So in investigating something related to the bonus collect, the ‘no bonus flips’ setting if set to kill the flippers, also kills the bonus collect routine prematurely sometimes… so a simple work around might be to just allow bonus flips.
It’s still not certain what causes the core error.
do other games have bonus flips bugs when off?
Not that I’m aware of. I don’t know 100% that this is what causes this (or a combination of this and the reuse of the temp locations). The biggest puzzle is figuring out what causes it before attempting a fix. If it was just the bonus flips that would have been nice, but again… without knowing how to trigger it…
So was testing a fix where I specifically save the temp variable somewhere else when the game sleeps that thread, and compare it on wakeup. Unfortunately, this patch causes a fatal error in the game and a reset (error identified by exposing the secret audits menu).
Obviously, this is not ideal in any way.
Still no idea what causes the non-collect in the first place. Everyone that’s noticed this was the version L-5?
Also, for others re-reading the thread and wondering about the BSD and Doctor Who tilt warning bonus collect bugs, the Papa romsets fix these, thanks to people from the old pinhacks.com - somewhere around 2010 or so IIRC.
Almost definitely unrelated but I ran into a scoring bug at IFPA worlds this year. I was down by 500k from the next player and shot the captive ball to score 1M points. I insta-drained down the middle from the captive ball…and my final score was only 50k more than that player. The captive ball definitely did not score 1M but instead 500k.
Embarrassingly I commented on that other thread as well. The captive ball level might be off by one at least in L-5, I’ll do some testing. That one might be easy to fix since it loads the level, then scores from a table. (Most things in WPC games score from a table of scores, likely so they could easily change the score awarded in one place)
The EB payout in tournament mode on L5 is “BS” which stands for big score, 20 million. The strangeness in extra ball payouts is likely related to the auto percentaging functions, which CANNOT be turned off in fish tales… you can do 1% as the best. If you get the extra ball first from the standup and then play video mode it is more likely extra ball won’t show up - but again, depends on that machine’s percentages.
Anyone able to test out patches? It’s best to have more than just me looking at what’s happening in the game. The Bonus collect mod was a complete bust and I’m investigating why.
It’s the ‘grab yer gear’ animation that shows the values wrong, at least the 500k level the first time. After that if you don’t advance the captive ball it’s correct and pays 1m, but the first time in, it’s always showing the +1 index value as detailed from the other thread. Will look into that one as well. You’d think they’d add the score in the animation/advance the value, but they didn’t.
So the fix for the grab yer gear award is to move the score subroutine call from BEFORE it’s increased (if it increased) to right AFTER it’s increased. The first couple attempts to patch simply didn’t work until I tried that. Since the actual award (hold bonus, etc) doesn’t occur until AFTER it’s increased anyway (as does the animation for grab yer gear) there’s no downside to moving it, the actual score just gets added slightly later. I’m guessing when the game was developed noone noticed this (since Fishtales did go through 5 revisions).
(For those interested, the first attempt set a previously unused flag so that the display routine would know to display the previous value. Didn’t change the score portion since that happened earlier. The second attempt tried to intercept the score routine and determine on its own if it had increased or not, that attempt even though it increased the counter (for the scoring), scored, then decreased the counter BACK so the correct routine would run, just didn’t work (probably because of timing).
I’ll have to look at the super jackpot thing - and still need to get something going on the bonus bug that doesn’t cause a fatal error/reset - so the displayed super is 200m and the actual award is 100m? Wonder if it’s the same type of thing as the grab yer gear error?
Grab yer gear at a million off or so isn’t so much but 100m sure is!
Of course, the third attempt for the grab gear score didn’t work. Just moving a scoring routine breaks the ‘sell yer gear’ portion of the code… very odd. It also never resets the captive ball after maxed. More digging needed. I’m realizing why a lot of this wasn’t fixed (if noticed) at the factory. On the surface, everything looks easy to just move around, but clearly, the progression in the game is linked with the order in which it’s coded; it seems very straightforward but it’s proving not to be.
Looks like an assumed value of A is the cause… best practice in other games seems to have been always save & restore registers when enter/exiting subroutines, unless you specifically need that value to change.