Hi everyone, I'm Rees, and welcome back to the channel.
So in one of my earlier videos I talked about importing some stuff
from Yahoo! Actions Japan. I showed off some of my pickups at the time.
One thing that didn't feature in that video because I've had it quite a long
time and not really done anything with was my Puck Man arcade PCB.
So I thought I'd put a video together just showing what it was all about, how it works,
and how I got it hooked up, and finally take an opportunity to see if it works.
But what's this Puck Man thing all about anyway?
Well, when the game was first released in Japan in July 1980,
the game was known as "Paku Man" - taken from the Japanese word "Paku" meaning "to chomp".
When gearing up for the English language release,
it was decided that the joke would be lost on Western audiences and so Namco
decided to rename the character "Puck Man" due to his resemblance to a hockey puck.
It was only when the cabinet started to hit American shores in December of that
year that the problems really started - problems in the form of young miscreants
modifying the game's marquee to make it spell something else entirely!
It was decided that it would be best all-round to change the name to Pac-Man,
which was closer phonetically to the original Japanese name anyway.
Now what I have here is a Puck Man board. The name "Puck Man" appears on the title screen and also
on the instruction cards that I got with it, so I think it's quite an interesting piece of history.
So we'll just take a quick look at these...
These are the original leaflets, and would have been stuck to the
side of the machine to explain how the game actually works.
As you can see, this one has the original Puck Man name in English, the next section
just explains how many points and lives we get and that we get a bonus life at 10,000 points.
These things are actually all configurable by the arcade operator as I'll explain in a minute.
I love the hand-drawn artwork on this one -
"Get higher points fighting with monsters!"
"Make double points by continuous bites"
- and of course it shows how to walk through the other side through the tunnels and so on.
Of course, we all know how Pac-Man works by now, but it would have been a really novel
thing back in those days, and then this bottom section of course about all of the bonus fruits.
My PCB also came with this Japanese version of the leaflet - as you can see, it has the
original "Paku Man" name across the top. Other than that, it's all pretty much the same,
apart from the prices on the bottom. ¥100 for a one player game or ¥200 for two players.
Just while we're on the subject of the paperwork,
my PCB also came with this rather badly photocopied page from the original manual.
It's still interesting to look at though. It shows the wiring for the edge connector - which I'll go
into in a second - it has some notes on how the game can be configured by the arcade operator,
and it also explains the DIP switches, which I'll also go into shortly.
The date on here is 1980, which would make this an early version.
On to the PCB itself.
Now, when this thing first arrived it was absolutely filthy so I decided to give it a
good clean first. You could definitely tell that it'd seen some action over the years,
and of course to give it the best chance of working I cleaned the edge
connectors with Magic Eraser and some IPA as well.
On the subject of the edge connectors, this one may look like a standard JAMMA connector but
it actually predates JAMMA by quite a few years, and is wired slightly differently.
Now this board must have been installed into a
JAMMA cabinet at some point because it came with this handmade adapter.
As far as I can tell this connector on this side
was just used for testing the board at the factory.
Perhaps the most immediately obvious thing about this board is the fact that
it consists of two separate PCBs connected by a ribbon cable. Now,
the reason for this is that the original run of Puck Man arcade PCBs were enormous
and arcade operators complained that they were unwieldy and difficult to handle,
so later revisions like this one were split into two separate PCBs just to make them a bit smaller.
Just having a look around the top PCB, we have some
power regulation and timing circuitry in this corner as well as the DIP switches.
Later arcade games would store their configuration in battery
backed RAM or even flash memory, but in early games like this the arcade
operator could configure the game by flipping these small toggle switches.
These determine things like how many credits are needed for a game,
whether the game is in free play mode, how many lives the player will get per game and - in the
case of Pac-Man - how many points are needed for the bonus lives, so it's pretty configurable.
Moving along, this big IC is the CPU, which is in NEC D760C. It's a clone of the ubiquitous
Zilog Z80 which was famously used in the Amstrad CPC, TRS-80, Sinclair machines like the ZX80, 81,
and Spectrum, and of course the MSX computers which were huge in Japan.
