Sorry to start another thread, I don't know what the posting rules are around here, haven't been around long enough. But can anyone explain to me the inconsistincies between the Twin Galaxies' settings on the Cubeman page, and the Twin Galaxies settings on the actual Twin Galaxies page. I'm assuming we're going with Cubeman's, but does anyone know why TG's own site seems to have major rule differences? For example a game I'm working on right now, Bump and Jump according to Cubeman's should be set at: 3 lives, HARD difficulty, and extra lives only at 30,000. But on TG's site they site that the settings are(for Bump and Jump Arcade): Difficulty: 3, Lives 3 Is this because Cubeman's list is specifically for Mame's interpertation of the Dip's settings?

Thanks so much, s&m

-- Shooter Morpheus (shootermorpheus@yahoo.com), August 11, 2001

Answers

No, this is (at least I imagine) because TG never has their act together. Ask cubeman about the Joust highscore at the site. Go on, I dare you.

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), August 11, 2001.

Back in 1985 there was a TG cerlox binder with the rules used in the "1985 Video Game Masters Tournament". Each contest site was supposed to get a copy of rules. Unfortunately, not all contests sites had proper technicians to set the difficulty settings correctly.

The most famous example of this was colour vector game "Star Wars" where one contest site reported a score of over 31 million for David Palmer of Auburn California. Compare this to the current Funspot high score of 3.4 million. The settings were supposed to be 6 shields, no extra shields for destroying the death star, and difficulty level hard.

Now, as for "Bump N Jump" I refer to page 61 of the TG book (Sunstar Publishing 1998) where it says:

Bump N Jump (Midway) Diff: #3 hardest; Start: 3 cars; Bonus: limited, 1 car at 30,000

The listed high score is a somewhat inflated 2,413,182 points. These higher scores were most likely set with bonus cars every 30K. All the games I saw in North America were "Bump N Jump" but MAME says that the original game is "Burnin' Rubber". Both games appear identical. Looking at the TG web site, an even higher score 2,429,540 is listed by Marco Donadio. Unfortunately it's an old score from 1984 submitted from Italy, so I would imagine it's another case of bonus cars every 30K points. Ian Sutton appears to have the highest MAME score on "Burnin' Rubber" using the TG settings, but I haven't looked at the other inps.

I'm going to track scores for "Burnin' Rubber" as the official tournament rom for this particular game, and I'm going to track the scores for 1 clone "Bump N Jump". Possibly the scores will be merged together _if_ everyone is satisfied that both roms have the same gameplay.

Mark

-- Mark Longridge (zero1@look.ca), August 12, 2001.

One other point, in the roms "Burnin' Rubber" and "Bump N Jump" there is only an easy setting, or a hard setting, plus 3 dip switches which are unknown, so I'm not sure why TG refers to a difficulty #3. I haven't seen the original manual for either version, but I will check on wiretap now....

Ok, as you can see from http://www.spies.com/arcade/switchSettings/BumpNJump.txt

There isn't any difficulty #3, just easy or hard, so the TG information is a tad incorrect. The last 3 dip switches are referred to as RFU, and says "all should be off", so that will be official TG setting.

Mark

-- Mark Longridge (zero1@look.ca), August 12, 2001.

"But on TG's site they site that the settings are(for Bump and Jump Arcade): Difficulty: 3, Lives 3 Is this because Cubeman's list is specifically for Mame's interpertation of the Dip's settings?"

I'm keeping track of the MAME scores, but I don't make policy for arcade scores, Walter does. There's still a lot of work to be done to make the TG site more accurate. Ideally MAME scores and arcade scores should be comparable, but there are still some differents, which is why we track arcade scores and MAME scores separately. But assuming the emulation is accurate, there is only the controls which are really different. In almost all cases I find the real arcade controls are better, hence the arcade scores tend to be higher than the MAME scores, even using the same difficulty settings.

-- Mark Longridge (zero1@look.ca), August 12, 2001.