CONTENT
By David Winter

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on David's site, Pong-Story, in early 2003. It's no longer available there, but David gave me permission to publish it here. You can view an archive of the original article here.

K.C.MUNCHKIN "Old Version"

This version seems to be same than Version A described below. It only differs by two points, as explained by Soeren Gust.
First, the lower 2K eprom is protected by a small address encryption where both A6 and A7 lines are inverted.
Second, unused space is filled with 00 bytes, whereas Verison A has random bytes.

K.C.MUNCHKIN Version "A"

The screen-shots below show Version "A" of K.C. Munchkin. This is an early pre-release version. It is very similar to Pac-Man and each game selected after reseting the console has its own maze (here, game 0 is shown).

This version is fully playable, and suffers a joystick translation problem, as explained by Soeren Gust:

There are changes in the routine which translates the X/Y offsets returned by the joystick routine into a direction value which seems to be used in a lot of places. This is done by a lot of conditional jumps and is quite confusing. The new version is doing the condition check in another order. This allows a minor improvement: in the proto version up/down moves have always priority above left/right. If the joystick is moved diagonal, up/down is always chosen, even if the way is blocked there, which is checked later after the original joystick state is overwritten by other data. The new routine randomly chooses one of the two possible directions and ignores the other. The difference can be demonstrated by moving the player to a position where the way up is blocked, but at least one side is free. Move the joystick up then diagonal to the free side. In the proto version the player won't move; in Videopac #38 and K.C. Munchkin he will move sideways.
Everybody is ready to play Game 0!
Everybody is ready to play Game 0!
Oops, K.C. just got eaten...
Oops, K.C. just got eaten...
K.C. moving up like Pac-Man...
K.C. moving up like Pac-Man...
K.C. moving right, like Pac-Man...
K.C. moving right, like Pac-Man...
Now that K.C. got the pill, ghosts turn pink. Let's go eat them!!!
Now that K.C. got the pill, ghosts turn pink. Let's go eat them!!!
K.C. just got one... It's gonna blink until it revives...
K.C. just got one... It's gonna blink until it revives...

Last revision: 28 FEB 2003 on Pong-Story

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