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Perfect Pitfall! (1:42)


Thomas Jentzsch

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Actually I wanted to join TwinGalaxies's 2005 Bounty Challenge for Pitfall!, but I have to admit, that I am not able anymore to repeat what I did 20 years ago (perfect score with a remaining time of 1:4x or maybe 1:14?). So I decided to do something different to find out.

 

I have started to manipulate the z26 emulator, so that it is automatically playing a perfect game. I have done only ~2.5 minutes so far, so it will take some time until I have a final result.

 

Stay tuned...

Edited by Thomas Jentzsch
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Actually I wanted to join TwinGalaxies's 2005 Bounty Challenge for Pitfall!, but I have to admit, that I am not able anymore to repeat what I did 20 years ago (perfect score with a remaining time of 1:4x or maybe 1:14?). So I decided to do something different to find out.

 

I have started to manipulate the z26 emulator, so that it is automatically playing a perfect game. I have done only ~2.5 minutes so far, so it will take some time until I have a final result.

 

Stay tuned...

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I ran it with 1:03 remaining the other day. I did 1:04 remaining back in the day. No way is 1:4x possible. I'd be really surprised if 1:14 was possible. Todd say 1:08 may be possible, but I doubt that too. I say maybe 1:05. I hope you can prove me wrong with your project. I'm very interested. ;)

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I ran it with 1:03 remaining the other day.  I did 1:04 remaining back in the day.  No way is 1:4x possible.  I'd be really surprised if 1:14 was possible.  Todd say 1:08 may be possible, but I doubt that too.  I say maybe 1:05.  I hope you can prove me wrong with your project. I'm very interested. ;)

Probably it was just 1:14. And since the rules of the Activision club didn't say anything about the remaining lives, I most likely sacrificed two lives for some extra remaining time. So that would make sense, wouldn't it?

 

Anyway, I hope we will find out soon.

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I ran it with 1:03 remaining the other day.  I did 1:04 remaining back in the day.  No way is 1:4x possible.  I'd be really surprised if 1:14 was possible.  Todd say 1:08 may be possible, but I doubt that too.  I say maybe 1:05.  I hope you can prove me wrong with your project. I'm very interested. ;)

Probably it was just 1:14. And since the rules of the Activision club didn't say anything about the remaining lives, I most likely sacrificed two lives for some extra remaining time. So that would make sense, wouldn't it?

 

Anyway, I hope we will find out soon.

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You may be able to beat the clock that way, but then you would have no perfect game.

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You may be able to beat the clock that way, but then you would have no perfect game.

I know, but I am also interested how my score back then was. So I'll probably try this variation too.

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Yeah, I too lost two lives on purpose at cetain opportune places in the game back in the days of the Activision Cliff Hangers Club to boost my time. Thomas, the 1:14 score may very well be possible using that additional strategy. They tracked "Perfect Scores" of 114,000 as opposed to today's additional track of "Perfect Games" which must be 114,000 with no lives lost according to the Twin Galaxies Bounty Contest.

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I don't think it makes any difference in your speed, but I have to ask for expert analysis here.  If you jump/skip along with Pitfall Harry do you move any faster/slower than if you simply run?

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It won't make a difference, as long as you keep moving.

 

D.Yancey, does that mean you claimed the bounty!? :)

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I don't think it makes any difference in your speed, but I have to ask for expert analysis here.  If you jump/skip along with Pitfall Harry do you move any faster/slower than if you simply run?

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It won't make a difference, as long as you keep moving.

 

D.Yancey, does that mean you claimed the bounty!? :)

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No, I did not claim the bounty. I just wanted to let everyone know that it is possible for someone to actually do it. Maybe that would help to stimulate more interest.

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Ok, here is my promised attempt of scripting a perfect Pitfall!. Just start the emulator with a Pitfall! binary (doesn't matter if it is PAL or NTSC).

 

The remaining time is 1:42, which is the time I always had in my mind and everybody (including me ;)) has always doubted.

PP_1_42.zip

Edited by Thomas Jentzsch
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Name a 2600 game that does not.   :ponder:   AS long as the player always does exactly the same thing.

Berzerk uses a timer to initialize its random number generator when the console is switched on. That should be pretty random.

 

Other games depend on how long you wait until you start the game. Pretty random too.

Edited by Thomas Jentzsch
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Hi there!

 

Other games depend on how long you wait until you start the game. Pretty random too.

 

Wouldn't your replay start the game always at precisely the same time?

 

It works perfectly for 99,99% of MAME games, you can record and replay your input for almost every single game it emulates.

 

Would be marvellous if one of the 2600 emulators could do that as well, then we could launch an Ataried version of MARP :lust: :love: :lust:

 

Greetings,

Manuel

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It works perfectly for 99,99% of MAME games, you can record and replay your input for almost every single game it emulates.

 

Would be marvellous if one of the 2600 emulators could do that as well, then we could launch an Ataried version of MARP :lust: :love: :lust:

We plan to add this to Stella at some point, as part of the debugger. Recording and playing back events could be very useful in tracking down bugs, especially if one can control/pause the rate at which input is played back.

Edited by stephena
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We plan to add this to Stella at some point, as part of the debugger.  Recording and playing back events could be very useful in tracking down bugs, especially if one can control/pause the rate at which input is played back.

That would be cool. Especially if it is editable.

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We plan to add this to Stella at some point, as part of the debugger.  Recording and playing back events could be very useful in tracking down bugs, especially if one can control/pause the rate at which input is played back.

That would be cool. Especially if it is editable.

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I don't see that generating the event stream is particularly difficult. We have to decide on the scheme, which could be something like EVENT:WAIT_FRAME pairs. So, for example, "left_down:1:fire_down:1" would mean "left pressed, wait 1 frame, fire pressed, wait 1 frame". Stella already contains an enumerated list representing all possible emulation core actions. We'd only need to modify the eventhandler to deal with these synthetic events, and I think it would be quite easy.

 

Modifying the stream would be more problematic. The difficult issue would be creating a GUI within Stella to do it. However, if someone were to create an external GUI/application, or someone wanted to manually edit the input state file, it would make things much easier.

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We plan to add this to Stella at some point, as part of the debugger.  Recording and playing back events could be very useful in tracking down bugs, especially if one can control/pause the rate at which input is played back.

That would be cool. Especially if it is editable.

972181[/snapback]

I don't see that generating the event stream is particularly difficult. We have to decide on the scheme, which could be something like EVENT:WAIT_FRAME pairs. So, for example, "left_down:1:fire_down:1" would mean "left pressed, wait 1 frame, fire pressed, wait 1 frame". Stella already contains an enumerated list representing all possible emulation core actions. We'd only need to modify the eventhandler to deal with these synthetic events, and I think it would be quite easy.

 

Modifying the stream would be more problematic. The difficult issue would be creating a GUI within Stella to do it. However, if someone were to create an external GUI/application, or someone wanted to manually edit the input state file, it would make things much easier.

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That could be helpful in debugging Stampede like I've been interested in.

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