Dav

I made some this summer because I needed one, and I made a few extra to cover my costs. It does F4,F6,F8,FA,UA banking, It does support ram games but not very well. The ram is unreliable on some consoles due to the timing. You would need an EPROM programmer and a couple of 27c040 EPROM's. I know some of you already have those. The dev kit isn't the most polished thing but the source is available if you know VB. The dev program accepts a text file as input and converts the ASCII to menu data, then combines the binaries to make the multicart ROM. The menu is vertically scrolling twelve character text. The good news is they'd be $25+shipping. Dave

I've got a few 2600 multi's left. They have around 140 games. I suppose if you really wanted a lot of games I could reprogram it with all small games for an extra fee. They're $40 each +s&h

No, I'm in Kansas City. I do have cabs for sale though. I've got a rare working Formula K that I don't have room for, and I really need to get rid of. It's the sister game to Gran Trak that was the first driving game. I'd take $125 for it. Most of the stuff I have needs work though, I just don't have time to do it. I'm not going to make the time since they haven't been selling for much lately. A fully restored Ms Pacman wouldn't hardly make enough to pay for the new artwork at the last few auctions here.

Yeah, that happened here to one of our auctions. The consigners started bringing less stuff, and less people came, and the consigners brought even less stuff, and even less people came etc, etc. I went to one of the last autions and he had 12 videos and 2 jukeboxes. Around here at least,the prices have really gone down anyway. I hope it isn't spreading everywhere. At least now we can still send our stuff to Dallas and get a decent price.

Probably, I heard it was about 85% buybacks. So if anyone dropped off games to sell and didn't stay to protect them they went cheap. Last time I did that I sold a nice track and field for $45. The bad thing though is if the people bringing the machines didn't sell any of them may quit coming. The Auction company says they lost $10,000, them may not be in a hurry to have another one either.

No, A11 is not connected from the eprom to the CPU and there is no contact pad on the edge connector for it, so there is no good way to connect it. If you can only address A0-A10 that's 11 address lines. 2^11= 2k The first thing I did when I rediscovered my Atari this summer was buy some combat carts so I could chip them. Then I was stuck with only 2k games. The 2600 Faq shows A11 as a no connect I should have got the hint. The only good thing about it is you can use a Dallas 2k NVRAM instead of an eprom so you don't have to erase them.

You can glue copper foil to the pcb to make a new contact, but I wouldn't think it would last too long on something like a cart that gets a lot of wear. Dave

Those are called 3in1, 6in1, 9in1 or 39in1 whatever number of games they have. They are just single board computers running mame. I think the cheapest ones are around $300. The newer ones look pretty good, the older ones have a lot of little things not quite right. Namco is starting to shut these guys down. The newest thing is to use Jakks pacman toy video game instead to make a 5 in 1 and use a TV instead of a monitor. Not only do you pocket the extra $285 difference, you're actually legal. Of course the monitors horizontal but people don't seem to notice.

Combat may not be the best choice. The combats I have are missing a finger on the edge connector and can only be converted to 2K games.

Have you thought about a multicart? You can get a multicart with 1 MB of rom and a menu. It's a lot easier than keeping track of 100 chips, and probably cheaper too.

Ha, you should, but I don't know how many people would ever see it. If you don't know already it's the fruit drawing routine at the bottom of the screen that has a bug in it. The maze is drawn correctly, then random fruit is drawn over it.

I agree, if the demo runs good enough I wouldn't worry about a random table for ms pac. Iirc they did something to the AI but nothing major like in pacman plus. I don't think the good players use patterns to play it. There's a ld a,r for the fruit bonus after a certain level. I still meet people who swear they can make the banana's come up more often if they do certian tricks. You'll find the gcc programmers are kind of sloppy. A lot more bugs than namco. I'm glad I can help, Any specific questions I"ll be glad to answer. I"m going through a pacman phase again so I might actually remember some of it. I've been trying to hack pacman into pacmania and super pacman for my multi pac. It's actually going pretty well considering what I've got to work with.

