Be Excellent To Each Other

I remember in the really early days of MAME circa 1998 the idea of having Joust on my Pentium 200 computer was one of the big draws for me. I don't recall why I haven't played it in years and years but I suspect I found it hadn't aged well.

Still pretty fun!

<43100>

<43350>
Getting the hang of it a bit, but not sure if I like it.

Come on folks, have a game of Joust!

Joust doesn't work on my hand held so I'm stuck with using my PC for it where I can't practice as much as I like... Nevertheless, I'll endeavour to have a go this weekend.

I'll have a go at some point before close of play tomorrow but this MAME challenge really has been a procession of shitty old games

Road Blasters was at least semi-modern and Pulstar is fab, but as for the rest.....

Does it just not work or does it stick with the gibberish graphics - if you can get into the menus on your handheld you need to press the equivalent of F2 to do a factory reset - next time you start it should be fine (all Williams games of that era are the same for this).

I just had a game and got to level 8 but messed up the screenshot so will try again shortly but a few tips

You can move downwards at the rate that gravity pulls you but you can go up as fast as you hammer the flap button
Enemies are colour coded - red=easiest / grey=harder / blue= deadly , they will often just bounce around off the top of the screen
The Pterry is killable but only via jousting with him from the front (very hard to line up) so he's best avoided
You get more points for catching the eggs in the air

There isn't an F2 equivalent as far as I can tell. Never mind, I'll play it on the PC.

Also, good job on this tourney Zaphod. I do enjoy MAMES games.

<59100>

This is quite a good game actually.

<38400>

I should make it clear I do very much appreciate the time and effort that zaphod puts into these MAME challenges, my previous comment was in no way meant to detract from that.

It's just, y'know, Q'Bert and Wonderboy......

Well you were complaining that Roadblasters was merely 'passable' despite it being your nomination :-)

In the zone!

<83450>

Track and Field for the final week? Bah, Hyper Sports is by far the superior game

<65900>



Haven't had much time to play this, sadly. Gives you a decent amount of lives, though, eh? I seemed to be getting about one per stage. Ballsed up the "unbeatable pterodactyl" level.

I agree which is why its number 42 in the Beex all time top 50 games ever (because i voted it my top choice) viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4191

Let's have Hyper Sports instead then!

You're the referee dude, you can do whatever you like.

<9500> because I just haven't had the time to play it this week... Bugger.

Weird - wonder if its because its the first rom set but on the pterry wave i had 2 pterrys (one for the wave and one because i was taking too long to complete it)

<71150>

Not quite that simple , its already chosen , and all the rom files and things are set for Track n Field - but we can play it after the end if enough people want to

And on to the final week which is a Single Round or Konami's Track & Field

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detai ... e_id=10180





Controls:
Buttons: 3 [Run 1ActionRun 2]

Note we're playing a single round of this game , if your using another version of MAME either stop and take your screenshot at the end of the High Jump or go into the settings menu and select the dipswitch setting to stop after 1 round (if you downloaded the main file from the start of this thread this has already been set).

Some quick hints for the various rounds

100 Meters - avoid getting a false start and just run as fast as you can - consistency is the key - if you draw with the second player then you will get a 3000 point bonus
Long Jump - run as fast as you can until the line then press and hold the action button , your looking for around 45' , if you press the button while on the line you will get a speed bonus , if you have all 3 jumps of the same length you get a bonus
Javelin - run as fast as you can and then press and hold the action button , your looking for an angle just under 45' , if you hold down the action button your Javelin will fire into the air and you will hit a passing bird for 1000 points (this will not qualify you)
110 Meters Hurdles - run as fast as you can and press the action button to jump , its really about getting into a rhythm , we always used to jump the tape but i dont really think it makes any difference , draw with the second player for a bonus
Hammer throw - start the ball swinging and then press the action button to throw , your looking for an angle of around 45' and you can qualify on the 7th swing but the big points are on the 9th (if you 'run' at the start you can increase the power of the throw quicker)
High Jump - start to run , press the action button once to jump , wait to clear the right height then hold down the action button to go over the bar , you can also tap the button while in air to vary the angle - at the higher heights you also need to tap the run buttons for height - if you fail your first two jumps then qualify with your third a mole will appear for bonus points.


