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Playing Ms. Pac-Man--and a bit of the other 4 games--in Namco Museum for GBA, in the emulator mGBA in Windows!
0:00 - Namco Museum
0:29 - Pole Position
1:27 - Dig Dug
1:52 - Galaga
2:37 - Galaxian
3:03 - Ms. Pac-Man - scroll mode
8:03 - full screen mode
1:05:25 - scroll mode
1:19:36 - full screen mode
1:20:55 - OH the corner boost is missing in full screen!!
Funny they didn't rotate the graphics 90 degrees for Full Screen mode like the later "Namco Museum 50th Anniversary" would do, then maybe they could'a had pixels of the right size so they could'a kept the normal pixel or so speed boost you're supposed to get when holding the direction of the turn around a corner in Ms. Pac-Man (and Pac-Man 'p'). But their scaled-down chunky full screen maze has relatively like double-sized pixels so I guess they figured that moving you ahead by one of those big pixels on each turn would'a made you too darn fast, so they just...gave no cornering boost at all in full screen mode. Which makes the whole darn game feel weird and sluggish and awful compared to how it's supposed to feel! ARGH
Plays fine in scrolling mode though, except of course you can only see about half the maze.
I found the Tips! They're only in the Pause menu from before you start playing. : P (Works the same for Pac-Man in Pac-Man Collection for GBA, which came out one month later.) Maybe I'll make a separate little video to show those.
After recording I went to bed thinking ahh I'm gonna sell these no-corner-boost Pac collections but ya know, the scrolling versions aren't all bad, and I don't have other versions quite like them. Maybe I'll keep 'em. Heck maybe I should do episodes just of the scrolling versions--hm! |
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Checking out the Tips section for Ms. Pac-Man
0:00 - get to the tips
1:01 - Tip 1
1:26 - Tip 2
1:38 - Tip 3
2:48 - bonus! Tip 4 (from Pac-Man in Pac-Man Collection for GBA)
3:30 - bonus! Tip 5 (from Pac-Man in Pac-Man Collection for GBA) |
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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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0:00 - Ms. Pac-Man (Namco Museum)
0:28 - Full Screen mode
1:55 - Scroll mode
19:47 - hi score run (also score starts out as "0970" before clearing 'p')
29:47 - wrap!
Doesn't have the staticky sound or fruit collision problems the Pac-Man port in Pac-Man Collection will have a month later, and doesn't have slow cornering both ports have in their Full Screen mode, but even in Ms. Pac-Man's Scroll mode, there's some input delay (~5 frames of input lag on my set-up, vs 3 for the arcade version in MAME), and the game doesn't quite ramp its speed up enough in later levels, leaving the game feeling easy like cruise control past a certain point. |
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9:48 - Namco Museum (GBA) |
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