Dav

Yep, if you can find someone throwing away a cabinet and an old pentium computer and you're handy with a soldering iron you can build one for pretty much nothing. On the other hand there's people that spend upwards of $3000.

I did the mspacman driver for Mame. I'm not a dev but I send them code occasionally. Mostly I break encryption for them, rather than write drivers. I did the 2 player simultaneous hack (mr & mrs pacman) that's in misfit mame. I designed the 96 in 1 pacman multigame that I've since sold to someone else. http://home.everestkc.net/mdoyle/multipac.htm It includes such hacks as a top 10 hi score list, player 2 control of the red ghost and pacman with 32 mazes. I helped Mike at www.fpgaarcade.com with his pacman on a chip testing. I've ported pengo to pacman hardware, done about 5 or 6 homebrew games for pacman hardware. I've probably dissasembled the entire mspacman at one time or another, I don't keep very good notes though. I have seen the original source code for ms pac too I've been hanging over here for the past few weeks because some friends asked me to work on an atari project, it's almost done. I just haven't decided what to do with it yet.

I don't know I never tried it myself, I'm just taking his word for it. I have enough problems making mame work w/o leaning new emulators. He emailed me asking why the attract mode was different, I told him and he said he added the 8k into upper memory and it fixed it. Dave

I believe Opcode's is the second. I got an email from a guy a while back that was working on the same project for something called a SAM coupe. Whatever the heck that is. I think maybe you have to be British or else I wasn't paying attention. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.owen/sam/pacemu/ That's an emulator, though, running the Pac-Man ROMs. This project was written completely from the ground up, right? He's calling it an emulator, I wouldn't since it runs the code natively. The roms are patched to drive the computer hardware instead of a pacman board. I'm not sure what Opcode's doing, but to be frame perfect he's either working from the roms or the source. Either way the results are the same.

I believe Opcode's is the second. I got an email from a guy a while back that was working on the same project for something called a SAM coupe. Whatever the heck that is. I think maybe you have to be British or else I wasn't paying attention. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.owen/sam/pacemu/

I've got a turbo upright in Kansas City that will be joining that number soon if someone doesn't come get it. And a couple of others that I'll let go pretty cheap. I'm seriously out of room. I just had to bust up a pinball because I couldn't make any room for it.

That might be a problem then, there's no record on the deco cassette so you can't use it. Maybe that's why no one's done it.

It makes it real hard to reverse engineer the encryption. The tables are stored in battery backed ram inside an epoxy blob. If you try to dig out the ram to read the table there's a real good chance you will break the battery connection and the table disapears. I'm sure the fact that they'll make more money doesn't hurt either.

I don't know if anyone's tried that idea yet. Iirc there's some tricky stuff like clear tape of a certain length at the beginnning/end but seems like it would be doable. Especially if you had a broken tape to splice into. I like the rom board idea because the tape player's so slow. This is something people have talked about for a long time but no one's ever done anything about it. I need to send him another reminder email. I don't have time to work on it now though anyway, I'm working on a console based project full time right now. There's a pretty good description how it works in the mame source in machinedecocass.c but it's very difficult to read.

The only problem I've had with swapping jamma boards is that none of my cabs seem to have start buttons and I can't start a new game on some boards, but it looks like you have that covered.

http://emustatus.rainemu.com/deep/d_cassette.htm I had hoped to make a multigame for it. It seems simple enough, replace the ram with banked eproms, modify the bios to skip the tape boot, replace the dongle with banked proms. I don't think it's going to happen now though, too many other projects. With everyone building mame cabs it doens't really make sense to build multigames anymore.

A few questions... How much of the rom area is currently unused? If Ms.Pac is going to be attempted, any chance at including alternates? Like the original "Crazy Otto"? Or Ms.Pac Attack/Plus? Or 2 player simultaneous ms pac.

