Donkey Kong Forum
General Donkey Kong Discussion => General Donkey Kong Discussion => Topic started by: The Butcher on December 13, 2013, 06:43:10 am
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Just got my first dedicated DK cab last night, it looks and works great, so i thought
played through, got to the first pie stage and it had 5 fireballs instead of 3
why? is this a difficulty setting or an issue with a chip
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Hey Thebutcher!
On the first pie factory L=3, the level start with 3 fireballs spawning at the beginning. But throughout the level, another fireball will spawn, and a fifth one will spawn later. So at the end of every pie factory, there will always be a total of 5 fireballs. But on stage 3, the level starts with 3 fireballs, on stage 4, the level starts with 4 fireballs, and on stage 5+, the level starts always start with 5 fireballs!
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!
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I think there is a harder chip set that spits out 5 fireballs from the start at lv 3, not 100% sure on that though.
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Hey Matt,
Your signature lists a high score of 285,100 (Level 9-1) on the arcade platform.
Unless I'm mistaken, you're not represented on our forum scoreboard. Is there any supporting documentation for that game, or should we wait for a new personal best?
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yes there is a few modified ROM sets floating around from 80`s where the difficulty is crank up :o
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My new high score is actually 326,600 :)
Um, can i turn the difficulty back DOWN then some how? or do I need to replace a chip or a board or something
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You could probably just replace the roms, but I would be interested in a straight trade for a unmodded pcb, assuming your board is a tkg4 original 2 board set
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Sounds like either some corrupt code or else a distinctly different rom-set. You should at least document the fireball stuff with video for the forum in case it turns out to be a legit, harder version of the roms. I know the romset at Galloping Ghost (which Estel is familiar with) is super hard, but it seems like your roms only exhibit a particular aspect of how those GG roms function (the GG roms affect other boards too, not just the conveyor stage).
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Yeah, there was an aftermarket "harder" romset, but I don't remember if it was official or not. Ken has that version. He dumped the roms and made it available for some of us to try in mame awhile back. John Marks has it as well, and made a video of it:
http://www.twitch.tv/voodoo_chilly/c/373723 (http://www.twitch.tv/voodoo_chilly/c/373723)
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In the hard version that a few others have come across there is also a noticeable difference on the rivet stages. On Level 1 the fireballs behave like they do on Level 5, including faster overall speeds and also a much faster spawn rate.
For The Butcher: Is it possible in your game to grab the bottom prize on Level 1 as soon as the screen starts without triggering a spawn on the left side, or do you always get a left spawner if you try to get that prize?
If you could post a video of gameplay through the first 3 Levels on Youtube or on your Twitch channel and post a link here, I think a lot of folks would be interested to see the differences on all screen types and whether or not it matches up with other known "Hard" romsets out there.
Some others will probably be able to tell you more about what to look for on the hardware -- there may be one or two chips that will look noticeably different than the other, factory original ones. These would just have to be replaced, reburned, etc, but let's find out first if yours is like some of these other ones out there.
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OK guys, here's what I got. It is A LOT harder. Stage 1 pie factory has 5 fireballs. Stage 1 rivet has 3 that spawn before i can get the first rivet.
Here's a video of the first 3ish levels:
Dk test (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAeTe337KZM#)
And here's some pictures of the board:
(http://i304.photobucket.com/albums/nn199/phillyfan4life05/IMG_20131214_151520_973_zps57c5b42a.jpg) (http://s304.photobucket.com/user/phillyfan4life05/media/IMG_20131214_151520_973_zps57c5b42a.jpg.html)
(http://i304.photobucket.com/albums/nn199/phillyfan4life05/IMG_20131214_151549_918_zps1902f5a7.jpg) (http://s304.photobucket.com/user/phillyfan4life05/media/IMG_20131214_151549_918_zps1902f5a7.jpg.html)
I think this is really neat, is there a high value on it?
Not I thought i was getting though :(
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sorry about the bad picture, bad phone. will take better ones for a buyer/trader
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This is the modified chipset. A lot harder than the standard roms. The fireballs are moving extremely fast and they also spawn faster. I heard of these but never seen it in person.
