The world's most-read Scottish politics website

Wings Over Scotland


New old times

Posted on January 01, 2020 by

As alert readers will know by now, there’s nothing I like more than preserving weird old videogame stuff that’s in danger of being lost to posterity, unless perhaps it’s seeing games ported to strange formats they were never designed to run on, years or even decades after those formats ceased to be current.

So man, what a stroke of luck!

 

What’s all this, then?

I’ll make this short, because WordPress has just forced an indescribably awful and compulsory new text editor on users and I want to murder everyone involved. Pac Manic Miner Man, as the name hints and the screen makes explicit, is a remarkable hack of the Speccy platforming classic by veteran coder Jim Bagley which enables it to run on arcade Pac-Man hardware.

 

Unfortunately Jim’s old website bit the dust long ago, and everyone who covered the release back in late 2012 lazily linked to the site for the files rather than storing local copies, which means it’s now all but impossible to find, even in the unlikely event that you were to understand the incomprehensible nerdery required to then actually build the ROMset for the game.

But after several hours I tracked a copy down, so here it is. If you pop that file into the ROMs directory of the HBMAME emulator (or any number of other special versions of MAME), you’ll be playing a fun arcade port of Manic Miner, with all the levels but lots of little timing and spacing changes that make it a whole new version to learn.

(Inexplicably it defaults to using Right on the second joystick or G on the keyboard for jump, so you’ll probably want to tweak that in the emulator controls.)

 

If you want to run it in Retropie, incidentally – which is how I do 90% of my gaming these days – you’ll need to rename the file pacman.zip and pop it in a separate folder in your arcade ROMs directory (otherwise it’ll overwrite your normal Pac-Man ROM). Other than that it works as standard.

(Here’s a fake arcade flyer I made to use in the Retropie frontend.)

 

But that’s not the end. In a beautiful twist, Speccy boffin Simon Owen then ported Pac Manic Miner Man BACK onto the Speccy (in monochrome because the graphics had to be resized), to be run through his astonishing Pac-Man emulator for the +2A and +3, as previously seen here.

(Press 3 to add a credit and 1 to start. 6, 7 and 0 are the controls.)

 

Sadly, he only did it as a proof of concept, which means it only works properly up to Eugene’s Lair. (You can play the later levels, but the sprites mess up and change all the patterns and it makes it super-hard. Personally I still quite enjoyed playing it, using save states to try to get through it out of sheer cussedness.)

But it’s still fun, and since building the tape file requires another load of techy faffing, we’ve uploaded the ready-to-go version (kindly supplied by one of the fine folk at the Spectrum Computing Forums) here for use in whatever Spectrum emulator the kids think is coolest these days.

I’m hoping to get the Speccy retroport properly finished one day – I’ve offered to do the necessary sprite redrawing if Simon will then put it all into the game – but for now Pac Manic Miner Man has been thoroughly saved from the dustbin of history, so enjoy it. If that’s the sort of thing you like, obv.

Comment - please read this page for comment rules. HTML tags like <i> and <b> are permitted. Use paragraph breaks in long comments. DO NOT SIGN YOUR COMMENTS, either with a name or a slogan. If your comment does not appear immediately, DO NOT REPOST IT. Ignore these rules and I WILL KILL YOU WITH HAMMERS.


  • About

    Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)

