Gauntlet Prototype release - 4 player

Falkentyne

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I know there was a 2 player test version, but there may have been a 4 player prototype version as well, that came out before "Intermediate release 1"

Has anyone seen or ever played it?
I remember two things from seeing this machine in 9th grade, in mid 1985 at a bowling alley which make me 100% sure it was the prototype version:

1) When Thief stole from a player and ran away, he had a different sound, instead of saying "haha, you can't catch me!", he sometimes said some sort of bizarre laughing taunt very quickly.
I remember it going "hahaha hahaha nak nak naakakak nak nak nak NAK" or something. It was quite fast, and it was NOT the same sound the Thief makes when you block his escape path after being pilfered (the block escape sound taunt is in both Gauntlet 1 and Gauntlet 2). I remember this because when I got pilfered and he got away, he made that strange laughing sound and all the people watching me play just started cracking up massively, as they had never heard that before. I was very surprised, back when I started getting "Good" at the infinite food Gauntlet versions (I didn't know anything about different ROMS yet), why I never encountered either that "food" level mentioned below, or ever saw that thief taunt again.

I checked the sound banks on MAME for "intermediate release 1" to see if any of those sounds are in the game, and they were NOT in the sound banks. If you block the thief's escape sound, his "ha ha" sound sounds similar, but doesn't come out as often nor nearly as fast.

2) There was a famous level I remember seeing around the same time (one of the first times I encountered the 4 player version, so it was still the "prototype"):

This level : or a variation of this level:

ovnSQkA.png


On the prototype version, the "key" room was filled with food, probably assuming 4 players were playing and each one would share 200-300 health. I remember watching people play, trying to take turns sharing food, while not opening the doors.

Then there was a key somewhere else and as soon as you opened a door, you got swarmed by ghosts.

On intermediate release 1 you got keys in that location instead.

It would be really nice if someone had access to the proto board and could get the ROMS dumped, as there were probably other bizarre things in the game also.
 
Thanks for sharing that as I didn't know of anything more than the stock version ROMs.

Scott C.
 
This is pretty cool.. it's weird how little things like this will be completely lost in the future if people like you didn't mention it on a forum or something like this, most people wouldn't remember that or have noticed it...
 
I used to think that it was just 9th grade romantic memories that were making me distort memories of the game, but then realizing I was a chess player with a very good memory, I remembered what I saw (and what I heard). That thief sound he made when he stole something from me and ran away is STILL in my memory--that's how bizarre and shocking it was when I heard it.

I remember (still at Cerritos Lanes) intentionally getting my Extra Speed stolen hoping to hear the Thief "Randomly" say that taunt again yet he never did......it was always "haha, you can't catch me!" And when a friend blocked him and he just said "Nah nah" every 3 seconds...I KNEW something was up and kept wondering how to make him say that weird long funny taunt again.

After seeing a Gauntlet (at Time Out) that was impossible to play on one quarter solo (the "final" revision), due to having literally no food on "Difficulty=4" for a solo player, then I realized there were different versions out. I thought maybe it was a game setting, until I saw on some, you could change the attract mode screens with the joystick, while on the others, you can't.

I only knew about a prototype version existing as being confirmed, from Eric Crabill's old Gauntlet ROM page. That being said, I can't be 100% sure that it was the 2 or 4 player version I first encountered, but from remembering the way the cabinet looked and the GIGANTIC crowd of kids around the game....
 
I've got a few Gauntlet prototype boards... but unfortunately, the boards were stripped of a lot of the parts (there were still some ROMs, but I don't think any were a complete set). I was able to dig up the pictures I took of the boards on my backup drive... I dumped all the ROMs at some point as well, but I haven't found them yet. IIRC, there were some ROMs that were the same as one of the MAME sets, and lots that weren't. I'm pretty sure I tried a bit of mixing/matching in MAME, but didn't get any running... maybe with a little more effort something could be done.

Attached are some pics (not the best pics, since I didn't have a great camera at the time)... there are two prototype boardsets. They have LOTS of jumper wires, resistors instead of resistor packs, etc. The board is numbered A043200, rather than A043201 of the regular board. The early revs didn't have any S/N tags on them. One has ROMs labeled 9/20, the other 10/10.