On the gaming side of things it was also used as the CPU in the Sega Master System,
and as a coprocessor in the Mega Drive and the Neo Geo AES.
This is before we even get started on all of the
arcade machines that used it either as the main CPU or doing audio duty,
so it's definitely something you will have come across at some point or other.
These numbered chips are NEC D2716 16K EPROMs. There are 8
here and there are 4 on the bottom PCB, making for a total of 192K.
With most arcade games these are split in such a way that certain sprites will be on one,
the mazes another, in-game text on another, attract screens on yet another and so on,
making it relatively easy to diagnose a ROM fault and swap in the correct replacement.
It's also possible to add hacks or enhancements or new game modes or even run an entirely
different game just by reprogramming these EPROMs - in fact Ms. Pac-Man started off
as an illicit hack for the original Pac-Man boards - but that's a story for another time.
So this chip is a PROM, which is like an EPROM
but can only be programmed once. The game board has four of these,
and this is one of the two that determine the colours of the maze and of Pac-Man himself.
I'm really intrigued as to why these weren't part of the main ROMs but haven't been able to dig that
info up, so if you do please pass that on in the comments because I'd be very interested to know.
Now if we turn around to the underside of the board, we can see our four remaining game EPROMs,
our other colour PROM, and two more PROMs which are where our sound effects are stored.
Other than that, we just have a load of 7400-series TTL chips,
which are just common basic logic for moving bits around.
So let's get this thing hooked up!
Now of course, this was originally intended to live inside an arcade machine,
so to connect it to a standard TV we'll need this.
This is a device called a Supergun and what it does is it uses an industry-standard JAMMA
edge connector, connects to the arcade PCB, and it pipes the audio and video
out to a standard SCART connector, as well as providing power for the board of course.
It also adds two Neo Geo AES joystick connectors,
and it just so happens that I have a Neo Geo AES joystick here as well.
So that's pretty much everything we need to get going.
You may also notice that I've turned my monitor sideways - now this is known as "tate" mode which
is the Japanese word for "vertical", and the reason essentially being that monitors aren't
perfectly square of course, so if you have a game which needs more vertical than horizontal
space the easiest way to do it is to just turn the monitor around, and most Japanese candy cabs
actually have a mechanism built-in that makes it very easy for the arcade operator to do this.
So I'll just get everything plugged in - it should only take a second...
So after a quick self-test the board's all up and running, and the first thing
we notice of course is that we have the original Japanese names for the ghosts.
I'll have a crack at these although my pronunciation will no doubt be
terrible - so we have "Oikake" meaning "The Chaser", "Machibuse" is "The Ambusher",
"Kimagure" is "Fickle", apparently, and "Otoboke" means "Feigned Ignorance".
The second part refers to their colour.
Well, apart from the poor orange guy here, not quite sure what he did to deserve that!
Then the game goes into the attract mode that we all know and love.
There isn't any sound at this point of course, so if I just insert a credit by
pressing the select button on the joystick we'll see the Puck Man name come up.
Now I'm by no means an expert at Pac-Man but I want to at least complete level two
to see if the animations are there so I'll give it a go.
This game was designed for a four-way joystick while I'm using an eight-way
joystick as well - so I'm just getting some professional excuses out there early.
So there you have it, I suck at Pac-Man - wait,
no that's not what the video was supposed to be about was it?
So I hope this has been an interesting look into the history of the game and
how the arcade PCB works, and obviously how you can get one hooked up at home.
If you found the video educational and/or entertaining, please hit that like button,
I'd very much appreciate it.
I always have retro computing and retro gaming projects on the go so if that sounds
like the kind of thing that interests you and you haven't subscribed to my
channel already I'd really appreciate it if you hit that subscribe button.
I just finally want to say thank you to everyone for watching - I'll catch you
down in the comments and hopefully see you soon.