You can easily identify a bootleg Pac-man or Ms. Plus, bootleg PCB manufacturers only went after popular selling games like Pac-man and Ms. The end result was a bootleg arcade game PCB that was identical (or 99.9% identical) to the original arcade game PCB.īootleg PCBs were much cheaper for arcade owners to buy since the people who made the bootleg boards didn’t have any costs associated with creating the game - they just needed to create the custom PCB.which could be done in mere weeks, since most original arcade games also listed the PCB schematics within the manual. Many people did just that - they would take a copy of the game, build a PCB to hold the game that was similar to the original, and make a few small programs to do anything that was stored in a custom chip on the original game PCB. There was no copy protection on arcade games at the time, and since the arcade game program itself was stored on removable ROM chips on the PCB, anyone who had the right hardware could easily extract the ROM chips and read the game program. Pac-man was bootlegged far more than Pac-man). Pac-man:īecause of its popularity, there were many bootleg copies of Pac-man and Ms. On these PCBs, you’ll find the CPU in its original socket, and 2 or more ROM sockets added to spare socket ports on the PCB to hold the additional ROM chips (and game program information) needed for Ms. Pac-man PCBs today that have been reconditioned to eliminate the need for the auxiliary card.
This is because the ribbon cable connection can become problematic with age. Pac-man PCBs that you’ll find today have an auxiliary card. Pac-man PCBs below are labelled using pink to differentiate them with Pac-man PCBs): Pac-man auxiliary card holds the Z80 CPU and some ROM chips, and connects to the CPU socket on the main PCB using a ribbon cable (the Ms. Pac-man game code, and an extra auxiliary card. Pac-man PCBs are really just Pac-man PCBs with updated ROM chips to store the Ms. Pac-man was originally designed as an enhancement pack for Pac-man, all Ms. If you remove these two auxiliary cards, you will see the single Zilog Z80 CPU (central processing unit) to execute the game logic, graphics, and sound, as well as the ROM (read-only memory) chips that store the game program itself: The second is the VRAM (video random access memory) addresser, which determines the address to be accessed by the video output circuitry (based on the horizontal and vertical timing signals). The first is the Sync bus controller, which interfaces the external devices to the CPU (discussed below). The Pac-man PCB (printed circuit board) has two auxiliary cards as shown to the right. When it comes to the actual video game arcade circuitry, Pac-Man, is actually quite simple.