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When I was devising unlimited lives cheat, I found a back door already in place which grants you 100 lives if you type a certain 18 char string. Dangerous, because the S and F keys will end your game. Typing ...
V I R G I N I A A N N A R I D I N O for 100 lives
... but the display isn't updated til the next bunny dies.
CHEAT MODE unlimited lives, find 2 instances of this sequence $"CE 03 4C", change both bytes $CE to become $AD. Within 33308 size files, these are offset $D06 and $EEA. |
| Another long comment, this download can be scrubbed clean of many hundreds of junk bytes at file's start and file's end, and secondly, I can describe how to modify these file versions to make a low resolution color conversion which looks beautiful. Other LRCC's have ugly colors and corrupt bits, visible in one game file which couldn't keep score right. Super Bunny is Perfect for practicing with LRCC's, there are no DLI's and incidentally the color registers $2Cx are NOT used at all, colors are programmed entirely with the hardware $D016-D01A which must mean the game is played with Vertical Blank Interrupt turned off, no VBI and no DLI.
Clean up this download 37354 byte file, this is not OEM it has been cracked and left in a mess. To the best of my knowledge Super Bunny is one large segment using addresses $2D00 thru $AF0F, starts execution at $2D00, and trapping the Reset button is not possible. I think the OEM floppy disk has an intricate hi res loading animation which ain't in working order in this file.
Create a new file beginning with these 6 bytes : $FF FF 00 2D 0F AF, skip past the first 2970 bytes of the download, copy the next 15745 bytes to the destination file, skip 4 bytes (a defunct segment header) while writing 133 Zeros to the destination, copy the next 17418 bytes, discard everything left over in the source, complete the destination file with a run pointer 6 more bytes $"E0 02 E1 02 00 2D". This elegant new file can load from DOS menus and is 6+15745+133+17418+6 = 33308 bytes, reduced from 37354 originally.
PATCH HACK Super Bunny low resolution color conversion, very cool companion to the hi res file. Offsets reflect the 33308 file (described above), but other files such as the one presently downloadable could be modded observing their correct offsets for editing.
Edit the Display List, it occupies offsets $5709 thru $57CC - change both instances of #$4F to become #$4E , and , change every #$0F to #$0E (there are hundreds of these bytes needing to be changed). Now make four (4) edits to coloration, then you'll be done.
1. offsets $1915-1917 change $"8E 17 D0" to $"EAEAEA"
2. offsets $1929-192B change $"8E 17 D0" to $"EAEAEA"
3. offsets $1978-1985 change $"A9 0E 8D 17 D0 8D 18 D0 8D 16 D0 8D 19 D0" to become $"EA A9 34 8D 16 D0 A9 5E 8D 18 D0 EA EA EA"
4. offsets $19B1-19B9 change $"8D 17 D0 8D 18 D0 8D 00 D4" to become $"8D 00 D4 EA A9 98 8D 17 D0"
Color values here are great, not the mess described in older comments. I ripped these colors off one corrupt version I found. No more blue carrot. You can experiment by changing these colors from their $34 $98 $5E values. Remember to play Super Bunny with keyboard, see keys in previous comment. |
| Strange controls, keyboard Or joystick, keyboard makes it easier to move with precision. On stick, fire button is for Pausing (strange), then keyboard Start button is required to unpause (stranger). Stick fire also enters letters into high score list. Keys:
Esc - pause
Start - unpause
S - stop game and show scores
F - restart
Left and Right arrows move
\ - backslash moves Left too
Return - input new high score
Many versions, none have titles, I think original was a disk and file versions have been "cracked". The one here is a file 37354 bytes, I also found a file 37376 bytes long in which the last 16 chrs pad the length to be multiple of 128 but the other 6 bytes are spread throughout the game file so I wonder if one file is broken or not.
Gameplay seems lame at first but improves. When you clear a screen (by punching every critter) the next screens get new and Larger critters (such as big cats and pythons). I'm into dissecting how programs work, so like "the Great Revealo" on the cartoon Futurama, here are tricks Super Bunny uses:
Bunny is white player missile, Bunny's red and blue cape like superman are PMG too. Artifacting dominates the screen and emulation can get quirky when PMG intersects artifacting but seems ok. Sometimes I die when I swear I made the jump onto some critter but that might be a feature read on.
High surface area of animation is made with 2 tricks. First the motion is all up/down not left/right, because the X axis in hi res is bigger than a 8 bit variable (320 > 256) the Y axis (192 < 256) has faster math in hi res. Second only the column which bunny is facing has critters that animate, and as bunny moves, animation switches to other critters, creating the illusion of widespread animation. Now one of the frames of critter animation might be an Attack Stance which you have to avoid? might be why I die when I think I shouldn't? |
| Super Bunny has two versions, one is high resolution with artifacting, and the other is a low res multicolor conversion made later. Although it's atarimania policy to record screenshots with artifacting disabled, the screenshots here are hi res with artifacts, and, possessing the correct colors, like "Ultima V", so I recommend keeping these photos as another example of how artifacting was meant to look. The low res color version like most every conversion for the European market swaps the blue and brown backwards, why do they think a carrot and a birds' legs and beak should be blue not brown? The color version also changes everything that had been white into green, except your player the bunny stays white.
Super Bunny was the first game program I ever saw that could animate hi res with artifacts. Up til then I assumed hi res couldn't be animated well enough to make a big arcade game. Since atarimania doesn't have any names to credit they might have the year wrong too and this hi res version should be older than 1984. I remember trying to show this to a schoolmate, but his dad had a hi res monitor which showed only gray instead of artifact color. I thought it had to be a gray scale (B&W) CRT but then he assured me it was a color CRT showing me color games in low res.
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| Missing original disk image! |
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