Question for vid guys

[Hooked]

How hard would it be to add additional games to a classic Mrs Pac.
As of this moment it only has ms pac with a speed chip.

[Donnie Barnes]

At last check, all the multi-game add-ons to the mobo had dried up and
were only available on the used market and hard to find (and
expensive). They generally only add lots more mazes and some basic
variations on the game anyway. I've got one of the better ones and am
not that impressed with it (but don't want to sell it).

I'm sure someone on r.g.v.a.c can give you more info on those kinds of
kits. If you don't have a problem adding a couple buttons to your
control panel, you can just convert the game to use one of the newer
mulit-game boards that has Galaga and all the really good stuff on it.
I like those boards, but the only drawback is you NEED a 4 way
joystick for the Pac series to work, and that works fine for Galaga
and such, but can be a pain on a few of the other games that did allow
an 8 way. But an 8 way in a Pac just WILL NOT WORK, trust me.

--Donnie

[tri_4...@hotmail.com]

Chad over at Lizard Lick (www.lizardlick.com) sells one of the
mulitpac kits. They aren't cheap, and add a limited number of games.
Chad also sells a kit to put a JAMMA board into a pac cabinet, just
plug it in and go, real simple. You can get a 4 / 8 way joystick from
Ulitmarc that you can just pull the shaft up and turn it to switch
between 4 or 8 way, its a must have in multiboard setups. I have one
and it works great switching back and forth.

> >  As of this moment it only has ms pac with a speed chip.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[do...@nc.rr.com]

Just curious - what is the legal status on the multi-game boards and things like Multicade? Given what Mr. Anal in Australia does with the pin stuff, I'm surprised Namco and the others would not pursue this (assuming they still had the copyrights).

[Matt Horn]

Add games to a Mrs. Pac or to a regular Pac is doable. However the issues
with that system in particular are that it's got its own proprietary plug
pin-out so you would need an adapter. I have seen Pac to JAMMA adapters,
but even with that you've got a bad situation control wise. The joystick is
a standard 4 way and you've basically got two buttons if you use the player
1 and player 2 buttons. So there's not all that many games in JAMMA format
that are worth the price of the adapter and trouble swapping out the boards
(in my opinion).

As far as the legal stuff goes on the mods, I'm pretty sure that Namco still
holds the rights to Pac-man and all the associated games. They've pretty
much forced all the mod chip makers out of business using the copy write to
threaten most out of production. The one exception to this seems to be the
speed chips. They apparently don't mind you changing the clock speeds for
parts of the games.

Back to your original issue... you're best option if you want more games
without having several cabinets is to pick up a cheap cabinet with about 6 -
8 buttons and two joysticks and paint it to look like a Mrs. Pac-man. Once
you've got the look just drop in a power supply and a JAMMA wire harness.
If you want to use your current Mrs. Pac board they have a JAMMA adapter you
can buy for the game to make it plug right up. When you're tried of Mrs.
Pac just pick up another game from e-bay for a reasonable price and swap it
out like a Nintendo game cartridge, so long as they're JAMMA standard
they'll plug up and work just fine without further modification or wiring.

Now granted I've made this process sound pretty simple, but in all honesty
it really isn't all that hard to wire, it just looks worse than it really is
till you get into it. Better yet, most cabinets come pre-wired for JAMMA
these days.

Hope that helps,
Matt