Pac-Land

The 45th anniversary of Pac-Man was yesterday. In order to join the cellebration we are bringing a new core compatible with the Pac-Land hardware: JTPACLAN.

History

Released by Namco in 1984. When this game was first planned, it was based on another project named "Lunlun Climber" and did not include any elements of the Pac-Man cartoon at first. During the development, Namco America signed a contract with Hanna-Barbera, which allowed them to use the characters, background music, settings, etc. of Pac-Man, which were reflected in this game. Pac-Man's mission is to deliver the lost fairies to Fairyland. It's obvious when you look at the cabinet, that there is no joystick. Instead, there are three buttons, which move to the right, move left, and jump.

Pressing the movement button repeatedly will increase Pac-Man's speed, and holding down the movement button will maintain his speed. The game is full of secrets and Eastern eggs.

Hidden items

• Blue Helmet: it protects you from falling enemies. Push the fire extinguisher to the left.

• Warp: If you clear round 1 with a score of over 10,000 points and no mistakes. You can warp to Trip 3

• Invisibility: Push the short cactus in the opposite direction in round 3

• Balloon: Jump over the long cactus, then go back and push the bottom part of it to make six balloons appear. Five of them are worth 100 points, but one is worth 7650 points.

Technical Trivia

This board looks like the ancestor of Rolling Thunder, which looks like the ancestor of Pac-Mania. It may had been easier if we developed the cores starting from the old system. Compared to Rolling Thunder, this system only has one 6809 CPU and one MCU for audio. Rolling thunder had two 6809 CPUs and two MCUs.

The custom chip CUS30 is used for audio. The same chip is used on Rolling Thunder and Pac-Mania (Splatter House...) but former systems added more sound chips to the mix.

The background are drawn with just four colors per tile. This is the absolute minimum across all JT cores so far. Sprites do have the usual 16 colors per tile and have very smooth animations.

A couple of Easter eggs documented in MAME:

- Go into the service mode
- Press left or right to change the sound effect until it's $18
- Press the service button to display the screen calibration test grid
- Press right 4 times
- Press left once
- Press right twice
- Press left 6 times
- Press jump

If you enter your [hi-score] name as one of the following then the name will flash red and yellow for 12.8 seconds when you finish entering it:

KISSY
YURI.
NEGIE
S#TOU (# is the small ghost sprite)

Other news

Work on System 18 is showing progress. We got a breakthrough this week getting sprites visible in Laser Ghost and Where's Wally.