bootleg arcade games on galaxian hardwaew

I guess you wouldn't have much to worry about if you made small changes carefully. MAME really only emulates the hardware accurately enough for the game to work. There is one danger of using MAME for testing. But if you see some little 32-byte or similar ROM files, it's probably the palette memory. I don't know if MAME would emulate that, or just have it hardcoded into the driver. If you find a manual for the game, there is a good chance it will have the full schematic for the hardware (this was common for early arcade games).Īs for changing the colors, I have no idea what Crazy Climber does, but I think it was fairly common to use a bipolar PROM such as an 82S123 to store the palette for the game, I guess because they have really fast access timing (the palette ROMs on my Millipede board definitely run hot, the board has turned brown beneath them!).

You can probably copy all the ROMs into one contiguous file. You'll look at where the individual ROMs were mapped into memory, then use a disassembler on them. Even if you don't know C yet, you could probably make sense of the memory map it uses and if you're lucky there will be some helpful comments in the source. If there is no other documentation on the hardware (I doubt there is), you could look at MAME's driver. Speaking of which, how would I hack a MAME ROM? I don't have a machine, as a matter of fact, I don't own a single arcade machine. I just thought it would be a fun challenge. I'm curious why you're interested in making it look more like Donkey Kong, since there is already Donkey Kong. Maybe Crazy Climber doesn't do the left/right check at all and treats all jumps as standing jumps?ĭo you own a Crazy Kong machine, or is it a game you grew up with or something?

This is the same reason you can get points for jumping next to Donkey Kong on the rivet stages (or any other hazard) if you hold the stick to the side while in the air. So if you let go of the stick after initiating a long jump, the barrel needs to be a very specific location to register the score. However, the game doesn't actually look if you're jumping sideways, it just checks if you're holding left or right, and assumes that you are. When jumping sideways the area it looks is widened as the hypothetical barrel could be anywhere on a much wider set of coordinates. Basically, when jumping straight up the game looks for a hazard right below you (like a barrel rolling beneath) and awards points if found. The cause (on the original DK) is actually pretty simple.

You know what, I might hack the game to fix it.

Yeah, it's also more glitchy then the original Donkey Kong, the original game didn't count the score for jumping over barrels sometimes, but Crazy Kong does that way more often.

Bootleg arcade games on galaxian hardwaew