Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone.  We got some good presents this year, mainly jumpers and a neat little usb vacuum for cleaning out your keyboard and that.  This is only a brief update so the main review of the year will go up tomorrow. 

Neo Geo X update. 
For those following the mini handhelds fortunes HG101 have a pretty impressive write up here. 

Bubble Bobble The lost cave. Revues, chips and teats.

We actually got this patched and playable in MameUIFX a fork off of the main mame project, we spent most of Xmas eve trying and failing to configure it for most other emulators and decided to cut out the middleman and put it in UIFX.  It works and can be found under bootlegs on the main menu screen.

In fact we don't remember any of the layouts except Level 9 (NES) a big brilliant red Maitta that is harder than the level was.  Most of the other levels are not the best and are actually quite hard (definitely later levels it seems), but its quite nice and best of all it has NES style lives progression.  Because I'm a massive Bubble Bobble nerd I know these to be granted at 30,000, 100,000 200,000 and 400,000 along with any you'd get from extend bubbles.  Our top score is about 400,000 odd or level 17. 

Here are some more findings and a brief list of bonuses encountered.

End of level bonuses.

You seem to get these on every fifth stage, these are standard bonuses and not the sort you get for matching the last few digits of your score or player 2's score.

1. Gameboy
5. Popcorn
10. Lollipop (round shape)
15. Bananas

Neat regular score bonuses.

As well as a few musical bonuses such as tubas and ocarinas we've found some nice bonuses to increase your score.

Ptolemy from Fairyland Story.  Worth 4000 points. (don't believe wiki here she doesn't show up in the original game.)
Purple PC. Looks like a purple version of one of the highscore bonus items. worth 4000
5.25 floppy disk.  Don't know how much its worth.

Bonus round Drug score bonuses.

In the NES version these would show up around level 45. But I've actually got a few of these in the arcade version. They give you a bouns round and the chance for an extra life if you catch em all.

Red Drug.  Tuliips
Purple Drug. Sunflowers.

We also got a fire bubble, the kind that actually shows up once in every 4096 games.  It gives you the ability to spit fire (red cross powers) untill you die. Its rather nice and is worth 10,000 points.

We got a few other stuff including most of the wizard canes, a bell that highlights rare stuff and a Chack'n pop invincible heart.  We haven't found any secrets yet but so far I am enjoying this immensly even though its much tougher than the original.