11 replies to this topic

[Dauber]

Just wondering...are there any VCS emulators for Winblows or Amiga that simulate "frying"???

Also...any Amiga users having any luck with the VCS emulators available? I have an '060 CPU and the things are so bloody slow. Heck, even the short time I had a PowerPC they were just as slow, although they're supposed to all be normal speed....

[Nukey Shay]

Dunno (?)
Frying a game causes the program counter to jump a few bytes past where code actually begins, I think Couldn't you use PC Atari (PCAE) to "NOP" over a few instructions in the program code (using the value $EA)? Or is that something different?

I just hack the program code when I wanna cheat

[Pitfall Harry]

To simulate frying on the Z26 emu, I tried jiggling the PC power switch back and forth. But all I could get it to do was reboot my computer.


Ben

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Well, I guess "frying" could be easily implemented in an emulator (e.g just start at a random address).

But the problems is, that AFAIK nobody knows exactly how frying works.

[Gregory DG]

Pitfall Harry said:

To simulate frying on the Z26 emu, I tried jiggling the PC power switch back and forth.  But all I could get it to do was reboot my computer.
Ben

LOL!

[Vic George 2K3]

I just know that the "double firing" trick on 2600 Space Invaders DOESN'T require any "frying". Interestingly, the same simple trick of holding down the Reset button or switch when you turn on your game system and then releasing it when the game screen appears also works on the Z26 emulator...the only thing now is to hold down the key used for the Reset button between the time you select the game (assuming you're using a front-end program with your Z26) and the time the game screen actually appears onscreen, and then release it afterward.

[slapdash]

Thomas Jentzsch said:

Well, I guess "frying" could be easily implemented in an emulator (e.g just start at a random address).  

But the problems is, that AFAIK nobody knows exactly how frying works.

Actually, perhaps frying is when it starts at the normal address, but with random garbage in the memory that needs to be initialized (for some games)????

[Nukey Shay]

Not really, I don't think...since the program is unalterable Rom. I think it just jumps ahead (which means that some things aren't initialized like they are supposed to, or the game crashes)

[Thomas Jentzsch]

slapdash said:

Actually, perhaps frying is when it starts at the normal address, but with random garbage in the memory that needs to be initialized (for some games)????

When a game starts at its normal address, the very first thing that is usually done is to initialize the hardware registers and the RAM. If you skip that part, by jumping somewhere into the code, those contents are completely unpredictable and cause the surprising frying effects.

[Vigo]

The interesting part is that when i power up without a cartridge, some patterns actually re-occur from time to time.... I already figured that out when i was a young kid...

[Room 34]

Vic George 2K3 said:

Interestingly, the same simple trick of holding down the Reset button or switch when you turn on your game system and then releasing it when the game screen appears also works on the Z26 emulator....

I think this trick was deliberately programmed into Space Invaders, so naturally it would work the same in an emulator as on a real system.

Can anyone confirm this? Thomas, have you disassembled Space Invaders?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Room 34 said:

Can anyone confirm this?  Thomas, have you disassembled Space Invaders?

No, but it should be easy. You just have to look from the start vector to the next SWCHB.