Ballblazer: odd audio behavior influenced by a previously loaded game about nes_mister HOT 4 CLOSED

After some testing, it seems that this game does indeed randomly generate its music, just like the 7800 version. It's seeding its random values based on the state of the ram, which is "undefined" on system power up for the NES. The NES core does not clear RAM by default between games loaded to somewhat emulate that Z-state ram on startup, and this is what you are seeing here. Lot Lot is initialing the part of ram it uses to a fixed value when you load it, then when you switch bad, ballblazer is creating a pretty unappealing but deterministic melody from it :)

NES.zip

To see for yourself, try this build, and use the "ram clear" value under advanced. This isn't really a bug but just amusing original behavior.

from nes_mister.

I see, with your build it does indeed play music cleanly. I assume that these advanced options are going to appear in the future core release or they are just there for debugging purposes? I feel like it is not really possible to achieve the same behavior in real life with a Famicom and two game cartridges to load Ballblazer with Lot Lot's RAM state, so a RAM clear option could be useful in such edge cases.

from nes_mister.

they will eventually make their way into the main build, as they are useful for a lot of RNG manipulation type of things that speedrunner types love.

from nes_mister.

Okay, if that's the case then I will close this issue as the culprit and solution are already known. Thank you very much for quick response.

from nes_mister.