MAME Options for Pacman

[Andromeda Stardust]

I'm curious. Someone mentioned you can park Pacman in the "safety zones" to the right of center board, and the ghosts will dance around and make chase but never eat Pacman. Billy Mitchel demonstrated this in the "Chasing Ghosts" documentary. I am trying but failing to reproduce this effect in Retro Pie MAME. At some point the ghosts just do an about face and usually Inky or Pinky will go inside the "T" to devour pacman after a time.

[+darryl1970]

Hey little update. I've been enjoying my arcade very much. I solved the samples issue with MAME not playing sound effects. The MAME config file

/opt/retropie/emulators/mame4all-pi/mame.cfg

has an incorrectly formatted line of code to specify the directory path for samples

rompath=/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame
samplepath=samples

needs to be changed to

rompath=/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame
samplepath=/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-samples

http://blog.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/mame-samples-2/

 

Eureka! Missing sound effects fixed in Donkey Kong!

 

I also got the MAME4ALL DVD in the mail and mass copied all the zips from Samples and ROMs. Raspbi Pi took an hour and a half to sync the data but I now have access to 2271 arcade games and nearly everything works flawlessly...

 

Still need to fix the audio lag issue though...

Sweet!

[+darryl1970]

I'm curious. Someone mentioned you can park Pacman in the "safety zones" to the right of center board, and the ghosts will dance around and make chase but never eat Pacman. Billy Mitchel demonstrated this in the "Chasing Ghosts" documentary. I am trying but failing to reproduce this effect in Retro Pie MAME. At some point the ghosts just do an about face and usually Inky or Pinky will go inside the "T" to devour pacman after a time.

I believe you have to be using the basic Pac-Man set (not Midway harder). Also, you have to wait until the monsters have gone through their corners and started to go after Pac-Man. Then just stay put in the right side of the "T" and go watch a movie or something. The monsters will never find Pac-Man, unless you move and they reset. I think there are a few versions that stomped out this trick, but I believe I have done it on the basic Midway version.

[Trebor]

Confirmed. Works perfectly under MAME "pacman Pac-Man (Midway)" set:

 

 

Ghost Monsters traverse around and near the area in a pattern endlessly, never attacking Pac-Man. Apologies for the lousy screen captures, but you get the idea of the where/how, and what transpires after you 'park':

 

[125scratch]

Confirmed. Works perfectly under MAME "pacman Pac-Man (Midway)" set:

 

PacmanSet.PNG

 

Ghost Monsters traverse around and near the area in a pattern endlessly, never attacking Pac-Man. Apologies for the lousy screen captures, but you get the idea of the where/how, and what transpires after you 'park':

 

Pacman.PNGPacman2.PNGPacman3.PNG

Pacman4.PNGPacman5.PNGPacman6.PNG

Hey, I just stumbled upon this thread in a google image search and thought your HLSL effects looked pretty good. Do you mind sharing them? Also what version of MAME are the screenshots on?

[Trebor]

The HLSL settings used in those captures, I actually do not know. At best, I can state that I do update to the most recent version of MAME typically shortly after it is released. The captures were taking on Jun 25, 2015.

 

Per the previous releases page from the official site, MAME 0.163 was released on Jun 24, 2015. If I updated exactly to the day, then I was utilizing 0.163. If I missed updating for a couple of days, it would be version 0.162.

 

Google image preview may have performed some justice to those captures. IMHO, they look less than ideal, as the HLSL settings utilized was for a full screen. Some quick window captures for the sake of the topic discussion and the matter at hand were attached (Apology contained in the post denotes captures are "lousy"). The HLSL settings were not optimized for a window, and definitely not for the associated resolution.

 

In more recent versions of MAME, I focus primarily on bgfx. Much easier to utilize and does not require nearly as much tweaking (For better or worse). I'm particularly fond of the "crt-geom-deluxe.json" effect.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Confirmed. Works perfectly under MAME "pacman Pac-Man (Midway)" set:

 

PacmanSet.PNG

 

Ghost Monsters traverse around and near the area in a pattern endlessly, never attacking Pac-Man. Apologies for the lousy screen captures, but you get the idea of the where/how, and what transpires after you 'park':

 

Pacman.PNGPacman2.PNGPacman3.PNG

Pacman4.PNGPacman5.PNGPacman6.PNG

Ah, okay. I've been playing Pacman on my Namco 35th Anniversary Plug and Play, which I recently stuffed into a cigar box.

Ironically when attempting the trick, I parked Pacman in the same spot facing right, and he eventually got eaten. In fact Pacman got consumed literally seconds after I made the cut in the above video. People claim patterns do not work in the Plug and Play ports, but I'm wondering if alternate patterns exist just for this version. They also reformatted the maze for landscape orientation.