| smbhax [sys=GBA; cat=Puzzle; reg=UC] |
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Playing Pac-Man--and a bit of the other three games--in Pac-Man Collection for GBA, in the emulator mGBA in Windows!
1:05 - tips: Pac turns faster near ghosts?!? Travels faster while ghosts blue??
2:23 - Pac-Attack
3:41 - Pac-Mania
4:45 - Pac-Man Arrangement
24:07 - Pac-Man (scroll)
26:45 - Pac-Man (fullscreen)
2:14:10 - hi score run
2:30:43 - wrap!
The game with which I was confusing Pac-Man Arrangement at first was the 3D graphics game CALLED "Pac-Man Arrangement" in Namco Museum Battle Collection for PSP, and later presented as "Pac-Man Arrangement CS Ver." in Pac-Man Museum Plus (which also had the original (2D) Pac-Man Arrangement, the same one included in this GBA Pac-Man Collection--this 2D "Pac-Man Arrangement" comes from a 1996 "compilation arcade game" called "Namco Classic Collection Vol. 2").
Oh the "one way paths" tip 2 (0.50) was talking about were the s-paths above the ghost house. 'p'
I didn't play the scrolling version of Pac-Man enough to tell if it runs kinda slow like the fullscreen version. The fullscreen version was baffling me; took hours to work out that it was running a bit slow which was causing me to take risks in a subconscious attempt to get around the maze faster--but then finally when I got to a later faster stage the speed felt comfortable instead of too fast and I got like my highest Pac-Man score probably ever. 'p'
The collision on at least some of the "fruit treats" is wonky, like you can go what seems like pretty much all the way through the strawberry (sometimes? from one side?) without it being picked up.
Thanks to mGBA's author endrift for helping me work out the command line format to set a specific audio level (ie "-C volume=[integer between 0 and 256]"). = D |
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| | | I was thinking maybe I could "overclock" Pac-Man to run at a correct speed by setting the framerate a bit higher, but in fact if you say run Pac-Man around the bottom loop of the maze on stage 1 at 60 fps, it takes pretty much exactly the same time as in MAME (which runs Pac-Man at the arcade 60.60601): ~9.79 seconds. 'p'
Is it just sporadic slowdown then? Or does it just FEEL slow for some other reason? I mean it's definitely gotta be slower on those bell levels, right? Those feel so fast as to be hard to react to in MAME, whereas here they felt like a pleasant cruising speed. |
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| | | | Pac-Man has a warping, color-cycling background pattern of Pac-Mans on the title and pause screens--Ms. Pac-Man in "Namco Museum" collection released a month earlier has just a static sorta Looney Tunes-ish background of concentric blue circles. |
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| | | Update: the sensation of slowness in this game is only in the full screen mode, and it's because in full-screen you don't get a little ~1 pixel boost when taking a tight turn around a corner! Doesn't sound like much but it makes a HUGE difference. Figured it out when I was playing the similar mode in the GBA collection w/ Ms. Pac-Man--Namco Museum--that came out a month before this one, then came back to this one and yet, same thing here. So I think I'm gonna have to play these in the scrolling mode, which still does have the little speed boost when turning, as the Pacs were meant to be!
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0:33 - Full Screen mode cornering
1:31 - Scroll mode
3:20 - Wikipedia-ing dev Mass Media
14:43 - play continues
56:56 - hi score run
1:08:57 - wrap!
It doesn't have the sluggish cornering problem that Full Screen mode has, but Scroll mode still has staticky sound samples, iffy fruit collision, occasional missing eating sounds, and I think slightly slower than arcade play at higher levels.
Oh yeah and input delay--I took a rough measurement afterwards--see next video--and measured about 2 frames more input lag than the arcade ROM in MAME (on my set-up I clocked roughly 5 frames of delay in Pac-Man Collection, and in Namco Museum's Ms. Pac-Man, vs 3 frames with the arcade ROM in MAME). |
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Very roughly measuring input delay in the "Scroll" modes of Pac-Man from "Pac-Man Collection" and Ms. Pac-Man from "Namco Museum" for GBA, both released in 2001, in the latest development branch version of the emulator mGBA (latest Development branch version, 0.11-8938-e8ef4be03), compared at the end with the arcade game ROM of Pac-Man extracted from "Arcade Game Series: Pac-Man" on Steam running in MAME version 0.271, both emulators running in Windows, using 60 fps cell phone footage of me crudely playing the game using my Hori Real Arcade Pro 2017 edition PS3/PS4 arcade stick on my mid-range gaming laptop, a "Sager NP6858CQ 15.6-Inch Thin Bezel FHD 144Hz Gaming Laptop, Intel i7-10750H, GTX 1660Ti 6GB, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD" bought in summer 2020, outputting to a 60 Hz 1080p Asus 5ms monitor.
0:00 - Pac-Man (Pac-Man Collection GBA) (mGBA)
3:10 - mGBA settings
4:54 - Ms. Pac-Man (Namco Museum GBA) (mGBA)
9:33 - Pac-Man (MAME)
Advancing the video frame-by-frame in the free "MPC-HC" video player on my computer, I counted an average of 5 frames of delay in both GBA games between the stick being fully moved and the Pac character sprite flipping direction. The delay is quite consistent from instance to instance. This compared with about 3 frames of delay--it was almost always 3, very occasionally 2--for the Steam arcade ROM in MAME.
So very roughly speaking the GBA in mGBA experience adds about 2 frames of delay on my set-up. Other hardware configurations may very well experience different delay differences!
The 2001 Pac GBA games in mGBA felt noticeably laggy; I didn't have this feeling with the arcade ROMs in MAME, the PS1 Namco Museum versions in DuckStation, the NES versions (Tengen version for Ms. Pac) in Mesen, or the NGPC version in Mednafen, which all felt pretty sharp, response-wise.
I no longer have an actual GBA so I have no idea how much of the delay is due to the game itself, and how much could be added by the emulator. The next-best GBA emulator I've used, Visual Boy Advance-M, has washed-out colors and much worse sound, and I don't want to play anything in it, so I'm not going to try comparing the delay in that. |
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10:22 - Pac-Man Collection (GBA) |
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