hi all!

in answer to a question about bypassing the DECO system startup, some people said that to press F10 (to unthrottle your computer and let it run at full speed) could be 'illegal' !??!!

well, i press F10 in quite a lot of games, to speed up things after i lose a life, or to bypass the 'this game legal only in such'n'such countries' screen... so far i didn't encounter any problems re: playbackability (nice word ;] )

so, what's the official opinion about this ? oliver

-- ozz (grand_leader@earthling.net), July 19, 2001

Answers

i don't think the F10 key is dangerous in terms of cheating? or for playbackability (using frameskip or not to record doesn't appear to make a difference in playing back only when playing back sometimes fs=0 is needed), but the issue is it's not those; it's that F10 isn't a true arcade experience. weather or not people get bored/impatient waiting for things to happen (levels to clear, roms to load); there wasn't an F10 key in the arcades. i personally don't mind it as long as the recording will playback at normal speed. But i believe recordings have been dqed in tournaments for using F10.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), July 19, 2001.

Mr Do! is a case in point here. The current marp high score for the parent rom set is over 6 million which I estimate would take over 4 hours to get in the arcades. If it wasn't for those damn intermissions (4 out of every 10 scenes plus one more for each extra man) then the total time could be reduced to nearer 3 hours. A similar argument can be used for other games, eg. Bombjack. The use of speed throttling through the intermissions would therefore be a great help in reducing the total time for a marathon game.

Personally I would frown on the use of speed throttling or the use of pause because as Chad says, it was not available in the arcades. Besides I would not feel satisfied that a score is genuine if I used either technique. Just make sure that you're comfortable and have an empty bladder before starting a marathon recording on MAME just as you would if in an arcade otherwise what's to stop you leaving your machine on pause overnight and stretching a game over a few days or weeks, that's just ridiculous.

-- LordGaz (garyjlee@hotmail.com), July 20, 2001.

I do have an issue with hitting F10 during a game... I don't with hitting it before a game starts, unless it affects recording/verification somehow. You didn't have to be in the arcade for the machine startup, generally. Unless you were a hardcore, that is.

Beejay: I tried Hero back at the start of this year and didn't like it much. Always feel claustrophobic in those 'one-wrong-path-choice- and-you're-dead' games, and don't find them much fun. Then again, I'm probably just too lazy to learn patterns. :)

Right now I'd like to try and watch Vaz's Operation: Wolf .inp to see how the heck he got past the second cycle, but I haven't had any luck with the playback. Can anyone else see this one?

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), July 20, 2001.