There were also two regular boardsets (labeled S/N UR1108 and UR01114). One was completely stripped... the other was partially stripped, but had some factory labeled ROMs, as well as some hand-labeled 11/24/86, and had a -106 Slapstic... so I'm guessing this was a development/test board for Gauntlet II. There didn't seem to be anything special about those (other than low S/Ns) so I swapped parts from a bad boardset I had into one of those to fix my machine I had at the time.

DogP
 

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I've got a few Gauntlet prototype boards... but unfortunately, the boards were stripped of a lot of the parts (there were still some ROMs, but I don't think any were a complete set). I was able to dig up the pictures I took of the boards on my backup drive... I dumped all the ROMs at some point as well, but I haven't found them yet. IIRC, there were some ROMs that were the same as one of the MAME sets, and lots that weren't. I'm pretty sure I tried a bit of mixing/matching in MAME, but didn't get any running... maybe with a little more effort something could be done.

Attached are some pics (not the best pics, since I didn't have a great camera at the time)... there are two prototype boardsets. They have LOTS of jumper wires, resistors instead of resistor packs, etc. The board is numbered A043200, rather than A043201 of the regular board. The early revs didn't have any S/N tags on them. One has ROMs labeled 9/20, the other 10/10.

There were also two regular boardsets (labeled S/N UR1108 and UR01114). One was completely stripped... the other was partially stripped, but had some factory labeled ROMs, as well as some hand-labeled 11/24/86, and had a -106 Slapstic... so I'm guessing this was a development/test board for Gauntlet II. There didn't seem to be anything special about those (other than low S/Ns) so I swapped parts from a bad boardset I had into one of those to fix my machine I had at the time.

DogP
Reminds me of the early days of emulation when I tried convincing the early Taito emulation developers that their version of Operation Wolf was different than both of what I played BITD, as well as the arcade game I owned at home. To this day, I'm not sure if the differences were due to difficulty settings or a different ROM set (I haven't tried to reproduce the issue in 12 or so years. My Operation Wolf is also long gone.

Scott C.
 
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I've got a few Gauntlet prototype boards... but unfortunately, the boards were stripped of a lot of the parts (there were still some ROMs, but I don't think any were a complete set). I was able to dig up the pictures I took of the boards on my backup drive... I dumped all the ROMs at some point as well, but I haven't found them yet. IIRC, there were some ROMs that were the same as one of the MAME sets, and lots that weren't. I'm pretty sure I tried a bit of mixing/matching in MAME, but didn't get any running... maybe with a little more effort something could be done.

Attached are some pics (not the best pics, since I didn't have a great camera at the time)... there are two prototype boardsets. They have LOTS of jumper wires, resistors instead of resistor packs, etc. The board is numbered A043200, rather than A043201 of the regular board. The early revs didn't have any S/N tags on them. One has ROMs labeled 9/20, the other 10/10.

There were also two regular boardsets (labeled S/N UR1108 and UR01114). One was completely stripped... the other was partially stripped, but had some factory labeled ROMs, as well as some hand-labeled 11/24/86, and had a -106 Slapstic... so I'm guessing this was a development/test board for Gauntlet II. There didn't seem to be anything special about those (other than low S/Ns) so I swapped parts from a bad boardset I had into one of those to fix my machine I had at the time.

DogP

Thanks for the pictures, DogP!

When you said they were "prototype" boards, are you sure they were *prototype* or "Intermediate release" boards? It's very important to distinguish the two, because the releases before the "Final" release were not prototypes. They were intermediate releases.

There was only one "Proto" release for 4 players and a Proto 2 player version (the 2 player version was sold by one of Atari's original developers, who had owned it until several years ago). So only two prototype releases versions were known.

