 4 bytes back in the nvram section, I added the ability and adjustments 19, 20, and 21. These will be set to:

19 Tilt warnings, range 0-3. 0 is factory, instant tilt, no warnings. 1=1 warning, next is tilt, 2=2 warnings next is tilt, 3=3 warnings, next is tilt. Recommended setting is 2. Danger, dangerdanger, tilt. If you set to 1 warning, you will get dangerdanger on first warning, then tilt.

20 Credits for beating HSTD, range 0-3. Set to 0 to not payout any credit for hstd surpassion, etc. 3 was factory.

21 Maximum credits (just for the guys on locations!) - range 00-99. If you set it to 00 that's your own fault! It will operate as freeplay without adjusting dip 19 in this mode. If you just want freeplay without winning credits, use this new setting, otherwise if you want to rack credits up, set the max here and for free play, put dip 19 on.

What's the bad news? I need to get $32 bytes free to add the option settings this way. It was an ugly-ish hack to get this in there since Stern games were never intended to be able to set single byte adjustments. Now, I do have some free rom space in the lower area now, but this will use up all of it. So there would be no more wiggle room to get bugs fixed or anything else going on.

But, progress! Still playtesting.

Also, since these are new adjustments, first install of the rom should have you go through and at least zero out 19, 20, 21.... otherwise if there happened to be say $ff set in the hstd payout location, yup, it will payout 255 credits and knock for each one. Holy coil meltdown.

I've been updating the info file for the game as I go along it won't show all the incremental changes, that was in the codebase but I split that off as well. Now it's just bugs in each revision in that file and new features. I have been archiving every build though, 1 test burn=1 archived source code file, so I don't go way off the rails like I sometimes do with this stuff.

There's currently zero bytes free in low rom and 5 free in upper rom. The changes along the way really ate up a lot more codespace than I was anticipating, so time to come up with another 100-byte saving breakthrough!

No, because it's already in there

If by attract mode with speech you mean that the speech will entice a player to play every so often (I think it's every 6 or 12 minutes I forget what I timed it out as). Dip 17 was repurposed to do this, (speech is always assumed on in the game) - on=attract mode speech, off=no

If you mean a "tutorial" like Bally Atlantis and Centaur have, there's no room in the code to add something like that. In fact, changing the attract mode at this point would be fraught with disaster as it's been cut down without changing it but it's a precarious set of code.

Added adjustment 22, multiball difficulty, range 00-03

00=as stock, whatever 5-4-3-2-1 progress you have when you get 2 balls locked/blast off spelled stays.

01=5-4-3-2-1 resets

02=5-4-3-2-1 resets, 1st multiball for player needs 5-4-3-2-1 countdown for all systems go, subsequent multiballs require full 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 instead.

03=5-4-3-2-1 resets, all multiballs need full 10-1 countdown (uber difficult!)

Rearranged some stuff to make some space again so it's fitting. Still pretty close to the edge here. Eliminated a routine that checks for hstd, pays the credits, then checks the SAME exact data again to store the hstd. I originally though this was because they were paying all hstd credits out as they should, but if player 1 beats HSTD, player 2 does as well, but not by as much as player 1, only ONE person would get the hstd credits. If player 2's score had been higher, BOTH players would get it. This is kind of a ripoff in the original code! Bally handles this correctly IIRC, checking all 4 players first, paying out the credits, then storing the HSTD in a separate run through. I'll try and add this in, but it's kind of an edge case here.

Fixed the HSTD code

Have about 16 bytes free for any other bugs!

Yeah, the full set of options is hard to keep track of and the attract one is somewhere on page 3 of this thread (page 4? page 2? dunno). The readme in the eventually posted next beta version will be completely up to date.

The full difficulty really hurts when you go 10-1 and miss getting the start.... or worse, last ball, outlane spots the 1..... ugh..... hit start again....