New old times
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.
