Ms. Pac-man control issues

[AtariKSI]

I have been playing the Ms. Pac-man cartridge on Atari 8-bit machines the past couple of weeks and once in a while it seems the joystick controls just go away for a half a second or so. This has led to quite a bit of frustration as I tried to set my own record for this game. I am moving along fine and all of a sudden, it just keeps moving when I turned or if Ms. pac-man is stuck in a corner, it won't move until about half a second later and in later levels this makes me lose a life. Has anyone else noticed this?

So far I have been able to get 154,040 maximum score in this game and if it wasn't for that glitch I could probably get higher.

[bmcnett]

I think I'll regret this.

Since I know you have these skills: I recommend playing the game in an emulator. If the emulator has no rewind feature, and it's open source, hack it to remember the last N seconds of machine state and play the game. When the glitch happens, rewind to the frame it happened and break into the debugger and figure it out. This is how we fixed bugs in professional development for Game Boy.

For a game like this with so little state, shouldn't be too hard. Release a patch and the world will thank you. Be careful to avoid unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials.

p.s. a video clip of the glitch on YouTube would be more informative than an image, and free of charge too.

[AtariKSI]

I'm sure there are many ways to get to the problem and fix it, but I don't disassemble to play around with other people's code. Also, I don't spend time with emulators as you are then dealing with potentially two problems at the same time. I just noticed a bit of the control issue in Oilswell as well but not as pronounced.

You turning over a new leaf as you seem to be behaving yourself now. I haven't been checking forums the past month due to being busy trying to fix computers/printers/etc.

[AtariKSI]

Here's my latest Ms. Pacman score for Atari 800. I actually got this last year but since the Retrocade magazine shut down, I'm posting it here. I posted most of my Atari 8-bit and Atari 5200 high scores on retrocademagazine's forums but they have disappeared like things and people tend to do in the material world.

196K obtained on Atari 800 Ms. Pacman cartridge played with CX40 joystick.

I had a good challenger there in retrocade so hopefully he'll see this and join.