Every tape has it's own dongle for copy protection. Not that they needed it since no one has every been able to find blank tapes that fit those players. If I had to guess it sounds more like dongle since the tape loaded. On the other hand the tape is much more delicate than the dongle so it's kind of a toss up. The one in MAME with the bad dongle boots then flashes a screen a couple of times and crashes. I suppose you could try replaceing the prom with that one and see if it does the same thing as mame. Unfortunately my experience with deco is all theoreticaly, One of the mame devs is supposed to be sending me a working deco cassette but they haven't yet. Dave

The dongle contains a prom that loads important data. I'm not sure how important, ie if it's color tables like nintendo vs uses you can still play just not in with the right colors. If it is bad you're hosed because there currently is not a good dump of it. Dave

You can take this with a grain of salt, as I have my own home made hardware. I burnt them to eprom. I got it going once I figured out you were starting from the second bank only. I tried the hackem! and intermission test. They both rolled about the same for me with the reset button. The intermission rolled on hackem but not the earlier intermission test. I don't know if starting only from the second bank will be a problem as I've only been messing with atari's for 2 weeks now but it seems to me when you power up a flipflop the status would be undefined. Dave

Most kits use the cpu socket to attach, obviously that's going to be ok you should have a Z80 somewhere. They also attach to the 1st graphic rom, 5e. The 96/1 kit uses an adapter with a jumper to select 2532 or 2732. I think if 5e is a 2716 or 2516 the 2532 jumper would work. Sometimes though they use a 2764 which is 28 pin instead of 24. However, all the pins are the same except the power. You could make an adapter using a couple of sockets and routing the power from pin 28 of the 28 pin socket to pin 24 of the 24 pin socket. Stack the 24 socket on top of the 28 pin socket leaving pin 24 bent out so you can solder to it. Of course some of the really small jamma bootlegs are quite a bit different hardware wise. I got one in a couple of weeks ago that just wouldn't run the multikit Other than that one board I've been able to install it on every bootleg I've gotten in. I have had to desolder the z80 and add a socket occasionally, and for certian bootlegs "eyes type" with encrypted graphics I have to encrypt the multikit to match. Dave

There's several similar jamma ms pac bootleg pcb's that have come out recently. Last I read than were around $100, compared to 200-$300 for a rebuilt original board. They use different size eproms than the older boards so multipacs won't usually plug in w/o modification. If they have converted the cab to jamma at least you can run different boards in the cab.

I can probably put a multikit in it as long as it's not one of the newer jamma bootlegs or lame galaxian bootlegs. If it is jamma I can supply a different bootleg that will run a multi kit or you could get one of the jamma emulator boards. If you can pick out the bootleg from here I could tell you a little more. http://users.erols.com/mowerman/pacfile.htm Dave

Look for a pac to jamma converter as the multicade boards will likely be jamma. The converters usually include voltage regulators to convert the voltage to dc. You'll still have to do some soldering to add buttons. Before you drill any holes you might look for a junk control panel on ebay and save your good one. I'm not sure what the extra board is, credit multiplier maybe? All pacman plus boards are pacman boards with the z80 removed. An epoxy block with a ribbon cable is attached to the z80 socket. These days you can skip the epoxy block and use decrypted roms. So yes, use the pacman manual.

It's kind of funny the seller getting all excited about f8 banking being cutting edge. I guess that's a point in his favor, if he doesn't know about it then he's not capable of laying out a board with it. I'm not a hardware expert, but my sources would charge around $300 for a board like that. Seems kind of strange if you were faking it. I would have skipped the solder mask to save a ton of money. The date codes on the chips are plausible, I make the eprom as 12/83 and the other chips as 80 and 82 and possibly 76(I don't recognize the logo). If that is a 76 that it'd be unusual to use a 8 year old chip but not necessarily suspicious since it's an odd chip. All in all I guess I have no real opinion

to convert to pacman you need the 6 eproms, 2 color proms and a z80. Or you could get the 2 color proms and a multi pac. http://home.everestkc.net/mdoyle/multipac.htm As mentioned the connector is different than most games so you can't just swap boards w/o some work.

The real problem is the size of the cartridge. I'd really like something like a double ender. The only solution I have thought of is dipping the board in epoxy like a candle.

Flashing time is included in this number. Flashing occurs when timer is < $100. I just tried pacman using shift p to count frames and the shortest blue time(7) lasted 60 frames as the table shows.

looks like it($4dcb) decs twice a frame so $2d0 = 720 = 6 sec That matches my timing.