(Topic ID: 291153)

TAFG, code change to optionally disable Cousin Itt's hideout?

By Priam

2 years ago



Topic Stats

  • 4 posts
  • 3 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 11 months ago by KoP
  • Topic is favorited by 1 Pinsider

You

#1 2 years ago

I have a TAF machine. When I'm doing a home tournament I put in a regular TAF ROM to avoid the random and often unfair high awards that Cousin Itt will dole out, but otherwise I like to have the TAFG ROM in there for the extra crispy features.

I'm not a virtual pin-baller, but I have toyed with Visual Pinball and I very recently ran into PinMAME, I discovered it was installed as part of Visual Pinball.

I read that PinMAME has a debugger, and I got to thinking...

I have quite a bit of programming experience, and thought if I could run the ROM code through the emulator and debugger, I may be able to find the memory address of the lower limit of option "A.2 32 Items in Mansion" and change the settable range to 0 - 4 instead of 1 - 4. And if that worked, setting it to 0 may eliminate the Cousin Itt's Hideout feature.

But I have some questions:

Has anyone considered or tried this before? Did it work? Or did the game bug out?

Where can I find documentation on PinMAME especially the debugger?...I've only been able to find really old documentation and it doesn't seem applicable anymore.

Is this kosher? Can I make this kind of modification to my own ROM?

Thanks!

#2 2 years ago

http://www.maddes.net/ has info on wpc roms

It doesn't matter which flavor of pinmame debug you use, some of the newer versions allow multiple breakpoints which. All would have online help with F1 when you're in the debugger. You can also delve into the source code if you want to look at the debugger that way - I'd guess the assumption is that if you know assembly (6809 in this case) you can probably figure out from the f1 help how to use the debugger. Note that if you're thinking of "debugger" in terms of modern software development you're going to be extremely disappointed - if you're familiar with 'monitor' (as in the Apple II, or omnimon for the Atari 8 bit computers) that's more in line with what the pinmame debugger is.

From other games it would really depend on how they are loading that parameter you reference into each players' running status - if as you suspect it just takes the # of items parameter and copies it into a location that gets decremented everytime the game determines one of the cousin itt items should show up, it probably will work the way you describe.

As for legality it wouldn't be legal to distribute this at all. There's active ongoing officially sanctioned updates going on by @soren, and he could possibly add this to future roms. If it gets added, the chips are being sold for a very reasonable $20 or so from certain distributors. There's a thread running on pinside if you want to add this request to there although I don't know if he's taking suggestions from that thread at all. I think what most tournaments do is what you're doing they just put regular TAF roms in the gold games to eliminate this feature. (Cousin Itt's Hair Dryer! lol)

#3 2 years ago

Also just read the revision history at IPDB.org, does the Pugsley and Wednesday "trap door" also award pseudo-randomly? That should be eliminated as well to avoid randomness in tournament situations. That would be harder to find I'd think since it's not tagged in with an adjustment.

2 years later
#4 11 months ago
Quoted from Priam:

I have a TAF machine. When I'm doing a home tournament I put in a regular TAF ROM to avoid the random and often unfair high awards that Cousin Itt will dole out, but otherwise I like to have the TAFG ROM in there for the extra crispy features.

I have quite a bit of programming experience, and thought if I could run the ROM code through the emulator and debugger, I may be able to find the memory address of the lower limit of option "A.2 32 Items in Mansion" and change the settable range to 0 - 4 instead of 1 - 4. And if that worked, setting it to 0 may eliminate the Cousin Itt's Hideout feature.
But I have some questions:
Has anyone considered or tried this before? Did it work? Or did the game bug out?

Thanks!

Yes, I did this and some more.
PM me if you want more info.

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