Q*bert also got added to the mix

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 7:48 pm

I was trying to find out when I bought Q*bert side art. It had been a long time. Maybe May of 2010.

Anyway, stuck at home, I managed to get it installed onto my Q*bert. One project down. It may take me over a year to get to them, but I get to them.

by **Flack** » Tue May 04, 2010 3:21 am

In MAME, Q*Bert's "voice" is a series of WAV files. Replacing those with your own voice would (I think) be trivial.

by **AArdvark** » Tue May 04, 2010 3:09 am

And have it doppler away when he falls off the back of the pyramid, Like Kevin Kline in 'A Fish Called Wanda'.

THE
REASONABLY OBSCURE
AARDVARK

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon May 03, 2010 8:01 pm

That would be good. It would save ME having to say it each time.

by **bruce** » Mon May 03, 2010 7:37 pm

Wouldn't it be great to take Q*Bert, and hack the sound system, so that instead of cursing in his funny punctuationy way, he just screamed "Motherfucking ASSHOLE!" really loud when he died?

by **Flack** » Mon May 03, 2010 10:50 am

That, is awesome.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Apr 29, 2010 6:49 pm

The dude running Phoenix Arcade (the web company) made the Q*bert "swear" marquee. If I were any kind of webmaster, I would have the information as to whether or not they were reproductions, or of his own design. I am fairly sure they are reproductions of an alternate marquee.

I always kind of wanted one, but they were listed as "out of stock" on his website.

I happened to be visiting Google Groups because the changelog for Inform 7 wasn't released two days early and MAN wuz I PISSED. I saw on rgvac that the guy did have some available, still. So I bought one.

Here's how my Q*bert looks now:

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Aug 13, 2009 4:32 am

jrok, the guy who made the awesome non-emulated, cramming-like-8-games-on-a-PCB board for Williams games, is making one for Mylstar games. This would include Q*bert.

http://www.jrok.com/xfer/msf/

Here is what he has to say about it:

Developing the sound support for the MSF board, which will be emulated in an Atmel AVR part, most probably. The original soundboard is basically just a 6502 hooked up to an 8-bit DAC for making audio effects... oh with a Votrax speech IC for extra annoyance !

And here is a photo:

I live in constant fear of my Q*bert board dying, so this is awesome. I think the photo shows him hooking this up to a JAMMA connection, which will be useful to a lot of people.

I paid like $170 for my Q*bert board and there just aren't many out there. If it plays the same, I'd probably feel more sane going this route.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon May 18, 2009 12:49 am

(This thread provides delightful discussion about a future possible arcade-style game on the PC. It fills me with joy! Boy, when this text game gets finished, am I gonna have some reckoning to do.)

Anyway, I long suspected that the ballast in my Q*bert was bad, and eating lights. I grabbed a known good starter, and the light from my Arkanoid and plugged them in.

It killed the light that was previously in Arkanoid in like four seconds. Yay for knowledge, boo for destroying a lamp.

(And my backup light flickers. Christ!)

So, off to Lowe's tomorrow - gotta snag two 18" fluorescent lights and a new backup. Luckily, I grabbed a ballast with a black light three years ago. Q*bert has a spare AC plug (I looooooooooooooove that they used to do that back in the day!) so this week my mission will be to take the old ballast out and put the modern-day one in. I'm stoked: I get that set, and my only issues with my Q*bert will be the water damage from the cab (can't really fix that) and the fact that it has the worst side-art of all-time. And that I may try to replace.

by **Flack** » Thu Nov 20, 2008 7:43 am

When I got my Q*Bert it had been a long time since I played the game, and I (incorrectly) remembered getting points for leading Coily over the edge. I was spending all my time on the earlier levels making sure I used every single "rescue disc" and leading Coily off the pyramid every time. Then at some point that got boring and I noticed you get a bonus for every disc you don't use. So in reality I was going out of my way and taking up a bunch of time to avoid getting bonus points.

The story of my life.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Nov 19, 2008 10:54 pm

Flack wrote:Maybe you could earn ammo each time you successfully lead Coily off the edge of the pyramid? Either that or a simple so-many-shots-per-level scheme might work as well.