Oh and the reason for a single round only is that unlike Hyper Sports the difficulty on this one doesnt change after the 3rd round so you can basically go on forever (actually the game crashes after either the 64th round or the 256th event which i have actually done but it takes hours)

<46050>

The words do not exist to express how amazingly fucking bad I am at the high jump.

I have never done it. EVER. Not even got over the bar, let alone qualified.

My best mate from back in my Manchester days comes over every year (in fact, he's come to the IOM for a visit every year since I moved here in 1996), a traditional staple for the last few years has been to fire up MAMEOX on ye olde XBox and get a bit of a games championship going on.

Hyper Sports I thrash him at every time to the extent that he broke one of my gamepads one year out of annoyance at my brilliance. Track N Field he can do the high jump, I can't, he beats me every time. I usually end up swearing at him and calling him a cunt as he gloats at me, sailing over the bar at greater and greater heights.

(One of our other favs is 'Football Champ', from back in the days when football games had two buttons )

You really cant do it - where do you get to - is it a case of jumping too early / going to flat / etc ?

I dunno zaphod, I really can't explain it, it's genuinely got to the point now where I think it's a real mental block.

I've watched my mate do it time and time and time again, I've watched him pressing the buttons on the pad, it seems so simple, but I can't replicate it.

It really is the strangest thing, but honestly, I've never got over the bar fucking once.

Blimey, are these dip switches on a default harsh setting? Had three games, first two were both scuppered at the Javelin event where I failed every single time to meet the qualify distance!

All I can really advise for the high jump is that I jump and hammer the "left/right" buttons all the way up (possibly a placebo that does nothing!), then at a certain point I only hit the middle one till the angle is right then start hammering all three together till he's home and dry

<56360>

I'll see about writing something about doing it which should at least get you over the bar.



They should be on the default - for the hammer bashing the buttons for a few seconds is all you need to max out the speed (we always used to bash them while things were in the air as well (long jump / javelin / hammer) but that really doesnt make any difference

I have not got my arcade stick to hand but i'll plug in a pad and have a quick go to get some screenshots for the high jump

Okay - score for a very quick once around



<68290>

High jump - okay some basic things - you tap any run button to start and you'll run at a constant speed.
You tap the action button to start your jump , and then you alternatively tap and hold it to change the angle while your in the air
Tapping the run buttons in the air gives you extra height but you dont need it at the start so ignore it at least for getting over the first few times

So how to do the first height - tap run and you start to run to the bar , there are a lot of ways to gauge when to hit the jump button but the easiest (at least to begin with) is to watch the Konami logo on the back wall - you want to hit the jump button just as the start of the K gets to the edge of the screen (tap the button dont hold it at all you want the first angle to be as close to 90 as possible)

Around this point is where you want to press the button



now you start going up - the number will read 90 or 89 if you've just tapped jump



For the first jump - dont press anything else until your well up into the air - this is about the right stage (note i have actually tapped the jump button once just as i took the screenshot)



Tap the button a few times and the angle number will start to go down and your character will start to flop back over the bar



Wait and he will then raise his legs like this , you can then just hold down the button to get him over the bar



You can at least qualify like this without doing anything else , after a bit of practice you can 'miss' the ideal position for the initial jump and still tap the button to feather him over into the right position , and when you hammer the run buttons at the same time you can gain extra height to get over the bar.

Back in the arcades the most common problem people had with the jump was a lack of patience , they tapped too quickly which took them too close to the bar or they did not wait for him to lift his legs up so they trailed into it - I have never actually checked back but there were rumors of being able to go 'under' the bar at some of the larger heights (although i suppose that might have been Dailey Thompsons Decathlon rather than Track & Field)

Oh many thanks zaphod that's absolutely splendid

Will give it another go and see if I can finally get the bugger nailed

(Also, my chum is over for his annual visit the last weekend in September, if I can beat him at Track 'N Field I bet he'll sulk for the full duration of his visit )

<50460>

Better score, still not over the bar though.

Did get 89m77c on the hammer throw though.

<64490>



High jump's not giving me any bother, thanks to zaphod's guide - I cleared several bars before cocking up, today. Hurdles are giving me loads of grief, though. Does anyone else find that the guy sometimes doesn't start responding properly to your button presses until he's near the first hurdle? In the 100m race, he pretty much goes as fast as you're tapping from the first step, but here, he sometimes takes a few seconds to get his arse into gear...

