Paku Paku -- 1.6 released 9 November 2011

[jmetal88]

Played it a little bit more - thought you might also like to know that the game now slows down when the music speeds up. Seems weird, but still playable.

EDIT: Nevermind, it's a side effect of having removed my memory upgrade. The older versions run the same way, the way my system is now.

[Vorticon]

OK here's what I have found with the latest version:

1- I still have issues with joystick down despite proper calibration. The joystick works fine with other games. Anybody else has experienced that issue?
2- The blinking issue is completely resolved.
3- There is a noticeable slowdown after about 120000 points. At around 140000, the game becomes positively sluggish.
4- The power pellets stop working after about 130000, thus increasing the game difficulty exponentially. Is this planned or is it a bug?

Nonetheless, it's still very much fun

[deathshadow60]

Ok, I made the assumption all voices were off when you start the sound -- apparently the Jr. starts out with the voices at a random low frequency setting.

http://www.cutcodedown.com/retroGames/a ... KU1_34.RAR

That SHOULD fix the buzzing on startup -- no guarantees though. If not, I'll set it up on tandy/jr to initialize, kill itself, then initialize again.

Odd my t1k doesn't do that, but again the Jr is kind-of an odd duck.

[deathshadow60]

1- I still have issues with joystick down despite proper calibration. The joystick works fine with other games. Anybody else has experienced that issue?

Unable to recreate that here, could be a quirk in how the Jr. handles the joystick -- it's using the same code for left/right as it is up/down, so that shouldn't be it... maybe when I reset the capacitor trip with joystick(1) being called second it's not fully discharging the capacitor? I'll look at the code and the Jr. tech manual and see if they want anything done differently.

3- There is a noticeable slowdown after about 120000 points. At around 140000, the game becomes positively sluggish.
4- The power pellets stop working after about 130000, thus increasing the game difficulty exponentially. Is this planned or is it a bug?

Power pellets stop working at level 17 (the first level where the 'prize' is a key)... works for level 18, then are gone for the rest of the game -- this corresponds to how the real Pac man works.

The game also drops back to level 2's speed at level 21 onward... though I don't think that's the slowdown you're reporting. I'm not seeing that on the T1K in slow mode, so not sure what's going on with that. Could just be the extra overhead of having to process the carry flag/DX since the number is a dword.

[Vorticon]

Unable to recreate that here, could be a quirk in how the Jr. handles the joystick -- it's using the same code for left/right as it is up/down, so that shouldn't be it... maybe when I reset the capacitor trip with joystick(1) being called second it's not fully discharging the capacitor? I'll look at the code and the Jr. tech manual and see if they want anything done differently.

That could be. I kind of got the hang of using the arrow keys, but a joystick will make play more enjoyable.

The game also drops back to level 2's speed at level 21 onward... though I don't think that's the slowdown you're reporting. I'm not seeing that on the T1K in slow mode, so not sure what's going on with that. Could just be the extra overhead of having to process the carry flag/DX since the number is a dword.

I did not know that about Pac Man as I never made it beyond the first few levels. For some odd reason I was able to figure out the monster patterns and the timing of the prizes' appearance in Paku, so my mileage increased exponentially If it wasn't for the non-functional power pellets later in the game, I could have gone on for ever... As for the slow down, I think it does match level 2 now that I think about it. It just feels much slower after playing at high speed for many screens. Now does the screen get corrupted like the real thing at the highest levels? (This would give me an incentive to try harder ).

[deathshadow60]

Now does the screen get corrupted like the real thing at the highest levels? (This would give me an incentive to try harder ).

I don't know, I didn't test for it or plan for it -- though unlike pac-man for this to screw up you'd have to reach level 65536... since I used a word instead of a byte as the level counter.

[deathshadow60]

New release, version 1.4 should resolve the joystick issue on the Jr. I've basically just split up where the joystick is called to be around the game logic instead of next to each-other, adding enough delay for the interface to 'stabilize' between reads. This also moves one of the reads to a spot where the cpu was sitting there with it's thumb up it's backside doing nothing, so the game should run MUCH smoother on systems like the Jr.

[Vorticon]

OK I don't know what happened with this release but it's unfortunately broken. The graphics are mega enlarged and overlapping. Also there is a buzzing sound when you first start Paku, which you had fixed in the previous release...

[deathshadow60]

There are zero changes to the graphics subsystem between the last alpha executables and this version that would result in that... no clue.

The paku.exe from this archive worked for you, correct?
http://www.cutcodedown.com/retroGames/a ... KU1_34.RAR

If so then there's something REALLY wrong as they use IDENTICAL mode setting routines.

Oops, there was a bug in the build tree that was giving you the 1.32 beta executable. Try redownloading the archive now.

What I get for letting my server auto-build the rar files.

[Vorticon]

Nope. No change...