(Also, I forgot to say, should SNOTS AND BOOGERS ever get made, that is an excellent suggestion: you get a bullet for making Coily fall off the edge. This gives you a chance to build some ammo up before the difficult levels, and also ties it to being somewhat competent at the game.)

by **bruce** » Wed Nov 19, 2008 9:50 pm

Flack wrote:Someday I will look into fixing/replacing/installing a knocker.

I didn't realize you were a plastic surgeon.

Bruce

by **Flack** » Wed Nov 19, 2008 1:14 pm

Cool, that sounds simple enough!

So far I've only had to do three things to my Q*Bert cabinet. When I bought it the front was locked (I had no key), the game wouldn't coin up after dropping a quarter in, and the bottom 1/3 of the monitor was blurry.

Since I didn't have a key for the front cabinet, I drilled it out. (The next one I do I think I will film the process and put on YouTube.)

Once I got the coin door open, problem #2 became obvious -- there are no coin mechs behind the door. I have temporarily solved this by placing the game in free play mode.

The third problem, the fuzzy monitor, was embarassingly simple to fix. I'd been putting off looking at it as I knew the problem would require capping the monitor (and, most likely, shocking the shit out of myself in the process). Last week I, for the first time, pulled the front bezel off and found a second piece of smoked glass. When I picked up the second piece I was surprised to find it smokey and covered in "schmuts". With a bottle of Windex I was able to clean the glass. Total repair cost was a couple of bucks, including Windex and paper towels. The game looks and plays great now!

Someday I will look into fixing/replacing/installing a knocker. I'm sure there are replacement and/or do-it-yourself kits out there at this point (I've never looked into it, to be honest).

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Nov 19, 2008 12:34 pm

Well, re-reading the thread, I guess most of the battery thing is taken care of.

Basically, I just bought the RAM that jrok suggests from mouser.com. The original battery had already been removed. I popped the RAM off, put the replacement chips in... and really, the toughest part was getting the wire soldered on to get power there - the PCB was too slick to really drop solder on it. What do people do in this situation? Do they "scrub" the PCB a little? I finally did get it to stick, but I think it could be jostled and come right off. It was like trying to solder something onto teflon.

It ends up keeping the top 9 scores, FWIW.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue Nov 18, 2008 6:50 pm

Flack!!!!!! Good to see you here, man!

I will detail the process I used to replace the battery when I get home tonight. As long as you don't confuse the ROMs and RAMs like I did, it's pretty easy (and thank goodness they had different numbers of legs, ha ha.... ahhh).

by **Flack** » Tue Nov 18, 2008 4:49 pm

Maybe you could earn ammo each time you successfully lead Coily off the edge of the pyramid? Either that or a simple so-many-shots-per-level scheme might work as well.

I have a Q*Bert cabinet too (paid $100 for it at a garage sale, believe it or not) and I really need to find out more about the battery issue.

by **bruce** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 7:39 pm

pinback wrote:
bruce wrote:I would pay money for SNOTS AND BOOGERS.
PM me your mailing address.

Allow me to clarify.

I would pay money for a Q*bert-like game, where Q*bert fired loogies from his nose, called "SNOTS AND BOOGERS".

I do not want an envelope full of Ben "Pinback" Parrish's mucus.

Bruce

by **AArdvark** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 3:20 am

NO! Q-bert the FPS!!!!!

That would be some kind of game!

THE
HOPALONG
AARDVARK

by **hygraed** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 1:04 am

Oh, so there's a constant stream of snakes, and I assume the player just has to use the window of time between killing one snake and another being dropped to run around and re-color all the squares the snake fucked up. I was under the impression that there was just the one snake, and once you killed it you were free to do whatever else had to be done to color all the squares. This changes my assessment of the ammo-dropping mechanic, although if I were you I would be wary of straying too far from Q*bert's original mechanics, i.e. don't try to make it too much of a shooter.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Oct 15, 2008 9:02 pm

Also, I did install that high score save mod successfully. Like an idiot, I removed ROM0 and ROM1 at first. I figured out what I did wrong, as those are 28 pin chips, and the RAM I needed to install was 24.

Sort of angry at myself for removing the ROMs, but hey, at least I got it working. I really should not work on boards at night with no coffee.

Q*bert also got added to the mix

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