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How to Create Custom 7800 Pacman Hacks!


jwierer

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I'm only aiming for them to have full compatibility with ProSysyem. I don't modify anything in the ROMS outside of what the (modified to display all 16 levels in Ultra Pac) Pac-Man Construction Set allows.

 

I can respect that my friend, and I appreciate you liking my post with the corrected A78 files. Save yourself time/effort then as ProSystem only requires the *.BIN files to run.

 

The only difference between the *.BIN files and *.a78 files is a header. Somehow the Pac-Man Construction Set may be corrupting the signature on some (many?) of the *.a78 files it produces. I just went through the latest four hacks you posted, and three of the four have bad signatures on the *.a78 file. I fixed them here:

 

mastersoftmunch_a78FIX.zip

snackattack_a78FIX.zip

snapper_a78FIX.zip

 

The 'champpacsjb.a78' file is fine. Appears it may be an odd-end bug with the application regarding *.a78 files, because all of the *.BIN files you have posted contain valid signatures. Hopefully/Maybe Jeff or someone else can take a look at it (?)

 

*THANK YOU* again for these awesome hacks!

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Yeah, it definitely must be something in the construction set. The champpacsjb was an Ultra Pac hack, so perhaps it was able to "Dodge the Ball", whereas all the others were hacks of the original Pac-Man. But anyways, thanks again for fixing up the ROMs. :)

 

I know I brought this up previously, but I wonder if Jeff would be interested in getting the Pac-Man Construction Set onto Romhacking.net, since his name is registered on the site.

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When you save an .a78 it calls A78SIGN.exe at the end. That's not my code, but apparently it doesn't always calculate the correct signature. I wish there was a windows library I could just use, but all I've found are standlone executables for signing 7800 roms.

 

-Jeff

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When you save an .a78 it calls A78SIGN.exe at the end. That's not my code, but apparently it doesn't always calculate the correct signature. I wish there was a windows library I could just use, but all I've found are standlone executables for signing 7800 roms.

 

-Jeff

When it calls A78SIGN.exe the end could you force it to so this:

 

a78sign -f hackname.a78

 

That is all that had to be done to fix the Pac-Man hacked A78 files with invalid signatures. Same command (switch) worked for the Piranha BIN file that was bad as well.

 

Not sure what switch (Or lack of switch) it is using automatically. Perhaps it is an older/bugged version (?) Attached is the one I utilize. It never fails.

 

A78SIGN.zip

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Thanks. Turns out I wasn't even signing the .a78 files. I guess I figured if you were using it on a physical cart you would be using the .bin. I fixed that and posted a new version in the first post of this thread.

 

-Jeff

 

Awesome, glad we were able to nail down the problem. Thanks for the update, Jeff! :)

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There is a small bug with the editor.

 

Whenever I try to edit a maze's Inside Color in Ultra Pac-Man, at first it seems to work; but afterwards it suddenly reverts back to it's original colors if you perform some kind of activity that writes any change(s) made to the ROM. Take for example the second maze, which uses a cyan for it's inner walls color. I try changing it to black, then saving, and suddenly it goes back to cyan.

Edited by Justin De Lucia
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There is a small bug with the editor.

 

Whenever I try to edit a maze's Inside Color in Ultra Pac-Man, at first it seems to work; but afterwards it suddenly reverts back to it's original colors if you perform some kind of activity that writes any change(s) made to the ROM. Take for example the second maze, which uses a cyan for it's inner walls color. I try changing it to black, then saving, and suddenly it goes back to cyan.

Yeah unfortunately, it wasn't setting the correct location so I would re-download your ultrapacman rom because somewhere there is a byte of data that is off which will probably crash the rom at some unknown point. Let me know if this fixes it.

PCS1.032.zip

-Jeff

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A few more to add to the database. Some are updated versions of previous hacks, others I made from the ground up.

_00-3_zps280238d1.png_01-5_zpsaf7adea9.png_00-3_zps155c4811.png_01-5_zps87dc91ff.png

PacJr.zip

DamagedPac.zip

MsFruitMan.zip

BabyPacUki.zip

MrPacNES.zip

PacIIINES.zip

Pesco7800.zip

PacIntellivisionMaze.zip

PacVic20Maze.zip

Pac-Man G2.zip

Pac-Man G.zip

Edited by Justin De Lucia
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So there's another bug I'm getting in my Pac-Man III ROM (which I made some edits to since I last updated it on the forums). Whenever I get killed, my lives counter doesn't go down by one. Also, the layout for Stage 13 uses the same layout (not colors) as Stage 11.

 

The second error is consistent with every Ultra Pac-Man ROM hack.

Edited by Justin De Lucia
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Looks like the speed hack doesn't work correctly with Ultra-Pacman. Remove it and your lives counter goes back to normal. You could do a diff on the two roms using Hackomatic to see what exactly breaks the life counter. The maze order looks correct, but given the original game only had 6 mazes there is no saying if Bob ever had it working correctly with 16.

 

-Jeff

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Why the speed hack was there in the first place was since the NES original only had fast Pac-Man as an option; you couldn't play with normal-speed Pac-Man. With that said I'll remove the speed up hack ) or make the ZIP have both ROMS/bins of normal and fast Pac-Man III.