    Stats: 6,729 Posts, 1,215,355 Comments

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • Categories

  • Tags

  • Recent Comments

    • Geri on The more you change nothing: “Charles & Michael Thanks for the reply. I haven’t used Facebook since indyref really. Only a few times as my…Apr 11, 21:53
    • Hatey McHateface on The more you change nothing: “It’s “its” foreign dominions, YLS. If you can’t handle written English, maybe post in Scots. I guarantee 99% of the…Apr 11, 21:30
    • Hatey McHateface on The more you change nothing: “So good you posted it twice, eh TH? Or maybe the DTs were kicking in. Hopefully you will have necked…Apr 11, 21:21
    • Young Lochinvar on The more you change nothing: “You mean like Engerlund treated those “uppity” ones in “it’s” foreign dominions? I reckon a psychiatrist would have a field…Apr 11, 20:54
    • Young Lochinvar on The more you change nothing: “The tragic diary of a blow-in..Apr 11, 20:46
    • Dan on The more you change nothing: “Archived link to Independent article mentioned re. kids and “un”social media. https://archive.is/0K3LC Ahh to be young again and have the…Apr 11, 20:26
    • PacMan on The more you change nothing: “@ Michael Laing 1:41 One of Robin McAlpine’s recent blog posts includes a link to a report in the Independent…Apr 11, 19:46
    • PacMan on The more you change nothing: “@ Michael Laing 1:41 One of Robin McAlpine’s recent blog posts includes a link to a report in the Independent…Apr 11, 19:24
    • Yoon Scum on The more you change nothing: “Seeing the Un is going to end the union any day now Do you think that the scottish government should…Apr 11, 18:42
    • twathater on The more you change nothing: “@ Michael Laing 3.28pm he along with his fellow yoonionists are just attention seekers desperately trying to undermine independence support…Apr 11, 18:21
    • twathater on The more you change nothing: “@ Michael Laing 3.28pm he along with his fellow yoonionists are just attention seekers desperately trying to undermine independence support…Apr 11, 18:19
    • Yoon Scum on The more you change nothing: “I so love being on the wrong side of history I’m not on the side encouraging people to kill themselvesApr 11, 17:55
    • GeoffC on The more you change nothing: “17 of them, so one for each year in “power” at Holyrood – but what do they do to further…Apr 11, 16:05
    • Michael Laing on The more you change nothing: “@ Yoon Scum: Please hurry up, then. I, and I’m sure many others, will be very happy to see the…Apr 11, 15:28
    • Yoon Scum on The more you change nothing: “Quick question Apart from calling me an English scumbag and marching ALOT Any ideas on showing that Holyrood is more…Apr 11, 15:23
    • Yoon Scum on The more you change nothing: “Why Bother? The UN are sending in troops to free us next week no way can they ignore a petition…Apr 11, 15:22
    • Yoon Scum on The more you change nothing: “I’m going to slightly disagree with you Grangemouth is closing not because it suits Westminster but because it has been…Apr 11, 15:20
    • sarah on The more you change nothing: “www.barrheadboy.comApr 11, 15:18
    • sarah on The more you change nothing: “Thanks, Michael. It seems that the grassroots are sprouting this spring! There is a Yes Brechin meeting of 5 parties,…Apr 11, 15:07
    • sarah on The more you change nothing: “HURRAH! An umbrella group of independence parties for 2026 Holyrood election IS happening. See Barrhead Boy’s blog today.Apr 11, 15:02
    • Yoon Scum on The more you change nothing: “Tim Rideout Is he the one who claimed all the IT for the new central bank could be bought for…Apr 11, 14:14
    • Yoon Scum on The more you change nothing: “GM I live in scotland Should I be locked up after the UN free’s Scotland to stop me holding the…Apr 11, 14:11
    • GM on The more you change nothing: “Absolute waste of his old mans efforts that cunt. Hope his bairns dinnae get tae ken what he does for…Apr 11, 14:01
    • Michael Laing on The more you change nothing: “Apologies if others have already posted the following information, but here is a link to a flyer for the Scottish…Apr 11, 13:48
    • Michael Laing on The more you change nothing: “@ Dan: I’ve just been reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which includes a chapter on the toxicity of Facebook…Apr 11, 13:41
    • Young Lochinvar on The more you change nothing: “Hmmm.. What a transcendent form of uber b0ll0cks. Suppose you had to get it off yer chest..Apr 11, 13:40
    • Jay on The more you change nothing: “Viv O’B, you did not reply to my enquiry relating to your comment on the matter of a lost M88…Apr 11, 12:03
    • bobo bunny on The more you change nothing: “Fair comment. If we’d got independence when Salmond was in charge, who knows where we would be. But with this…Apr 11, 11:37
    • Lorn on The more you change nothing: “Nope. They’re actually doubling down on everything. It is going to take a couple of generations to eliminate their rotten-to-the-core…Apr 11, 11:36
    • Jay on Mad caps: “Saarah: thank you for acknowledgement and good luck. Those rhizomes are troublesome, go anywhere.Apr 11, 11:28
  • A tall tale



↑ Top