I'm still around. I've just been too busy with arcade stuff to work with consoles. After christmas I hope to get back to it. As for your problem, probably half the arcade games are running the bootleg code, so it's not as big a deal. Most repair shops will replace the auxillary board and ribbon cable with a hack that runs bootleg code. If you want the original you can use the overlay tables in the mame driver and merge them into pacman by hand. Or I think there's a way to dump from the debugger. Actually though the overlay mechanism is not 100% understood, mame may not be correct for a couple of bytes of the table. That's because the process of reading the random numbers can turn the overlays off temporarily. I plan on updating my driver sometime but I've just been too busy to do the research. Dave

Buying junk on ebay a piece at a time does not mean something is commercialy availible. For example last week someone asked me for 45 of the custom chips for pacman boards. Where am I going to get them? Suppose I want to stock 2600 missle command in my game store? Do you have a link for someone that can send me 200 of them right away? Tested, and with instructions oc course. Before you say I'm being silly remember your the one that said especially in large quanities. Your definition of obsolete is a little suspect too. If they meant your definition why bother writing the exception since there will always be someone who still uses something occasionally. In the technical world we use obsoete all the time to mean outmoded. For example any electronic manufacter will tell you if a chip or part is obsolete or not. Obviosly they aren't saying no one uses it or even that you can't buy them new from your supplier. They're saying they've quit making it.

Eproms are definately much slower than ram or whatever those other guys are using. But they still respond fast enough to make the clock cycle so it shouldn't really matter. When I tried haunted adventure last week I went ahead and burnt your 8k pac and hackem from each bank and tried them they both started ok. Was there any place in particular that was having problems?

you could edit or do anything you wanted, it wasn't automated. There was a moderator who would make the changes if he though it was appropriate. The problem was the moderator didn't know that paperboy didn't have a hardrive or that turbo used a z80. There was only a few people that would know info like that so a majority rules thing doesn't really work. Some kind of karma system probably would though. BTW here's an entry from klov's competition. http://www.coinop.org/g.aspx/103223/Polybius.html

I was using a 6-switcher.

Klov.com used to be somewhat like that, any one could submit entries and they were accopted. It was full of misinformation and madeup games. It was unusable for research. Now that it's been comercialized they've gone gone through and cleaned it up. But it's reputation is so bad that no one uses it for a serious source. All those imply a moderator or someone in authority to edit submissions, that's not what you were talking about before.

My experience is that doesn't happen and they fill up with garbage. If someone mistakenly or maliciously says they've seen a new label variation how can someone correct them? Who can prove they didn't see it?

The one I tried was the first one listed 8kha2-v08.zip. On my multicart I can tell it which bank to start in. I made one entry to start in bank0 and one to start in bank 1. I didn't see anything wrong with either one.

I tried the original version on my multicart. I ran it 10-15 times from each bank didn't see any problems. I'm having trouble understanding how removing the cart from the console could cause a problem related to the programing. Your program doesn't know if you turned it off and unplugged the cart or not. You couldn't check that if you wanted to. Dave

It's just an exemption to the dmca. It means I can legally crack the protection on ms pacman for it's inclusion in mame. This is very good for emulators and makers of replacement parts for arcade machines as the dmca makes them illegal. However it doesn't mean anyone can distribute the ms pacman roms. All copyrights are still protected by the berne convention.

I don't think it was the endings that hurt them. About that same time in order to help people get to the end they added the continue option. A lot of people feel that is what went wrong with arcades. They got greedy and quit giving people value for their quarters. It seemed like no matter how good you were you were only going to get your 90 seconds per quarter. In contrast you knew if you kept playing pacman you'd be able to keep playing longer. Also with an older game like Pacman when you got to a high level you'd really done something, everyone knew you'd done something. With later games a monkey with a bag of quarters could do just as well. My 4 year old neice has all the high scores on my stun runner. I don't play it much since there's no point in trying to get a good score.

idea #1 will work. When I first started I used a 2k dallas nvram. I used an extra socket under the nvram and bent the write line out and wired it high. I used it for quite a while, works great since there's no erase at all, until I got in a hurry and plugged in backwards. Blowing up a $10 part made me kind of grumpy. For testing on my multicart I used a pair of 29f040 flash roms they come in smaller sizes too. They have a short erase time. Doubling up roms in a larger pcb works because when you accidentally hit the bank trigger it changes banks but doesn't hurt you since all the banks are the same.

The problem is I have to go outside the cpld to do that and I lose 2 pins. That would probably work. I'm not planning on doing any more work to the hardware, though. I'll PM you.