Pinball Home ROMs - how do these get made?

RussMyers

New member
Joined
Dec 16, 2005
Messages
1,798
Reaction score
6
Location
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Pinball Home ROMs - how do these get made?

Who does the programming and distribution of code for these?

I would dearly love to have a Home ROM set made for my 1995 Bally/Williams Who Dunnit? to add a Wizard Mode and any other gameplay improvements that can be added in.

How does this kind of project get done?

Thanks,

RussM
 
I think there are two parts to this question.

1- Who re-writes the code to include new game play features

2- Who programs the eproms with the updates code.

--

For the first question, that's easy, ... hardly anybody can do that.

Most of the more common home roms (TZ, DM, ST:TNG) were actually written
by the game developers themselves.

Beyond that, only a very select few people have actually been
able to re-write game code. The few that come to mind are :

Oliver K. http://www.pinball4you.ch/okaegi/pro_soft.html

Leon (Test chips) http://www.flipper-pinball-fan.be/

and Wolffy who made the WhiteWater LH6 home rom

As far as I know , there are no home roms for WhoDunnit,
and I very much doubt anyone who "might" have the skills to make changes,
will invest the 100's of hours it would take to do so...

--

As for who programs and supplies the actual eproms,
there are many folks who can do that.

Google is your friend... ;-)

Cheers,
Steph
 
Finding burned EPROM dealers on the web is easy, I was not asking about that.

Really, I wanted to find out how hard it would be to get someone to update the programming for a particular pin.

So it would have to be someone from the original dev team or similar with access to the SDK or other dev tools and the willingness to actually do the coding and debug/QA.

IOW, chances are slim to none.

That's what I was afraid of.

RM
 
So it would have to be someone from the original dev team or similar with access to the SDK or other dev tools and the willingness to actually do the coding and debug/QA.

IOW, chances are slim to none.

RM


Yup, and yup ....

I actually use to be a whiz on 6502 assembler language [ ...back in 1982 ! ]
(...anyone remember Jim Butterfield's C-64 Supermon assembler ?
I knew that thing inside out ! ;-)

I wish I had the time to figure that kind of stuff out now.
8-bit programming is not very difficult...

There are some really cool mods for video games
(...much more so than for pins... ) , and I'd love to be able to do that...

Cheers,
Steph
 
Hmmm...it would be interesting if you did find such a person and they named a price. I'd pay good money for a really nice home rom for this game.

$100 would be a drop in the hat to unlock the full potential of that game. I'd bet long term that around 100 or so could be sold. That's $10k, surely that kind of money would attract the big boys to reprogram a single game.
 
$100 would be a drop in the hat to unlock the full potential of that game. I'd bet long term that around 100 or so could be sold. That's $10k, surely that kind of money would attract the big boys to reprogram a single game.

No... about 5 would get sold, and then one would get dumped and passed around...
 
I, too, have a Who Dunnit? and have posted a fix for the Elevator floor bug:

http://www.enteract.com/~jenison/mars/romhacks

Often I've seen posts lamenting the lack of "wizard mode" for this game (frankly I'm not good enough at it to ever reach said wizard mode :)). But I've always wondered what people would consider this wizard mode to be like. I mean, if you're going to contract out to have the game "finished", the person is going to want solid requirements on game behavior.

How do you tie the 5 mini stories together? Or maybe you don't (Nick goes to Casino? Nick defeats Crazy Bob*?) What shots would need to be hit during wizard mode? Wizard mode probably wouldn't have any new sounds/quotes (adding new sounds would increase the difficulty in programming it).

* WhoDunnit has subtle tie-in with Junkyard...would be funny to have Crazy Bob as boss villian in WhoDunnit as well...might be able to steal some sounds from Junkyard.
 
I, too, have a Who Dunnit? and have posted a fix for the Elevator floor bug:

http://www.enteract.com/~jenison/mars/romhacks

Often I've seen posts lamenting the lack of "wizard mode" for this game (frankly I'm not good enough at it to ever reach said wizard mode :)). But I've always wondered what people would consider this wizard mode to be like. I mean, if you're going to contract out to have the game "finished", the person is going to want solid requirements on game behavior.

How do you tie the 5 mini stories together? Or maybe you don't (Nick goes to Casino? Nick defeats Crazy Bob*?) What shots would need to be hit during wizard mode? Wizard mode probably wouldn't have any new sounds/quotes (adding new sounds would increase the difficulty in programming it).

* WhoDunnit has subtle tie-in with Junkyard...would be funny to have Crazy Bob as boss villian in WhoDunnit as well...might be able to steal some sounds from Junkyard.

