David's Arcade Games

Ms. Pac-Man

I bought this game at an auction in August of 1996. Its pretty beat up, but I got it for fairly cheap as Ms. Pac-Mans (Ms. Pac-Men?) go because a) It looked bad, and b) it didn't work. Being my first game purchase, I was kind of nervous about buying a game that didn't work, but I figured what the heck.... When I got it home, all that turned out to be wrong was one of the daughterboards had been plugged in backwards! Of course this blew all the fuses in the power supply, but nothig else was hurt. Yea!

I'm in the midst of converting this game, so that it plays a multitude of other Pac-Man games. Heres what it can play so far (all are switchable by grounding, or pulling up just a few wires):

• Ms. Pac-Man
• Pac-Man
• Super Pac-Man
• Hangly Man (A Pac-Man Variant)
• Puckman (Another Pac-Man Variant)
• Pac-Man Plus

And of course, the speed variation for most of them.

Eventually it will also contain (as soon as I aquire the PCBs):

• Junior Pac-Man

So now that I have all the games switchable, how do I switch them? Well, I've been reverse engineering the Pac-Man motherboard so that I can write my own program that will print up a nice menu and let me select which game I want to play, after which it will switch to the game I selected. Sound cool? Well so far I've been able to write a program that displays text on the screen, take input from the joystick and player buttons, so I'm nearing my goal. Since I wish to share all the information and software I've gathered so far, here it is:

• Info on making your Ms. Pac-man machine easily switchable between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man.

  Note: there are just pictures here now, in JPEG and GIF format. The JPEGs are smaller and 24 bit, the gifs are bigger and only 8 bits, so you should only get them if your browser or support apps can't handle JPEG for some reason. Hopefully this will be a full fledged page with more written information soon. Right now, unless you can read schematics, it might not be that useful. Have fun!

• Memory Map

  - This is the how the memory space of Pac-Man (or Ms. Pac-Man... they're the same) is organized.

• Source Code

  - This is the current version of the source code for my test program. This source is in C! I found a C Compiler for the Z-80 on the net so I though I'd try it out. It is a horrendous compiler, but I'd rather use it than assembly.

• Test ROM

  - This is a binary image of the above test program that I used to burn the ROM for my Pac-Man board. It is not padded to the correct ROM size, but don't let that stop you from trying it out. If you actually go ahead and burn this into a ROM, you should install it at location 6E on you Pac-Man / Ms. Pac-Man board. Don't worry about the rest of the ROMs, they won't matter.

• Developement Environment

  - This is the source code for all the tools that I'm using to generate my test/menu programs. I have several packages available:
  • ZCC - ZCC is an implementation of the Small C Compiler (SCC) targeted to the z80. This package includes source code for the preprocessor, compiler, assembler, linker, and some other assorted tools.
    • Source and executables for Macintosh (You will need MPW Shell to use these!!!)
    • ZCC - Source and executables for MS-DOS. (Coming Soon!!!)
    • ZCC - Source only. Source files have unix EOLs. (Also coming soon)
  • stobin - stobin is a program to convert motorola "s record" (or .mot) formatted files to a straight binary format, suitable for blowing roms, or for using emulators. I hand converted this source code from a pascal program to c code, so theres lots of grossness about it. The variable names are all caps for instance. And it annoyingly relies on global variables for stuff. I wrote a much better converter for work, and I'll see about publishing that one instead.
    • Source and executable for Macintosh (You will need MPW Shell to use these!!!)
    • Source and executable for MS-DOS. (Coming Soon!!!)
    • Source only. Source files have unix EOLs. (Also coming soon)

• Character ROM displayer

  - I have also written a program in a gross combination of ANSI C and C++ to display the contents of the Character ROMS from Pac-Man / Ms. Pac-Man. I have a ASCII-Text version and a version for Macintosh that displays it as a bitmap (Not available yet). To use, run the program and enter the name of the ROM image (which must be in the same directory). It will open it up and try to display it a character at a time. Type return to go the next character. Type - return to go to the previous character. Type b to look at 4 characters together (for looking at the fruits). Type s to got back to small characters. These were written at 3 or 4 am and so the code is NOT pretty. Just a warning...

• Maze Displayer

  - This Mac-only application will read in a Pac-Man ROM and display the maze on the screen. It is the first step to my eventual goal of building a maze editor. Anyone interested in this? NOTE: I'm not putting up the source code for this yet because its possibly the worst code I have ever written in my life. I think it was 5 or 6am when this one got finished. I have a MacBinary version of it too.

You may be interested in Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man emulators. Check out "The arcade emulation programming repository". I have recently ported the Multipac emulator found there to Macintosh. It can also be found at this site, which is part of John Stiles emulation pages. If you're interested, I'd like to know about it -- Email me: david@porkrind.org. By the way, the Test ROM I mentioned above will work with the Multipac emulator. Make a directory called "test". Copy the test.bin file 4 times and name them test.6e test.6f, test.6h, and test.6j. Then copy in the standard pac-man roms .5e and .5f and name them test.5e and test.5f respectively. If you using multipac for the mac simply run the "Rom Converter". It might complain, but it will work. If your running multi-pac on the PC then you have to hack the code so it doesn't return an error when its reading in the file though (the file is not padded to the full length of the PROM). So don't bother unless you can re-compile the emulator (or pad the ROM Image to the correct length).
Also of interest might be Dave Spicers "Sparcade" emulator Page.

For other Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man information check out lawnmowermans page.

Tron

I bought this game at the same time I bought Ms. Pac-Man. Its really beat up, and I'm currently looking for new monitor bezels, a new blacklight, and possibly some new sideart. The game works great.

Sky Shark

Mr. Do!

These 2 games share a JAMMA cabinet that also houses my friends "Time Soldiers". I am in the midst of repainting this cabinet so that it looks half-way decent. Mr. Do's monitor orientation is opposite that of the "Sky Shark" and "Time Soldiers", so I just have to install some relays on my monitor or something to switch flip the picture vertically and horizontally. Yuch :-)

Ghosts 'n Goblins

Magic Sword

Black Tiger

These 3 games constitute my horizontal JAMMA games and are housed in a "Black Tiger" converted cabinet. Its a bit dirty at the moment, and there's a BIG spider inside, but other than that it works fine. Some day I'll get around to building a universal JAMMA switcher so I don't have to keep opening up the backs and switching the games in and out. By the way, in case you're thinking, "Ghosts 'n Goblins isn't a JAMMA game!", I'll tell you that it will eventually have JAMMA converter on it, and not a bunch of clip-leads, as it currently does!