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btime: MAME ROM Information.

History:

Burger Time (c) 1982 Data East.

Burger Time is a platform game in which one or two players take on the role of burger chef 'Peter Pepper'. The chef must create a set number of burgers per level by collecting the four separate ingredients needed to make each one (two pieces of bun, the burger itself and a garnish, such as lettuce or cheese).

Each screen is made up of platforms joined by connecting ladders. At the bottom of the screen are a number of empty plates while the burger ingredients lay across the platforms directly above the plates. The Chef must walk across the entire width of the ingredients to make them drop to the platform below. A burger is only completed once all four of its ingredients have been dropped onto the corresponding plate at the bottom of the screen.

The chef's efforts are hampered by the rogue ingredients that are constantly chasing him. These are called 'Mr Hotdog', 'Mr Egg' and 'Mr Pickle' and any contact with them results in the loss of a life. The chef can temporarily freeze the enemies by throwing salt at them. He only carries a limited amount of salt but this can be replenished by collecting the bonus food items that randomly appear. In addition to the salt, any enemies located on a platform below the chef can be killed by dropping an available burger ingredient on top of them.

Enemies become more numerous and faster moving as the levels progress.

- TECHNICAL -

Main CPU : M6502 (@ 1.5 Mhz)

Sound CPU : M6502 (@ 500 Khz)

Sound Chips : (2x) AY8910 (@ 1.5 Mhz)

Screen orientation : Vertical

Video resolution : 240 x 240 pixels

Screen refresh : 57.00 Hz

Palette colors : 16

Players : 2

Control : 4-way joystick

Buttons : 1 (PEPPER)

- TRIVIA -

Released in November 1982, the game was originally titled 'Hamburger' in Japan, but was renamed 'Burger Time' before being introduced to the United States.

Burger Time was originally made for the Deco Cassette System ("Burger Time (DC)"), an early arcade format that pulled the game data from audio cassettes. The cassette system enjoyed a brief bit of popularity, until it was discovered that the cassettes quickly wore out, rendering the game useless. Bally Midway licensed this title soon after its original release, and redesigned the hardware to drop the cassette altogether. This version of the game sold vast quantities when compared to the original. There was also a bootleg version of this game that bore the title "Cook Race".

Bryan Wagner holds the official record for this game with 11,512,500 points on September 19, 2008.

A sequel called "Pizzatime" was planned around 1984 but was never released.

Have you ever wondered why one of the enemies is an egg? In Japan where the game was made, it is common to add a fried egg to your burger. Hence, Mr. Egg as one of the enemies.

- UPDATES -

* The Bally Midway licensed version has a different attract mode.

* If you run out of pepper in the Bally Midway licensed version, a special sound effect will play, signaling this.

- SCORING -

Stacking a burger ingredient : 50 points per ingredient

Crushing Mr. Hot Dog : 100 points

Crushing Mr. Pickle : 200 points

Crushing Mr. Egg : 300 points

Collecting Ice Cream : 500 points

Collecting Coffee : 1,000 points

Collecting Fries : 1,500 points

Dropping Ingredient with 1 enemy on top : 500 points

Dropping Ingredient with 2 enemies on top : 1,000 points

Dropping Ingredient with 3 enemies on top : 2,000 points

Dropping Ingredient with 4 enemies on top : 4,000 points

Dropping Ingredient with 5 enemies on top : 8,000 points

Dropping Ingredient with 6 enemies on top : 16,000 points

and so on...

- TIPS AND TRICKS -

* 'Mad Dash' : J.D. Lowe, the current world record holder adds some suggestions... Something that very few players use is something I call 'Mad Dash'. If you watch as the chef is drawn on the screen, he walks up/down ladders at approx. 8 steps a second. So, in theory, if you can press the up and down arrows faster than 8 times a second, you can go faster. This is very helpful on later levels like Level 20. This does not work on going left and right, because the steps are smaller, and the computer has to draw the chef facing you again if you let go of the controller. It's a bit complicated, but like I said earlier, it can be very helpful.

* Pepper Appearances : The peppers do not appear randomly on the screen; in fact, they appear after so many ingredients have fallen to the bottom of the screen...

Level 1 - Peppers appear after 4, 8, and 12 ingredients have dropped.