Ideally, a wizard mode would utilize the casino aspect of the game. No need to solve even more cases. IMO wizard mode is there to reward a player for accomplishing everything the game asks of them - not to rehash the same crap you've already accomplished.

I do have a question for you since you have ability in fixing rom bugs. Is it possible to adjust the utterly crappy function of the roulette wheel? Ideally I would like to see the bets be less, and the payout percentage to be more often.
 
Ideally, a wizard mode would utilize the casino aspect of the game. No need to solve even more cases. IMO wizard mode is there to reward a player for accomplishing everything the game asks of them - not to rehash the same crap you've already accomplished.

K, so some Casino night thing where hitting the roulette and running the slotmachine would be required...maybe you need a certain $ amount to win or something.

I do have a question for you since you have ability in fixing rom bugs. Is it possible to adjust the utterly crappy function of the roulette wheel? Ideally I would like to see the bets be less, and the payout percentage to be more often.
Yes, the roulette wheel paying out potentially billions of points makes the game a bit unbalanced. So you want a more static range, ranging from say 10mil to 100mil or max current points, whichever is lower? That could probably be arranged. Just let me know the requirements.

I'm confused about the "payout percentage" comment...you want the wheel to be rigged so you win more than 50% of the time?
 
K, so some Casino night thing where hitting the roulette and running the slotmachine would be required...maybe you need a certain $ amount to win or something.


Yes, the roulette wheel paying out potentially billions of points makes the game a bit unbalanced. So you want a more static range, ranging from say 10mil to 100mil or max current points, whichever is lower? That could probably be arranged. Just let me know the requirements.

I'm confused about the "payout percentage" comment...you want the wheel to be rigged so you win more than 50% of the time?

I have had this pinball for about 2 months and I play quite regularly. I have scored a win on the roulette 1 time. I'd estimate I've chanced the roulette at least 40 times. I do not put the game in tourney mode either.

The previous owner said he completely abandoned that shot due to this.

I think most owners would be more than happy with a home rom that merely made the roulette wheel more play friendly and abandon the wizard mode.

Another thing I find lacking in this game is the implementation of the equipment. I think there should have been a mode associated with collecting all of the equipment. Even if only a multiball. Hehe, I'd call it sewer rat multiball, where you had to exterminate some rats by hitting playfield shots.


Back to that wizard mode, I would make it like the basement multiball, where you have to skill stop the slot with the elevator ramp. However, I would light 3 random shots on the playfield to skillstop the slot machine. Then have a progressive jackpot with the roulette shot on a timer to act as a jackpot multiplier.
 
I have had this pinball for about 2 months and I play quite regularly. I have scored a win on the roulette 1 time. I'd estimate I've chanced the roulette at least 40 times. I do not put the game in tourney mode either.

The previous owner said he completely abandoned that shot due to this.

I think most owners would be more than happy with a home rom that merely made the roulette wheel more play friendly and abandon the wizard mode.
Huh, never seen this issue. What version of the ROMs are you running? Mine's about 50/50. The usual complaint is that the roulette wheel makes for unbalanced scoring based on a lucky guess. For example, the current score on my machine is 6 billion, but only because I got to 3 billion (decent game), then hit roulette which allowed me to double my score. One shot and a lucky guess shouldn't be worth that much.
 
Huh, never seen this issue. What version of the ROMs are you running? Mine's about 50/50. The usual complaint is that the roulette wheel makes for unbalanced scoring based on a lucky guess. For example, the current score on my machine is 6 billion, but only because I got to 3 billion (decent game), then hit roulette which allowed me to double my score. One shot and a lucky guess shouldn't be worth that much.

If I get a chance this evening, I'll verify my rom version and the audit setting for the roulette wheel.
 
I can say that on my Who Dunnit?, the win/lose on the roulette wheel is 50/50 as far as I can tell. Unsure of my ROM revision, will check it when home - think it's 1.2.

Would love a Wizard/Ultimate Jackpot mode for all 5 cases solved - Casino Game theme seems the obvious way to go.

What a cool thread !!!

RM
 
Yup, and yup ....

I actually use to be a whiz on 6502 assembler language [ ...back in 1982 ! ]
(...anyone remember Jim Butterfield's C-64 Supermon assembler ?
I knew that thing inside out ! ;-)


Cheers,2
Steph

I actually re-wrote Jim Butterfields supermon and called it stringmon. It had tonnes of other features. Backwards scrolling, highlighting, debugging.

I was 12 years old at the time.
 
Back
Top Bottom