 

With that said, I'm getting the idea of making a 10-maze Ultra Pac hack, with the levels used in the NES, Game Boy Color, and Game Gear versions of Ms. Pac-Man, even changing the player to Ms. Pac-Man. This hack would have two variations, one with the original mazes faithfully created (with sharp turns and long alleys), and ones with modified structures to eliminate the cheap level design choices. Sadly no one has ever bothered to rip the Game Gear-only levels, so like with Pac Jr., I'll have to snag the maze layouts myself, unless someone wants to help.

 

 

EDIT: Here's the results, as well as the fix for Pac-Man III.

PacIIINES.zip

PortableMsPac.zip

MsPacPortable_zps29b15b2a.png

Edited by Justin De Lucia
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A new hack: Pac-Man Vs' mazes faithfully ported and recreated.

PacVs.zip

 

_01.bmp

_02.bmp

_03.bmp

_04.bmp

_05.bmp

_06.bmp

 

I know PacFan already did port over a few of the mazes; but I wanted to try my hand at it to remove the dreaded sharp turns and further improve on each maze and not just port them over.

Edited by Justin De Lucia
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Justin / Jeff:

 

You guys are doing such great work with these hacks, never had any idea that there were so many different mazes out there.

 

I see you are having some issues with the Ultra Pac-Man / 16 maze rom. Jeff had asked me if I still had the source to that and unfortunately I do not. I may, however, have a backup from that time (although I don't think I was saving that stuff on it), I'll check when I get a sec if I can find anything.

 

Thanks for keeping this alive,

Bob

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The original Ultra Pac-Man ROM? No; I already have it on my computer.

 

There are a few minor things I'm looking to change in my Ms. Pac Portable Mazes, mostly the positions of a few of the walls in the first, second, and fourth levels. I'll also maybe add in some walls into the sixth and tenth levels to make it easier to dodge the ghosts.

 

I remade a few more ZX Spectrum mazes earlier in the day; may continue with a few more single/two level hacks based on what versions exist for the Spectrum (and perhaps do a few more from other systems...?) Once I'm ready, they'll go up onto the forums.

 

I think I should mention, when I used the newer editor with Jr. Pac-Man, I tried porting over a single maze (the red one from the ZX MacMan) and setting that one maze to all eight level slots. When I loaded the ROM into Prosystem, it was a glitchy mess and unplayable, reading no inputs from the controller. This alone made me re-create the maze into Pac-Man instead of Jr. Pac. (since the editor acts much more buggy when editing Ms. Pac and Jr. Pac compared to Pac and Ultra Pac).

 

I was also wondering, if anyone could spare me the maze order in Pac-Man Collection, I may consider doing some hacks of that game, compiling some of the mazes I've worked on porting into 7800 format in one cart.

 

While browsing, I found this; a T-Shirt design with a Dr. Who-branded version of Pac-Man:

PAC+MAN+WHO+700.jpg

I could polish it up and make it into a playable hack!

 

EDIT: Results are in!

_00-3_zps024a7357.png_01-5_zpse4b635e0.png

PortableMsPac.zip

Pac-Who.zip

GhostsRevenge.zip

Gobbler.zip

Edited by Justin De Lucia
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Here's my disassy of the Ultra Pac, ported from the original Ms. Pac-man. It shows the major diffs between the two.

PACMANULTRA_MASTER_Disassy.rtf

 

Unfortunately much of the non-program code is only shown as raw data, so you'd have to decode some of the tunes and most of the graphics data to know what is what. But all the bytes are shown, so nothing is missing.

 

In there you can easily find where the lives are decremented. Maybe there's a conflict between speed and lives count. Don't know. However, maybe the Ultra Pac-man you have on steroids also had the lives decrement blocked. It wouldn't take much to figure that out...

 

I confirm the binary that Herr Gambler posted is checksum=5995, the latest Ultra Pacman NTSC code and it runs.

 

Sure there's a bunch of good ole time hacks. My favorite on here so far is PESCO - the one with the fish smacking it's lips for the next kill of the crabs and octopus "fruit".

 

I'm still looking to graduate to the new wave of 7800 Pacmen. The one with ghosts that are constantly borne and ejected onto the playfield, the one with shooting capability to kill all the ghosts. But don't run out of bullets...because they're all gonna get ya... And new sounds, etc. There's so much more that could be done, IMHO.

 

///BLUEULTRAMAN///

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You should disassemble Pesco to get rid of the 4th ghost and to move the fruit to the correct location. Then it would be perfect!

 

EDIT: Actually the disassembly helped me figure out the Pacman fruit locations. Something I may add into the editor at some point now that I know how it works. Here is a version of Pesco with the fruit at the top like the 2600.

 

Pesco.bin

 

-Jeff

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If you wanted to remove the fourth crab in Pesco, I'd remove the light blue crab since he wasn't in the 2600 version. You could also flatten the dots and Power Pellets so they'd further resemble the original.

 

Aside from that, thanks for liking my Pesco hack and using it as a template for further improving it's accuracy to the original.

 

I have begun a conversion of the Facebook game "Waka Waka", which will feature five mazes and different graphics.

 

EDIT: Here's Waka Waka in all it's glory.

Waka Waka.zip

_00-3_zpsc198e04d.png_01-5_zps608936b2.png_02-3_zps833b6682.png

_03-3_zps5724e01a.png_005_zpsf43924ff.png

Edited by Justin De Lucia
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