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Old footage of the mythic UMK3 Chicago Wavenet machine, and my thoughts about it.

was this man completely bald, dark skinned, kind of chubby (like, michael jordan bald?) i'm from michigan and there was a short (not much taller than I was, and i was 14) black guy who used to play umk3 at an aladdin's castle, and he played like the a.i., and he would crush the cpu with scorpion on regular umk3. i never beat this man...ever. lol. he used to work at a J.W. clothing store, and he would come to the arcade on his break. i wouldn't put it past that dude to have driven to chicago to play wavenet.
No he had short hair and he worked at a local UPS facility.

Now we have alot info on the same thread.
Here are some pictures I promised. Sorry for the wait I was busy with last minute holiday things. The quality is not the best its from an iphone4 camera. One off and one on.



 

Tim Static

Adminerator
the best players were from north pier
All i can say is you, [MENTION=3427]MOE30W[/MENTION], [MENTION=446]colt[/MENTION] and everyone else that was any good at this game better be at Season's Beatings 7 next October. Its gonna be the biggest UMk3 throwdown in the history of the game.

PS- bout damn time you showed up in this thread, Mr Texas. :)
 

MKK hanzo

Moderator
Great thread! Here are some facts about MK3 and UMK3 Wavenet that i got from various people and old internet sources:

1. WaveNET Stands for Williams (! not Midway) Action Video Entertainment NETwork

2. UMK3 Wavenet - You need 3 tokens to start, then after 10 wins, the message: "Kontinue your Winning Streak!" comes up, and you have to put in 2 more tokens to continue playing, and then every 5 wins after that, you have to put in two more tokens to continue.

3. UMK3 Wavenet - When u try an infinite combo (Kung Lao's or Stryker's) a whistle will blow and say "Stop Cheating" and a few others messages, including KMD. What KMD is, I doubt someone know lol

4. UMK3 Wavenet - Hall of fame - Wait for the "MK3 Wavenet Edition" screen. Press and hold at that moment start, right, and the rest of the buttons except for LP. Keep holding till it happens, if you see the demo, then something went wrong, try again. The screen starting flashing through different stages. Like it does when u put in a UKK. Then Raiden, Rain, and Noob popped out and perforem their winning stances. Then a MK1 and MK2 arcade machine fell behind them.

5. UMK3 Wavenet - Do the same as the above one, but instead of doing it on the title, do it before the title. You'll notice that instead of "Wavnet Edition" it'll say "Nitro Edition".

6. UMK3 Wavenet - Before the machine boots, press and hold RUN, once it boots, instead of saying "Downloading Wavnet Data", it'll say "Rewinding Cassette Deck".

7. In UMK3 Wavenet people claimed that you could perform Babality AND Mercy, however, this is not working in Revision 1.1 and 1.2. In MK Trilogy for N64 you can perform Friendship and Mercy.

8. MK3 Wavenet probably had some gameplay changes as well, because people said Cyrax's throw juggled the foe higher, and Nightwolf's 3rd axe has difficult times to connect.

9. The Wavenet was implemented for Mortal Kombat 3 and San Francisco Rush somewhere in the spring of 1996. Somewhere around August for UMK3.

10. MK3 used a really weird processor called a 34010 from Texas Instruments. However, the game designers pretty much pushed the CPU to its max before the Wavenet Group (thats the team for Wavenet) had a chance to make it a networked game. There wasn't enough RAM, CPU, or ROM (for networking code) left to do it, as well as this board didn't have an ethernet output on it to connect it up to the router. Midway ended up designing a tiiiiny little board (running a small embedded OS that just translated game commands into TCP/IP and vice versa) that plugged into an expansion connector on the MK3 board. It had an Ethernet controller, some ram, more ROMs for the networking code and a 386SX CPU made by AMD on it.

11. UMK3 Wavenet gameplay changes had Kung Lao's Spin disabled after 3 hits, Stryker's Gun after 5 hits, before Kabal performs his Spin you hear a sound.

12. UMK3 Wavenet - There was an option to change your nickname during the match, and some players often did that so they dont get the loss.

13. Unconfirmed stuff - Ermac's TKS had larger area. You can do 99% combos but, then it just stops doing damage, the opponent will stay on danger no matter if the juggle continue. 12 Wavenet UMK3 machines and 8 MK3 Wavenet Machines total. Noob Saibot's Teleport move had a hit limit.
They copied that from Primal Rage? Wow
 
No he had short hair and he worked at a local UPS facility.



Here are some pictures I promised. Sorry for the wait I was busy with last minute holiday things. The quality is not the best its from an iphone4 camera. One off and one on.



Wow thank you for these pics, including the readable "Who will rule the net" text.
Both pictures can maybe be combined to a blinking sign ( .gif file :p ) .
It wasnt as thick as I thought it would be, but never the less cool.

You were lucky to live close to were the wavenet games was released.
 

Carefoot

http://youtube.com/nickcarefoot
An MK9 Wavenet cabinet should and would be awesome. Just because I think this game would be fun alongside Tekken and Street Fighter at modern FG coin operated arcades. As much as I enjoy the home arcade idea going to my local arcade is fun to battle nerds.
 

YourMKArcadeSource

Your Source For All Things MK Arcade Related
Just got in touch with someone who was involved with the production and testing of MK3/UMK3. I asked him about Wavenet and looks like we've been totally wrong about it for a long time. Here is the info on it directly from the horse's mouth....

"I can tell you about the Wavenet though. I am pretty sure it was based off of regular MK3 and not UMK3 (my memory is a bit fuzzy in my old age). There were no games in CA from what I remember unless they had a machine hooked up at Atari which is doubtful. We had a game in the lunchroom at Midway and then at Diversions, Dennis on Belmont St, Gala North, Gala West, and Friar Tucks. The games were hooked up via ISDN lines that Midway paid to have installed at these locations. I don't know why and how people keep thinking they were T1's but I've corrected people on this fact countless times.

Ed hacked together a playable Noob Saibot character for the Wavenet MK3 but that was his only involvement with it. The Wavenet group did all the work to make it run on their wavenet network. It was very laggy which resulted in things like Kabal being nearly invincible because you couldn't block his dash move up close because of the lag. A programmer at Midway named Kevin Day made some hack "fixes" to the game to add delays to certain moves to try and counter the lag so moves couldn't be abused but it wasn't enough to make up for the lag. The reality was that technology and internet speed wasn't there yet for a game such as MK. It also didn't help that the wavenet group was run by a complete moron. They pissed away a shit ton of money on all this stuff that ended up tanking and getting cancelled both under the name Wavenet and then MTN (Midway Tournament Network).

As for what happened to the hardware, that's a good question. I'm sure some ex-employee probably swiped a board set or two but that someone wasn't me (which is kind of shocking considering how much stuff I did get from that place over the years I worked there). Regardless though, whoever had it wouldn't be able to do a thing with it because the Wavenet network and infrastructure doesn't exist that ran the whole thing so it just be a fucked up MK3 that won't function correctly. It is likely that most of that stuff was destroyed and no one saved any of it. That place threw away just about everything and saved just about nothing for years, way before they went out of business."

So it appears that even if a Wavenet board showed up, it would be useless. Sad news, but now we can stop looking and move forward. Opinions?