Qbert Marathon to end all Marathons

Sbeehive

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Was just checking to see what happened to Twin Galaxies today... and the site's running a Qbert Marathon! One guy is up to 50 + hours right now! It's insanely entertaining. Anyone else watching it?
 
Nah, you go to the site and it has a message how it will be back up soon. The link is on there though. At least they are doing stuff like this.
 
My wife and I (and our little dog Yoda) stopped by Richie's arcade around 2am on Saturday morning to watch George play Qbert for a little while. We met George, John, Mike and Kelly. Nice group of people. Still not sure how I talked my wife into going over there at 2am!

Bill
 
Haha now that's true love. That's awesome man, how was it in there? George is still going strong!
 
Was just checking to see what happened to Twin Galaxies today... and the site's running a Qbert Marathon! One guy is up to 50 + hours right now! It's insanely entertaining. Anyone else watching it?

Maybe I was dreaming, but I thought Q*bert had a kill screen. I swear I saw either Billy Mitchel or Dwayne Richards get a kill screen before at the Milwaukee show several years ago. And it only took an hour or two. How can these guys be playing 50 hours? Are there different ROM versions, or was there a hack made to allow continual play?
 
Maybe I was dreaming, but I thought Q*bert had a kill screen. I swear I saw either Billy Mitchel or Dwayne Richards get a kill screen before at the Milwaukee show several years ago. And it only took an hour or two. How can these guys be playing 50 hours? Are there different ROM versions, or was there a hack made to allow continual play?

Q*bert has no kill screen that I have ever heard of, and long marathons of the game over the past 30 years are well documented. There are a few different ROM sets in MAME and it is possible one of them has a bug that causes a kill screen, but I have never heard anyone claim they've seen a kill screen on Q*bert before. It is far more likely you saw a Q*bert die due to hardware malfunction, as that is not uncommon at all.

The parent ROM in the current version of MAME is "US set 1." There is a "US set 2" but the differences are unknown. There is also a Japanese ROM set and one called "early test version," again differences unknown.

Also, while I don't doubt Dwayne Richard can marathon Q*bert I have never heard any discussion of Bill Mitchell being a Q*bert player, to say nothing of posting a score on the game.
 
My wife was in this with Ed and George until we hit the 18 hour mark then the game started acting funny. She could still play but it would clear the levels when she had all the tiles colored, then the game just reset.

My wife and I are glad George was able to do it, I know he has made a couple of attempts before. It's a was going to be a hard score for anyone to take down. My wife was preparing in many ways to make a 60 hour run.
 
Tronic... Your wife needs to "go for it"... She is a great player!

She will when I can get this issue figured out with the board. To be honest I think the 30 yr old ROM's might be going bad. I haven't put the logic analyzer on it yet but I think the baground ROM's are the cause since it had to do with the part of the code that determined if all the tiles were done.
 
My wife was in this with Ed and George until we hit the 18 hour mark then the game started acting funny. She could still play but it would clear the levels when she had all the tiles colored, then the game just reset.

My wife and I are glad George was able to do it, I know he has made a couple of attempts before. It's a was going to be a hard score for anyone to take down. My wife was preparing in many ways to make a 60 hour run.

Sorry to hear that. Can't wait to hear about her next record attempt.
 
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