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Oh yeah, this is the known hard romset that is also at Galloping Ghost. Maybe trial by fire will be a good way to learn the game! ;)
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what about value? is it worth more or less then the standard version? or no change?
will i be able to trade it you think?
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what about value? is it worth more or less then the standard version? or no change?
will i be able to trade it you think?
I think it would be worth more to a collector than a competitive player since that person would be at a disadvantage in terms of HS attempts using that romset (not to mention I'm assuming it's not alllowed). You might want to try klov.com, I'm sure it's a rarer boardset and people might want it in exchange for the normal romset.
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It is already up on KLOV
How much would it cost me for a standard DK board so I can just swap it out? Wouldn't mind keeping this if no one else wants to jump on it, it is pretty neat.
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It is already up on KLOV
How much would it cost me for a standard DK board so I can just swap it out? Wouldn't mind keeping this if no one else wants to jump on it, it is pretty neat.
$125-$150 probably.
I would just have the couple of original roms burnt for the 2 locations that need to be swapped. I really doubt going forward there will be any issues with using those freshly made roms in conjunction with the original boardset.
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A guy on KLOV is going to give me a set of the original ROMs in exchange for the opportunity to burn my ROMs for himself, so looks like I'm good to go.
If anyone else would like to burn them, let me know via PM.
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Very interesting video.
It appears to me that what happens here is that the game starts out on screen 1-1 on internal difficulty #1 as normal. At the first transition to a higher difficulty towards the end of 1-1, the game appears to change directly to internal difficulty #5. Then, it appears to stay on internal difficulty #5 for the rest of the game instead of resetting itself on each screen.
On 1-1, you can see that the fireballs start out moving very slowly. Then, towards the end of the screen, they change over to moving very rapidly, appearing to skip over the intermediate speeds. Also, the beginning of the screen begins with barrel release patterns that are consistent with internal difficulty #1, which results in Kong pausing after every barrel is released. At the end, it appears to have a barrel release pattern consistent with internal difficulty #5, which results in Kong pausing after every 5th barrel is released. On 2-1, barrel steerability appears to be dramatically improved, although that's always harder to quantify without a larger sample.
Interestingly, certain features remain unchanged such as the path of the first barrel on 2-1, the spring speeds on 2-2 and the prize values. However, these are all tied to the actual level number in the code and NOT to internal difficulty. The only thing that has me confused right now are the wild barrels, which SHOULD be tied to internal difficulty, but there appear to be Type 1 wild barrels on 2-1, which doesn't fit with my theory.
One fun experiment would be to speed run through 1-1 (do not grab ANY hammers), trying to get to the top before the first transition to a higher internal difficulty. Then, see if this affects what happens on 1-2 -- specifically with firefox spawn rate and the firefox speeds at the beginning of the screen. Something tells me that 1-2 would start out at internal difficulty #5 no matter what you do, but that would tell us something about how the hack was written. For example, is it just a running timer that continues even during intermissions, etc, or does it auto-set it to 5 at the end of the first screen, or could it potentially reset at the beginning of 1-2, potentially giving you around 30 seconds to play on the easy (normal) setting on 1-2?
Anyway, thanks for sharing. I find it interesting that this version appears to be rare, but not completely unique.
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Well according to Mark, some members here got the ROMs from Ken.
Anybody wanna post those?
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I plan on resolving my twitch issues tonight so I'll get a stream of the game play that doesn't look like a terrorist video up some time this week for anyone interested. I've been having trouble connecting to twitch at all lately via xsplit (keeps wanting me to do an update and whenever i hit yes, it fails, no matter what). It either can't connect at all, or it's so laggy it's worthless.
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Well according to Mark, some members here got the ROMs from Ken.
Anybody wanna post those?
Here they are. As far as having any value, they really dont. While originals seem to be pretty rare the rom images are available and burning them is quite cheap.
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Well i got 147,000 on the "fast" chip set last night, that was pretty fun :)