Level 2 - After 5, 7, and 13 ingredients.

Level 3 - 4, 8, and 13.

Level 4 - 6, 16, 22, and 29.

Level 5 - 3, 6, and 9.

Level 6 - 3, 7, 12, and 14.

* Enemies can't turn around immediately, so you can follow them around temporarily.

* The best tactic is generally to stand halfway across a piece of food, wait for enemies to appear on the burger piece's edge, and then drop the burger piece and the enemies at once. Always lure the enemies onto the highest portion of the screen, and then drop them. This has several advantages : it clears more burger pieces, plus it means that units on lower levels may wander into the cascading pieces, killing them also.

* Leave plenty of room around yourself when going up ladders - the sprites in Burger Time are somewhat bigger than the visible characters.

* When enemies first appear, you have 1/4 sec to go through them, if you need to.

* IMPORTANT : If you get caught by an enemy while the last piece of food is falling into place, the game will NOT deduct a life from your game!

- SERIES -

1. Burger Time (1982)

1. Burger Time [Cassette No.26] (1982)

2. Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory [Cassette No.39] (1984)

3. Super Burger Time (1990)

- PORTS -

* Consoles :

Colecovision (1982)

Atari 2600 (1982)

Mattel Intellivision (1982)

Nintendo Famicom (1985)

Nintendo Game Boy (1991, "Burger Time Deluxe")

Sony PlayStation (1997, "Arcade's Greatest Hits - The Midway Collection 2")

Sony PlayStation 2 (2005, "Oretachi Game Center Zoku - Burger Time")

Atari 7800 (2005, "Beef Drop")

Nintendo Wii (2010, "Data East Arcade Classics")

* Computers :

PC [Booter] (1982)

PC [MS-DOS] (1982)

Apple II (1983)

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (1983)

Commodore C64 (1984)

BBC B (1984, "Mr. Wimpy" - Ocean)

Acorn Electron (1984, "Mr. Wimpy" - Ocean)

Oric (1984, "Mr. Wimpy" - Ocean)

Sinclair ZX Spectrum (1984, "Mr. Wimpy" - Ocean)

PC [CD-Rom] (1997, "Arcade's Greatest Hits - The Midway Collection 2")

MSX ("Mac Attack")

VTech Laser-VZ ("Hamburger Sam")

Amstrad CPC

* Others :

LCD handheld game (1982) released by Mattel.

LCD Handheld Game (1982) by Bandai.

VFD Portable Game (1983) by Bandai.

- SOURCES -

Game's rom.

Machine's picture.

MAME Info:

0.35 [Nicola Salmoria]

0.11 [Mirko Buffoni, Kevin Brisley, Nicola Salmoria]

Artwork available

TEST MODE:

- In test mode, press 5 to advance through the various tests.

Bugs:

- btime, bnj: According to manuals, btime & bnj Service dips should have a different effect. Source (ID 02598)

WIP:

- 0.142u5: Aaron Giles fixed save state does not work correctly in Burger Time and clones.

- 0.138: Burger Time background vertical offset was off by one pixel, burger parts positions are correct now. This also means Peter Pepper awkwardly walks in the air, which is the way it is on the PCB [Hap].

- 0.130u1: Anoid added resistor values measured on real PCB to Burger Time.

- 0.126u3: Changed name of dipswitch 'Cabinet' to 'Control Panel'.

- 16th December 2007: Mr. Do - Revisited Burgertime, fixing some colors and text, and adding back in some minor missing elements.

- 0.101u3: Fixed cpu2 rom address in clone Cook Race.

- 0.97u1: ShimaPong fixed input in clone Cook Race.

- 18th August 2001: Zsolt Vasvari updated the 6502 CPU core so that another hack could be removed from the Burger Time decryption.

- 31st January 2001: Juergen Buchmueller further fixed the i8x41 core and hooked some parts of the DECO cassette system to the Burger Time driver.

- 8th July 1999: Zsolt Vasvari fixed Burger Time sprite placement in cocktail mode.

- 0.35fix: Renamed (btime) to (btimem).

- 0.35: Renamed (btimed) to (btime) and (btimed2) to (btime2)

- 5th March 1999: Aaron Giles has fixed more drivers to work with rotation handling (galaga, frogger, burger time and their clones).