Originally, the only versions that were known back in the mid 90's, were "Intermediate release 1" (all the food dropped, transporter bugs galore, unpredictable transport locations, game reset bugs from transporting while dead, etc), "Intermediate release 4" (pretty much the same as IR1, except transporter bugs fixed), "Intermediate release 5 or 6" (whichever one this was called then, this let you change the attract mode screens, all the food is still in the game for all characters), and "Final Release" (Warrior and Wizard Extra Shot Power nerfed, food drops heavily nerfed on levels 1-7, nerfed on levels 8+ depending on difficulty level, monster generation speed scaling up to 4,194,384 points, etc, food removal scaling until 2,097,152 points due to an overflow bug causing all food to be dropped except 1 per level, etc).

A few sets got changed after the MAME rom names got changed from the "Gaunt.6a" type format to the part number format, but that's getting off topic.
 
When you said they were "prototype" boards, are you sure they were *prototype* or "Intermediate release" boards? It's very important to distinguish the two, because the releases before the "Final" release were not prototypes. They were intermediate releases.

There was only one "Proto" release for 4 players and a Proto 2 player version (the 2 player version was sold by one of Atari's original developers, who had owned it until several years ago). So only two prototype releases versions were known.
Well... I'm just talking about the PCBs themselves. Just by looking at the boards, you can tell that two of them are prototype boards... they're actually different physically than the standard boards. I know the pics kinda suck, but if you look closely at them, you can see jumper wires all over the place, resistors in place of resistor packs, lack of silkscreen, etc. And the model number etched on the board is A043200 (the final board that was actually put in cabinets was A043201), and there are no traces of S/N stickers.

I don't really know how you're classifying "proto" and "intermediate" releases... did they say somewhere on the ROMs, in the game, etc? As I said, none of these were complete, so I couldn't actually get them to boot and run... so the only thing I can see is the date that's handwritten on the chips. But if the released ROMs don't have any date on them, then it doesn't really help for comparison. A few ROM dumps matched ones from MAME sets, but a lot didn't... so I'm guessing these were used at some stage in development and were never actually a released set (I don't know the release date of Gauntlet, so I'm not sure whether 9/20 and 10/10 are before the initial release, or between releases).

And the one board is Gauntlet II, which has some factory labeled chips in addition to the hand labeled chips... so I wouldn't be surprised if that was a development/test board that they used after the initial release of the game (maybe development of an "intermediate" release?).

I'll try to dig up the boards and ROM dumps to get some better pics/info.

DogP
 
Here you go... here are a few pics explaining why I'm saying the PCBs themselves are prototypes. You can see all the lifted legs, jumper wires, etc... the board number is different... and you can see the flux residue still on the bottom of the board from someone hand soldering it. Definitely not a standard production PCB.

As I said... I don't know about the contents of the ROMs though.

DogP
 

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Crazy pics, really cool Dog!

Looks like a repair I had a buddy do...:D
 
Good point.
It's the ROM revision themselves that is the important thing for prototype vs I.R. releases, from what I was actually referring to as that determines the level layout, the sounds used, and so on. It's entirely possible an early PCB could contain later game code.

I guess I opened up a can of worms here :(

If the PCB's were actually complete and working, then the actual ROM revision could be determined by play or emulation/dumping.
 
Yeah, I'll try to find my dumps (or redump them if I have to), notes from when I looked last time (which was a very brief attempt), and dig into the schematics to see what ROMs are and aren't present.

From a quick comparison of pics... it looks like one Gauntlet 1 board is complete with ROMs, minus 10A and 10B. The schematics show those two ROMs enabled with the Slapstic, which maybe would have been disabled during development... so maybe they're not really "missing"... or maybe they're identical to the released ROMs.

The other Gauntlet 1 board is missing rows 8 and 9 (program) and 10 (slapstic), but has twice as many ROMs in rows 1 and 2. Not sure if some ROMs are just in the wrong spot, etc. Looking at the labels, half of those have checksums written on them, the others don't... so maybe they're just blanks.

The Gauntlet II board looks to be missing 1A, 1L, 2A, and 2L (graphics), as well as 7A, 7B, 6A, and 6B (program). But it also has some chips from the released version, so maybe the ROM set is identical except for the hand marked EPROMs.

An interesting read: http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc2012/slides/Design Track/Logg_Ed_Gauntlet_Postmortem.pdf . From that, it looks like it was put out on test at the Milpitas Golfland in the week of 10/2, and was released sometime in October.

