Hi folks,

Thank you so much for the feedback so far. Here are some of my thoughts on the things that have been mentioned.

I'm getting a mixed response about the game speed - any more opinions out there about how fast the game should run? Yes, the button queuing was intentional.

Do others agree that the pause when eating a ghost is too long?

I see no mention about the control layout (on the remotes, the front panel doesn't leave many options), so should I take it that it is satisfactory, or is there a better layout someone can suggest?

As for the sound effects suggestion, I thought there was no need as it would be good enough just listening to your music collection. I'm not sure how to go about adding sound effects, but for someone whos keen enough I'm sure they can be implemented once I release the source.

The same goes for a few other suggestions like the high score table. As mentioned this would require mounting the drive as read/write, unless you don't mind the scores being wiped each time the machine reboots. I'd rather not tackle such technical issues but theres nothing stopping someone else from having a go.

The game doesn't have the same priority as the player software, so if the player is very busy, like spinning up the disk, then the game will freeze. I figured that this is an acceptable compromise, but others may disagree. I think this too will go in the same basket of leaving it to others who may have a bit more technical knowledge of such things than I do.

I don't want to cop out of making any changes myself, but I'd rather concentrate on less technical issues, on the game itself and ways the gameplay could be improved. Some things I thought of myself but didn't know if there would be a demand for would be some of the extra bonuses from the original that are absent, such as extra lives for reaching so many points, and the fruits.

It's encouraging to see that there aren't any reports of serious bugs. Would I be right in thinking that there is very little, if any, work that needs to be done? One thing I concentrated on was getting good behaviour for the ghosts, trying to mimic the different personalities of the original. I don't know how successful I've been. Do people find that the ghosts are challenging or too easy to beat?

As for the source code, I hope you guys can be patient with me as I don't have a lot of spare time to be spending on this project. I want to make the code much prettier before I release it, as parts got rather messy in my rush to finish the beta. A corresponding new version of vfdlib should also appear at the same time as I've found a few bugs in the bitmap handling in the course of writing empacman.

I'd like to think that once the source is out there it would give others the example they need to bring some more great apps to the empeg. At the very least it means that people will be able to customise empacman to their tastes - e.g. if you really want to change the game speed then changing a few constants and recompiling is all it would take.

About the installation process, I don't mind that this thread has raised the issue. I hope that there is now a higher incentive for a more user-friendly procedure to be devised. I applaud people for their attempts thus far. I believe the ultimate solution would be one where apps could be downloaded and configured from JEmplode, with no need for any other shell/ftp trickery.

Cheers guys,

Richard
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