Q*bert also got added to the mix

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Shot with Canon PowerShot A610 at 2008-10-11

GREAT PHOTO, JONES. Yeah, I know. I honestly cannot shoot arcade games without the flash.

Anyway, I picked this up a couple weeks ago and in trying to find info about the battery issue, I started remembering all sorts of this game from my youth.

1) I had the Q*bert piggy bank. Had totally forgotten about this, but yes, I did have it.

2) I had the Q*bert watch, which would let you play an LCD version of Q*bert on the watch's face. I do remember owning that. I also remembering the time would reset to 12:00 (and flush the high score) if all four buttons were pressed at the same time. This seemed to happen roughly every twenty minutes that I carried it around. I'd probably be wearing it to this day otherwise, so maybe this was for the best.

3) I did remember the Q*bert TV show.

4) I still have the Q*bert plush stuffed animal. That made it to Colorado, and it's on top of the actual game right now.

I had forgotten how amazing the sound is in the game. MAME never bothered to emulate what it does when you first turn it on, which is shout, "HELLO, I AM TURNED ON!" It also will generate speech for Ugg, Wrong-way, Slick and Sam somewhat randomly. Slick and Sam (the green guys) remain the two FRIGGING cutest dudes in all of arcade game history, as far as I am concerned.

I also sat at a talk discussing Q*bert the first time I went to the Classic Gaming Expo, and it's been fun to read in various articles what was said at the panel - apparently, a co-worker of Warren Davis (the programmer) was sitting behind him as he worked, late one night. Rather than murder this interloper (Ron Waxman), as I would have done, he was okay with it.

The interloper says, "What if the tops of the cubes change color when he lands on them?" And at that point, the story goes, they knew they had a game. Awesome.

It was also going to be called "SNOTS AND BUGGERS" originally - @!#?@! was also thrown about, but nobody would know how to pronounce it. (Not an issue for me, personally, as I pronounced even Galaga wrong for like 20 years before being corrected.)

[CO]

2) I had the Q*bert watch, which would let you play an LCD version of Q*bert on the watch's face. I do remember owning that. I also remembering the time would reset to 12:00 (and flush the high score) if all four buttons were pressed at the same time.

I went through 3 pac man watches at probably the same time, then moved on to calculator watches. Then I realized that those things were giant geek flags that would repel anyone of the opposite sex.

[AArdvark]

I though the big thing was to wear two or three watches of different colors at the time. ....Swatches, they were called.

It would be cool to be able to wear all the cabinets you own on one arm.


I would have a sit down Spy Hunter and some kind of pinball watch on my wrist.


THE
LOPSIDED
AARDVARK

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

jrok's Q*bert high score mod looks simple enough. I went to mouser to see if they had the DS1220AD part, but they don't.

Maxim-ic.com does, and their page for it is right here.

They list a few variations of the part, like DS1220AD-100IND and DS1220AD-120+. Does it matter which I get? I don't know what the additional designations mean.

And what does the "sample" thing mean - they will send me one to try out, in case I was putting something together for a project? I am happy to pay them the seven bucks for the part, I don't want to cheapass people carrying this ancient stuff, just curious.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Ahhhhhh, I bought a part that would work anyway from Mouser.com.

Right now I can't break 30,000. Whenever Slick, Sam or the green ball show up I panic and run towards them immediately before thinking.

I also did some other reading on the game. The art guy originally envisioned Q*bert being able to shoot stuff out his nose to take out enemies that way as well. He wanted to name it SNOTS AND BOOGERS. Yea, disgusting. But anyway, once I get through my current backlog of games I want to make (looking like 2111, currently) that would be a fun one to do: Q*bert, but you can shoot people.

Of course, in all the remakes of Q*berts over the years, for various systems, nobody has ever put that in, or gone ahead and made that game. Even though, twenty seconds' reading on Q*bert would bring you that factoid about the game, and offer a new direction to go to.

Game designers! Our best and brightest.

[bruce]

SNOTS AND BOOGERS

I would pay money for SNOTS AND BOOGERS.

Bruce

[pinback]

I would pay money for SNOTS AND BOOGERS.

PM me your mailing address.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

SNOTS AND BOOGERS

I would pay money for SNOTS AND BOOGERS.

Bruce

Maybe I should do it after CZK. I want to do an arcade-style game very badly.

And I am just thinking -

- Grab the graphics from Q*bert
- Take the good ideas from Faster, (can't remember), More Challenging Q*bert (like Q*bertha, and how the learning curve speeds up)
- Have a lot more shit going on in the screen to shoot

... OK, wait - should Q*bert be able to shoot anything in the direction he's facing? Should the shot go a distance of one cube only? Are there some things he shouldn't be able to hit? Should he need to jump on something for "ammo"? Should a creature drop that ammo as it goes through the pyramid, then?

What is Sam dropped ammo at some point. Then you have a decision to make - let him continue to deface your pyramid in the hopes of getting some ammo, or stopping him right away so that the cube doesn't get messed up, at the cost of not having ammunition.

Maybe treating the s&b like the pepper in BurgerTime is the way to go? It's a semi-scare resource that is quite powerful?

What if the snots only took out one enemy... but when the "cyan ball" was dropping through the maze, the shots would go through an entire "plane" of cubes, like a frigging railgun?

Just thinking outloud.

[hygraed]

I've never played Q*bert, but the impression I get reading about it is that you would have to kill the snake eventually in order to make all the cubes a single color. If that's the case, I would not have the snake drop ammo since the player would be forced to kill it eventually. The only choice the player would have in that situation is whether to kill the snake now or wait until later. You're eventually going to have to lose your ammo source, be it sooner or later, the choice between which doesn't really add anything to the game.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, what Q*bert ends up doing is:

- It unleashes a purple ball that randomly falls to the last row
- That ball uncoils into "Coily"
- Coily chases you around the maze
- If you jump off a spinning disc, you'll get taken to the top of the pyramind... but if Coily was close behind, he will jump off the maze in an attempt to follow you. (But with no disc there for him, he falls to his "death"
- The game then sends another purple ball down the maze and everything retreats

Coily does more or less go right after you, so I bet top players could predict his movement. For a horrible player like me, though, I have a vague sense of where he'd go, but that is sort of it.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

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.

[hygraed]

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.

[AArdvark]

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

That would be some kind of game!




THE
HOPALONG
AARDVARK

[bruce]

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

[Flack]

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.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

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).

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

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.

[Flack]

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).

[bruce]

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

I didn't realize you were a plastic surgeon.

Bruce

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

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.)