He always takes a few seconds to get into gear if you look at the speed you should see it slowly climb up , the issue is always on the hurdles to get into the correct rhythm , once you've got that you can actually do it without even looking at the screen , you know the pace , you know the sounds it makes and its all about squeezing that extra few mps out of the run (weird fact on the very first emulated version of Hyper Sports i actually went once around the whole game and the graphics were pretty much just jumbled blobs but the SFX were correct from the very begining)

<83930>

Having had a go on my PC it appears zaphod is running a different ROM set or different DIP settings or something compared to what I have on MAMEOX.

The game for the BEEX challenge is running at tougher settings.

My last score was on my PC though so it's a legitimate entry.

I'll have another crack at it before the deadline tomorrow

The screenshots I did were from mame on Osx
The one I did later was from the pc version (I'm not going to be back at my main pc until tomorrow night to check settings)

That was good fun, folks

Scores should all be in the first post - thanks everyone for playing.

Thanks for hosting it, sir!

Nice score on Track & Field, by the way! I would have thought the upper limit would be below that. Did you do loads of high-jumps?

I think about 44 - and for the one time score i've been closer to 100,000 so that score is beatable

One of the big differences between Track & Field and Hyper sports for scoring is that HS gives you a score for each attempt and T+F just gives you a score bump for a bonus or when you finish the event (so for 1 circuit on HS the trick is 3 perfects on the Skeet Shooting)

When going for score I always get one 'decent' thrown in the Javelin and then hit the bird for the other 2 , always fail the first 2 high jump attempts and then qualify to get the mole out - without that I'm sure i could get a higher point on the high jump and probably further on the Javelin but it would not make much of a difference overall for score

I wont have a chance today but at some point this week i'll pull out my arcade stick and have a game and screencap each score

Thanks zaphod

There must have been a technical issue with my PC or something, hence my shit position in the overall leaderboard.

My chum was over last weekend for his annual visit, needless to say the old chipped XBox was fired up for some MAME action.

Track & Field formed part of the schedule.

Even with this thread open on my PC featuring zaphod's step by step guide, even with me referring to it before I started the high jump, even with the HORRIBLE LAUGHTER OF MY MATE REVERBERATING IN MY DESPERATE BRAIN, I still couldn't do it.

I got over the bar once, which is better than I've ever done before, but I didn't qualify.

He sailed over the bar about seven times, just to mock me.

Don't be disheartened, I find that the Xbox pad isn't the best for playing MAME. For instance, I struggled to pull off Hagars piledrive in Final Fight. The buttons just seem a bit too spongy.

I whipped his arse at most other games though, and took this year's championship in fine style, so it was all good in the end.

Final score was 29-21, which is a massive margin to win by. (Usually it goes right down to the wire.)

We pretty much play the same games every year, Track & Field, Hyper Sports and Football Champ in MAME on the old chipped XBox, Worms 2 Armageddon and Fight Night Round 4 on the 360, pool and darts at the pub. New entries for this year were Pinball Arcade (360) and 3D Ultra Minigolf 2 (360). 3D Ultra Minigolf 2 in particular we really had a blast with - highly recommended if you have someone to play it with.

In fact, Track & Field is the only game he can consistently beat me at. And pool at the pub, he almost always beats me at that.

Any chance of you doing another one of these Zaphod? I've jailbrokified the old ipad and now have MAME on it - I'd be very much interested in joining in if you do a new challenge.

Yeah - at some point in the next few weeks i'll get things setup

Excellent, thanks - look forward to it.

Just in case anyone else has been having trouble getting Williams games to work in imame4all (in my case it was Robotron and Defender), it's easy, and this short youtube video shows you how.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwtPFz4eVhU

If enough people are still interested in this i'll put together a nomination thread at some point today / tomorrow - probably 5 or 6 weeks worth of games - try to make them all icade friendly and i'll either put links up to or put a download link up for a 'unzip and run' version for Windows and the roms if you want to run it on something else

I'm definitely still interested if we can get enough people in, count me in if it takes place. Cheers Zaphod.

Most definitely in... Every time I see this thread appear, I hope that it's for a new tournament. Looking forward to it Zaphod.

Some reading while your waiting - The Registers top 20 arcade games (with many notable omissions)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/05 ... _classics/