- 0.35b2: Added cpu1 rom (32bytes - reset/interrupt vectors) and prom ($20 - unknown) to Cook Race.

- 0.35b1: Nicola Salmoria added clone Burger Time (Data East set 1). Changed description of clone 'Burger Time (Data East)' to '(Data East set 2)'. Renamed (btimea) to (btimed2). Version (set 1) is a different ROM set, without Midway copyright and different attract mode. Version (set 2) is the same as (set 1), but with two instructions NOPed out (function unknown). Cook Race is a bootleg of the cassette version (different hardware and different gameplay).

- 0.34RC1: Nicola Salmoria changed description of clone 'Hamburger' to 'Cook Race'. Renamed (hamburge) to (cookrace). Cook Race is running on different hardware and with levels in different order. Known issues: No high score save in Cook Race.

- 0.33b7: Cocktail mode support in some games (btime, etc.) [Martin Sandiford].

- 0.33b3: Zsolt Vasvari added proper emulation of the ROM decryption in Burger Time.

- 0.31: Added clone Hamburger. Game doesn't work and the roms seem to be encrypted.

- 0.29: Lives left are correctly displayed in Burger Time, sprites are turned off appropriately, and the switch test in test mode works correctly. The hardware of this game is more similar to Eggs than I thought [Nicola Salmoria].

- 0.23: Some fix to Burger Time sound pitch.

- 0.16: Various fixes to Burger Time [Nicola Salmoria]: Fixed CPU clock speed to avoid slowdowns on fourth level. It's much faster on a 486. Sprites no longer "stick" on the screen on a level change. Fixed a bug in high score save. DELETE BTIME\BTIME.HI, OTHERWISE THE HIGH SCORE TABLE WILL BE CORRUPTED. Fixed a couple of bugs in M6502 BCD arithmetic. One of them was causing the pepper counter in Burger Time to behave strangely. Known issues: The way I turn sprites off is not correct.

- 0.15: Nicola Salmoria added high score saving to Burger Time.

- 0.14: Nicola Salmoria fixed bug which sometimes caused 6502 games not to run (actually they did run, but interrupts didn't happen).

- 0.13: Added Burger Time (Data East), which is likely an earlier version. Fixed all of the problems in Burger Time related to ROM encryption [Nicola Salmoria]. Slices fall more than one level when an enemy is on them, no more crashes when a bonus life is earned, the high screen table works, two players mode works, and other things. Use latest version of Marat's 6502 engine [Nicola Salmoria].

- 0.12: Sound support in Burger Time [Nicola Salmoria]. This is the first multiple CPU game supported by MAME (two 6502, one for code, one for sound). It's not perfect, but we're getting there. Also, as you can guess, this is slow. A 486/100 cannot handle it at 60 fps. Runs reasonably with -frameskip 1, though. Fixed speed in Burger Time (was running at about half the real speed). Modified the engine to automatically cache an interrupt request and execute it as soon as interrupts are enabled. I had already done a similar change to the 6502 engine, it was needed by Burger Time which wouldn't accept coins otherwise. Added missing gfx1 rom ab11.12k.

- 0.11: Mirko Buffoni provided a driver for Burger Time (Midway) (Midway 1982). Game is playable with sound. The colors for Burger Time should be accurate [Nicola Salmoria], but I'm not quite sure - can anyone confirm? Info on Burger Time taken from Replay 0.01a by Kevin Brisley. There are the same problems with ROM encrypton that Replay 0.01a by Kevin Brisley has. I'm not yet sure whether the ROMs are actually encrypted or just corrupted... also, one of the graphics ROMs is missing. Note: Actually Burger Time uses RAM, not PROMs to store the palette. However the game doesn't seem to use this feature, so we don't care to emulate dynamic palette adjustments. The palette RAM is connected with resistors to the RGB output.

Other Emulators:

* Retrocade

Recommended Games:

Burger Time

Burger Time (DECO Cassette)

Super Burger Time

Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory (DECO Cassette)

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Povar / Sobrat' Buran / Agroprom (Cookie)

Romset: 52 kb / 15 files / 19.8 zip

MAME XML Output:

<description>Burger Time (Data East set 1)</description>

<manufacturer>Data East Corporation</manufacturer>

</input>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</game>

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