WTF?!? Tilt!

[simplygriff]

So a buddy and I were playing Ninja Warriors (you know you gotta love cyborg ninjas) last night for about an hour.  We had to be getting very close to the end.  When all of a sudden the screen goes black and tilt is all that is on the screen.  The game  then proceeds to reset and we're back at the beggining.  Booo!!!

I posted this little tale in software because after this incident my controls were f'd up.  I mean bad.  In mamewah scroll up was now random game, left was restart the music, right was switch to custom list etc. etc.  I mean it went berzerk.  I figured out that I had configured a button through JoytoKey to be "T" which was mame's setting for tilt in the game.  I changed this so it wouldn't ever happen again. I wound up rebooting the computer and everything is fine now but I've got a few questions.

1.  Why is there a tilt button in an arcade game?  I understand pinball but not Ninja Warriors.

2.  What could have caused my controls to go haywire?  This was just bizarre.

3.  Just how long is Ninja Warriors?  That game seemed to go on forever.

[Soulcon]

1. Tilt I think is one of those Hard to emulate in specific games so M.A.M.E. made a hard button for just that instance. So when you accedently tilted it via CP usage it sorta confused your current settings.

2. Since you are most likely using USB when it reset in mid game and wasn't a normal setup option. EX. Tilt for mame. It confused itself and put a tempory wrong coding for codes in the ram version of Ipac you might have. Simply reseting the ground or unplugging the USB controller might have fixed it as well.

3. Most games are 7 to 9 stages long but can be multi stages. I think Ninja Warriors is 7 stages but with certain stages being longer then others or split up into multiple stages. Sorta like Darius where you can sorta spit up or down to go to the next stage but its actually the same stage.

Hope that helps.

-Soul

[simplygriff]

That's probably exactly what happened.  I'm using Playstation to USB adapters.  It did freak me out for a little bit but we ended up just laughing aobut it so I thought I'd share.  Thanks for the info Soulcon.
-G

[SirPoonga]

1.  Why is there a tilt button in an arcade game?  I understand pinball but not Ninja Warriors.

Same reason it is in pinball, so you don't abuse the machine.

[simplygriff]

So having a specified button for this is just an effort to preserve the way the machine worked originally.  That's cool I just wish I had known about it.  Any other games that have tilt?  And is the default setting for this always t?  is that a setting I can change in the tab menu under general?
-G

[SirPeale]

Quite a few games had a tilt sensor.  Really it's not much more than a weighted leaf switch.  A lot of Williams doors had them.  Pretty much a hard blow would connect the two points, and either the controls would lock up, your game would end, or like in your case dump you back to the beginning.

[SirPoonga]

Actually, many of them used the same plumb bob system that pinballs do.  The main reason for this was for some coin doors it was possible to get more credits by slamming the cabinet pretty hard.

[fredster]

Peale has it right.

If you hit some of the coin doors hard enough, you'd get a credit.  The bounce would flip the switch.  They added these leaf switches to about every original midway game I've seen and some of the williams.

You could also drill a hole in a quarter and put a string on it and just hit that little switch with it over and over and play for free.  Sometime in the early 80's they develped the "cutter" coin mech that would prevent that.

When some of the games are tilted, they just say "game over".

[APFelon]

Yep... I remember when I was younger playing the original Rampage with 2 complete strangers. We were pretty far along and I put in another quarter. It got stuck.

After a few blows to the coin door with the palm of my hand, I tilted the machine... I ruined the game for two people I didn't know, PLUS I lost my quarter (it cleared the mech and fell into the coin bucket).

Some machines had an alarm, like Asteroids. You pound on that puppy, and it'd beep at you.

APf