RIP Leslie. I loves me some Theme.

I see what you did there.

BTW, is the blurred background from a seperate image?

Oh, she has more than one sound?

Nice lighting effect. It looks like it's carved into clay. I think that they putty like base color enhances that effect.

Glad that you're ok (in a relative way). There be dragons. Stay safe. ❤️

For God's sake - move them closer!

11/11 Here’s the first cutscene between levels 1 and 2.

end Jr. Pac-Man project
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #retrogaming

10 / After I grabbed the data and put everything back together I of course had to test it out. Now presenting… “Jr PacMan - with blinky, pinky, inky, and tim”. (Tim?! - what happened to Clyde?).

Portion of a text representation of hex code with the strings “General Computer Corporation” and “Hello, Nakamura!”

Portion of a text representation of hex code with the various text strings, including the ghosts names.

9/ Part of the fun of dumping a program rom is to scan for hidden strings that never show up in the game. One ROM has the string “Hello, Nakamura!”. Masaya Nakamura bought the Japanese division of Atari from Nolan Bushnell in 1974 and later renamed it Namco. He’s known as “the father of Pac-Man”.

Main printed circuit from a Jr. Pac-Man game. About 12” x 18” with about 120 widely spaced chips.

Five computer chips about the size of a large thumb. Each has 28 metal legs that plug into the connector on the arcade motherboard.

A PacMan chip mounted in the RomMax EPROM reader.

8/ So, once I got my RomMax running on The Beast (took me a few days to figure that one out), I pulled the five code PROMs and two music/sfx PROMs out of the arcade and downloaded the data. Each chip holds 8k of data, so there’s a total of 40k for the entire game and 16k for music/sound fx.

7/ Before doing that though, I wanted to grab a copy of the game code. It’s all binary, but some day it might be kind of fun to reverse engineer the Z80 assembly and try to unveil the underlying code.

Front view of Jr. Pac-Man running in an old, battered Ms. Pac-Man cabinet. The control panel is covered in various stickers.

Side view of Jr. Pac-Man running in an old, battered Ms. Pac-Man cabinet. The side says “Ms. Pac-Man” in large letters and has a cartoon ghost with hands chasing a sexy Ms. Pac-Man, with high heels, a bow, and long eyelashes. The cabinet is light blue with pink and yellow designs.

6/ ... but other than that it still works great! I was thinking of maybe refurbishing the monitor at some point, but have finally been “persuaded” to pass it on.

5/ My daughter had it in her room for many years (which explains the Sleater-Kinney sticker) and it’s spent decades in the garage. The cabinet is beat to hell and misbranded as Ms. Pac-Man, the monitor is getting blurry and warped, and the audio has a loud hum, ...

4/ I needed to revive this old tool in order to download the program stored on my Jr. Pac-Man arcade. I fished this machine out of a dumpster 35 years ago and it’s been following me around since.

Small circuit board designed to slot into the ISA bus of an old 486 computer. A flat 40pin ribbon cable connects to one edge. RomMax-4G rev 1.6 is stamped on the back.

RomMax EPROM burner connected to a 486 computer via ribbon cable.

3/ It’s also possible to wipe all data using ultraviolet light so that they can be reused. The RomMax can read the data from these chips and store it in a file.

2/ ... 30 years ago when I was working with arcade machines at Atari and GlobalVR. Vintage arcades stored their programs on EPROMS (Eraseable/Programmable Read-Only memory). These are hardware chips that can have data permanently burned on to them using a special burner.

Jr. Pac-Man project
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #retrogaming

1/ I had an ulterior motive for resurrecting the old 486/ISA bus system first. I have a RomMax-4G rom reader / EPROM burner that requires an ISA bus and DOS to run and I had no other system to use it on. I bought this device...

Can't even cover the ticket fee for that much these days!

Sign says "Maga can oligargle deez nuts"

Sign has photo of Trump with a red clown nose and a golden crown. Text says "Faux-king Joke"

Woman wearing a t-shirt that says "Are we great yet? Cause I just feel embarrassed"

Two senior Asian women sitting on steps and holding anti Trump signs.

Signs of the times #3
#NoKings
#NoKings3.0
#Oakland

Three people holding signs and looking at the camera with a large crowd in the background

Cameron, Paula, and Gamecat at the Lake Merit rally point for
#NoKings
#NoKings3.0
#Oakland

Sign says "NO! In the name of Humanity, we REFUSE to Acept a Fascist America!"

Sign with a painting of Marie Antoinette with her face replaced by Trumps.

Sign with an original painting of a dark, sinister Trump about to devour a doll sized Uncle Sam.

Large black and white original drawing of Trump with his neck ripping open and a large snake emerging from his mouth.

Signs of the times #2
#NoKings
#NoKings3.0
#Oakland

Papier mache potato covered in large googly eyes and wearing a crown. Sign says "NO DICK-TATERS"

Picture of Jimmy Carter holding a hammer and building a house. Sign says "Real leadership builds up! It does not tear down!"

Sign says "We are NOat OK!" With an upside down american flag. Next sign says "Make corruption wrong again!"

Sign says "America belongs to we the people, NOT YOU South African Nazi or 'Lil Bith Vance or the team of felons"

Signs of the times
#NoKings
#Oakland
#NoKings3.0

#NoKings
#Oakland

Sign says: "For the love of god.. MAKE IT ALL STOP" with picture on Munch's "The Scream"

Sign says: "The Emperor has no BRAINS!" with caricature of Trump with flies rising from his open skull

Got my signs ready - March about to start...
#NoKings

Thanks for engaging.

I posted the ScanDisk results for C and H. No errors on either.

I thought that it might be some sort of configuration error on the disk controller, since I did a lot of flailing to get it to work in the first place, and not an actual HDD hardware error (fingers crossed).

Have you had any experience dealing with a compressed drive like this? Maybe the errors occur during decompression?
I've always had a tendency to just buy bigger drives. 😁

SimCity “About” screen, showing “Copyright 1989, 1992 MAXIS and Will Wright”

11/11 Overall I’m pretty happy with the outcome. I’ll have to address the boot issues at some point and maybe try to figure out how to back up the disk, but for now I might move on to the next system. This one is a keeper.

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #retrogaming

ScanDisk Results for C: (named ‘Dorothy’) 518,791,168 Total Disk Space, 0 Bad Sectors, 1,894 Files, and 105 Folders.

ScanDisk Results for H: (named ‘Host for c’) 543,768,576 Total Disk Space, 0 Bad Sectors, 44 Files, and 4 Folders.

‘Compression Properties’ for Drive C, showing “Compressed drive C is stored on uncompressed drive H in the file H:\DBLSPACE.000”, with 368.35MB Free space and 127.79 Used space.

‘Compression Properties’ for Drive H, showing “Drive H is not compressed”, with 235.12MB Free space and 283.45 Used space.

10/ I ran ScanDisk on C: and H: drives with zero errors. (C drive - named ‘Dorothy’ - is a compressed drive that resides as a file on the uncompressed H: drive).

9/ Unfortunately, the system is still kind of glitchy. Once running it seems pretty stable, but I’ve had various hangs, ‘missing VFD.VXD’ error, disk write error, ‘corrupt registry’, etc. during boot. These all go away with a reboot (so far), but it’s a bit concerning.