MAME ROW #8: Pac & Pal

GtBFilms

An interesting selection this week - I thought Real Bout Fatal Fury would be my clear choice, but persevered with Pac & Pal and actually quite liked it once I worked out the rules.

This is what I worked out so far:
Every time Pacman turns over a card he get a certain time to pick up the revealed fruit. He can have three overturned cards at once. If he gets the fruit in time he gets a bonus score, if not, it disappears. There are things that look like space invaders, their cards have an 'S' on them. after picking up those Pacman can fire a gun/beam/smoke to freeze ghosts for extra points. After the last item has gone, its the end of the level - so there is a tactic in getting the 'S' cards first. (if you leave them until last, you don't get the time to freeze the ghosts for extra points)

Meanwhile that little green guy (who doesn't harm pacman) steals fruits and takes them to the centre. If you catch him you get the points, if he gets the fruit to the centre, you don't.

In each level the same cards seem to always have the same fruit on them, so you can learn the correct order to do each level.

Every 2 levels there is a bonus level, with cards either revealing points, that green guy (extra points?) or the red ghost - end of bonus level. In contrast, the placement of the cards in the bonus level appears to be totally random.

I also gave Galivan a try, which seemed to be a strange hybrid between ghosts and goblins/strider and games like that. It is really difficult as soon as you lose your power-ups though.

But as mentioned, we've not had a beat em up yet, so I'll need to put some more thought into my vote!

pjft

I ended up trying two of them last night - didn't have Galivan around in my manually curated list on the Pi. I did watch the video and it looked "interesting", though haven't had the chance to play it.

Pac&Pal feels like there may be some potential, but too "complicated" for its own good, and not in a good way I feel. It might end up being fun, so I may persevere. I'd probably stand by my vote for it, as I think it may be a good game for high-scores.

I also tried Fatal Fury as I was more of a SF2/MK kind of person. I liked the fact that you can move between foreground and background - that was an interesting touch. I did suck terribly at it, though. Need to look up a moves list for it, otherwise going in blind does not help at all - at least in my case. Played with Mai and lost the two rounds against Terry.

Spent the rest of the night finishing playing Midnight Resistance from start to end :P

cyperghost

For now:
3 votes for Fatal Fry
2 votes for Pac&Pal
1 vote for Galivan

GtBFilms

@cyperghost

The contest is hotting up!

So I finally went for Pac & Pal - i) to keep the vote interesting, but mainly because ii) it has a clear score, whereas as far as I can see, Fatal Fury just has stages, and so a draw is less likely with Pac & Pal.

mediamogul

I voted for 'Pac & Pal', as I've been meaning to learn the ins and outs of both this game and 'Pac-Man Plus' for a while now. All three choices here would be fun though.

cyperghost

Update:
4 votes for Fatal Fury :)
3 votes for Pac & Pal
only 1 for the last one :)

Hot hot!
I hope everyone is fair and votes only once!

@GtBFilms
FF gots a score counter =)

pjft

I take it back. Pac & Pal is actually quite fun after you wrap your head around its gameplay.

mediamogul

@cyperghost said in MAME ROW #8:

I hope everyone is fair and votes only once!

I reserve the right to protest the results... violently!

#notmygame

Lyle_JP

If you're having trouble with Pan n Pal roms, can you get Pac-Man and Chomp-Chomp to work? Same game but "Pal" looks like a Pac-dog.

GtBFilms

There's something strange happening with Pac & Pal, I tested it on my PC and it worked fine. On RetroPie, I'm only having any luck with advmame-1.4, despite trying 3 different versions of the ROM.

Even on advmame-1.4, while it plays fine, the sound is about 10 seconds behind the action all the time, which is a bit odd.

mediamogul

Just tested 'Pac & Pal' in lr-mame2003 with 'pacnpal.zip' from the 0.78/2003 reference set, and after quite a bit of playing, it appears to be fully functional. If the game ends up being chosen, that might be the best way to go.

cyperghost

And the winner is ... Seems to be ... Ought to be ...
@meleu are you ready? For confirment we need your next posting...

With up to now 1 vote more ... trumpet jingle
PacMan and bis party .... PAC&PAL
Congrats little yellow fruit eating walking spot

meleu

Wow! Pac&Pal won!

And we have a record on the number of votes: 11. The biggest number we had before was 8.

mediamogul

@meleu said in MAME ROW #8:

Wow! Pac&Pal won!

Wow indeed. Going into this, I was sure that 'Fatal Fury' would win. I had even begun feeling out a few characters to hit the ground running.

GtBFilms

@meleu what have we done?!

It's like the shock U.S Election result all over again!

meleu

@GtBFilms hehe I remembered it too. But our little yellow fellow is a bit more friendly.

obsidianspider

I won't be playing this week as I can't get that game to work on my system. Have fun all.

pjft

@mediamogul I had started as well, trying out Mai. Played a bit yesterday

@meleu Great that we had 11 votes, it's good to see this get more traction :)

@obsidianspider What problem are you finding, and what emulator are you trying it on? I believe I'm running it on lr-mame2003. Have you tried "cat /dev/shm/runcommand.log" to see what error you're getting?

Still, looking forward to playing a bit of Pac & Pal with everyone, should be fun.

Cheers!

obsidianspider

@pjft I didn't know that there was a log file you could look at after the fact. Thanks!

$ cat /dev/shm/runcommand.log
Parameters: 
Executing: /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-mame2003/mame2003_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/arcade/retroarch.cfg "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/arcade/pacnpal.zip" --appendconfig /dev/shm/retroarch.cfg
papi3.cpu    NOT FOUND
ERROR: required files are missing, the game cannot be run.

I unzipped the pacnpal.zip and pacnpal2.zip. Looks like I am missing stuff.

meleu

@obsidianspider why don't you download a "mame 0.78 reference set"? We use this romset version for the MAME ROW.