Author Topic: 3-in-1 Playpower Help  (Read 816 times)

RZone

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3-in-1 Playpower Help
« on: August 13, 2023, 08:20:29 PM »
Hello
Is there anyone here that could please separate the 3 games into 3 separate playable roms.
I just can't seem to get it right

forgotusername

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Re: 3-in-1 Playpower Help
« Reply #1 on: August 14, 2023, 04:45:33 PM »
The games on this ROM appear to be built together, i.e. they cannot be completely separated from each other like most multicarts. Out of curiosity though, I messed with a debugger and found code to make the menu automatically load into each game:

Address line #1DEA0:
first two bytes to ff = hanuman quiz game
first four bytes to ff = malaria
first six bytes to ff = hanuman typing game

As such, I was able to get them into separate ROMs, but not in the conventional method as most multicart extracts. Additionally, I was able to trim Malaria into a smaller 40k file.

RZone

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Re: 3-in-1 Playpower Help
« Reply #2 on: August 14, 2023, 06:19:52 PM »
Alright!!! Thanks
I wonder if the other 2 can be trimmed as well?
Hanuman typing game does exists as a single rom somewhere and the size is 40,960 without the header
« Last Edit: August 14, 2023, 06:31:07 PM by RZone »

forgotusername

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Re: 3-in-1 Playpower Help
« Reply #3 on: August 14, 2023, 07:37:09 PM »
They could be trimmed theoretically, but it is difficult as certain parts of the games are effectively built into each other (for example, the Quiz Game title screen is connected directly to the 3-in-1 selection menu). The main reason I could trim Malaria is that it's towards the end of the PRG data, and it only uses 8k of CHR data.

As a side note, much of the source code for the Play Power is publicly available (seen at https://code.google.com/archive/p/playpower/source/default/source and http://playpower.pbworks.com/w/browse/#view=ViewAllObjects); I believe this is where the 3-in-1 ROM itself originated from. It's possible the games could be assembled directly as individual ROMs from the source, though that would be beyond my capabilities to do. Interestingly, a bunch of pre-assembled "prototypes" and test programs are in there, as well as various VT02 documents and whatnot...