Anyway, I'll keep you updated if I find anything out.

DogP
 
Also note that prototype ROMs on a prototype board may ONLY work in that prototype board as there may have been hardware revisions that caused the code to need to be changed as well. It's rare, but it happens.

But what I mean is dumping prototype ROMs may still yield something that won't play in MAME unless you can nail down the hardware differences and make those changes to MAME, too. And they obviously wouldn't work in a production board if that were the case.


--Donnie
 
Also note that prototype ROMs on a prototype board may ONLY work in that prototype board as there may have been hardware revisions that caused the code to need to be changed as well. It's rare, but it happens.

But what I mean is dumping prototype ROMs may still yield something that won't play in MAME unless you can nail down the hardware differences and make those changes to MAME, too. And they obviously wouldn't work in a production board if that were the case.

True, but that could also come down to a lot of factors: how finalised the hardware design was at the start of development, were there revisions to the hardware during development, what market / software needs might have driven changes, etc.

If I had to guess, the most likely difference between the prototype and production PCBs would be no Slapstic on the prototype boards - but if you're designing in the protection for the game rather than bolting it on later, this approach wouldn't necessarily be the best. Production PCBs also had a strong likelihood of having decreased parts counts over prototype boards - and from having just watched the video of Ed Logg's talk at GDC 2012, there definitely were significant hardware revisions between prototype and production.

Not disagreeing with you by any means, but companies generally like to lock in the hardware design up front as much as possible. Saves the costs of having to redesign it (and possibly the software running on it) down the line, but I'll admit that's not always possible.
 
Also note that prototype ROMs on a prototype board may ONLY work in that prototype board as there may have been hardware revisions that caused the code to need to be changed as well. It's rare, but it happens.
Yep... that's certainly a possibility, though given the dates (September and October), I gotta believe that the hardware was pretty near final if it was released in October. I never actually tried booting the proto boards, since they were stripped of some parts, and it didn't seem worthwhile to try getting them running when I could just test in MAME. But yeah, maybe it'd be worth swapping final Gauntlet ROMs into the proto boards to see if they actually run (I don't have a complete Gauntlet board or cabinet to test in anymore though).

Hi DogP, I'd love to help you figure out differences in those ROMs, one of my all time favorite games.
Are you a ROM hacker type, or gameplay playing type? I'll try to dig it up this week, though I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually play. Maybe there will be some interesting graphics or something in the ROMs though.

DogP
 
BTW Bob Flanagan (one of the original programmers) replied back to my email asking about ROM editing to fix the "Broken" fight power bug in Gauntlet 2, where the base fight power is determined on the color/position of the player rather than the character itself (e.g. Green elf has 1-2x normal fight power, while red, blue and yellow elf have only 1x fight power--same as Wizard...meawhile, Green Wizard has 1-2x normal fight power also, and Warrior has only 2x fight power in red, blue and yellow slots (likewise, Valkyrie has 2-3x fight power in green slot).

Date: 7/23/2016
Subject: RE: RE: To Bob: Regarding Gauntlet 2 (an old standing bug)

Neither Ed nor I own any rights to any Gauntlet IP. Whatever work someone did to update and release ROMs would not affect Ed or I, except that we may be happy to see that people are still that interested. However, someone, I can't remember who, does own the rights to the Atari arcade IP and I am pretty sure they would be interested in anyone updating and releasing their IP without their approval (and probably money - lol).
 
Reminds of the early days of emulation when I tried convincing the early Taito emulation developers that their version of Operation Wolf was different than both of what I played BBITD, as well as owned at home. To this day, I'm not sure if the differences were due to difficulty settings or a different ROM set (I haven't tried to reproduce the issue in 12 or so years. My Operation Wolf is also long gone.

Scott C.

There has been a lot of work on Operation Wolf in Mame recently after the discovery of an unlocked prototype board. You were correct that the game was not correctly emulated when you tried it BITD. Check out Haze's post for more info.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2016/04/01/a-wolf-in-prototype-clothing/
 
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