Pacguy gets a nod in the Washington City Paper

Last week's Washington City Paper included a supplemental fall arts guide Titled "State of the Arts." In that Maura Judkis wrote a sneak preview of what's to come in next month's exhibition at Flashpoint. You can see it here.

FINISHED

Sound works, all graphics are edited, all exterior graphics are looking good. I am officially done working on this thing for the time being. All that is left is to play the life out of it to see if it is going to overheat from prolonged periods of gaming. I may add one more fan if it seems to become like an oven on the inside, but other than that I am happy. I will post pictures soon.

And we're up and running

It took a few attempts and getting monitor drivers, video cards, PCIe extenders, and so on, but the pacguy cabinet is now functional. All that is left are a few of the finishing touches. In the end I decided that Linux was not the best platform for this project so I am now running everything in Windows XP with just plain old MAME32. I will set the OS preferences so that MAME starts and loads the Pacguy rom on Startup. Not the perfect solution, but I have decided that I can live with the windows OS startup screen being there for 2 minutes when you turn the cabinet on. It was either that or dig deeper for tips on how to write command line to get 15hz compatibility in Linux. I will post some pictures soon.

Progress

Well, thanks to our good friends at Dorkbot DC, I can now edit the color proms. Pacguy sports the proper color skin and blue jeans, and we have a bonified hamburger as level 1 bonus fruit. It a bit of trial and error meaning I have to make small changes and test the ROM. By test I mean play until I see that particular sprite in action. This will become a little more complicated as we get to editing the fruits at levels 3-5, but I am certain it CAN be done. If anyone wants to volunteer to play a shitload of Pacguy in alpha, please post and let me know.

Still at a stand still on the hardware. Got a video card that can handle 15hz monitors, but it is PCIe and my small form factor PC only has a PCI expansion slot. So close. If anyone has heard of a good small form factor PC with a PCIe (regular not mini PCIe) expanison slot that is not mega expensive, please let me know so that I can pick it up. More to come soon......

I can put away my drill

I think I've finished the physical assembly of the cocktail cabinet. It's a tight space, and I had to go through several drill bits, two CPU, and unhook and rehook the JAMMA wiring harness quite a few times to get it together in a clean and secure fashion. Now let's just hope that when I get to the next stage (Hooking up the J-Pac wiring or JAMMA to PC adapter, or in just plain English, the adapter that connects the arcade buttons and monitor to a computer) everything works without much difficulity.

I still haven't figured out the color palletes to finish my Rom, but I am getting close. A very generous computer programmer out there has agreed to help me get the color palletes edited, so I have confidence that this is going to happen a lot smoother then me playing trial and error, entering random numbers in to a hex code that I do not understand.

Here are some pictures of the cabinet in it's current state, and a screen shot of Pacguy being played in Alpha.

Holy Color Palettes

Who would have thought that something as simple as changing the color in a video game like pacman could be so complex? I had no problem changing the pixel configurations of the sprites using Turaco and the text, but looks like I will be doing my homework and learning a bit of hex in order to change the color palettes so that my figure is not pac-yellow with blue hair. So far the software community has been very helpful explaining all this stuff to a novice such as myself, but it is all still slightly over my head. It will get there, but my hopes are that I leave this process with enough programming knowledge to be able to edit other classic arcade games. Any advice is more than welcome here.

Control Panel

Here is the graphics for above the controls on the underlay. A bit of a spin off the original, but reinvented

A Few Road Blocks

Well..... The cabinet arrived (a few weeks ago sorry for the delayed posting) after several issues with the freight company delivering it to the wrong address, and the construction of this machine is well under way. Everything looks great, however it is not going together as smoothly as one would wish. For starters, I ordered an unassembled cabinet which is what I received though everything was pre-drilled. This would be nice if any of the holes lined up. I spent 4 hours redrilling things and now the inside of this treasure chest of wires looks like the victim of a drive by shooting.

The cabinet is a little too tight to fit the Dell Dimension 4700 that I have as a CPU to run MAME so I decided to remove the motherboard, video, audio, and usb cards, and hard drive from the tower, and mount them too the wall. I did this, but now made a fatal mistake somewhere along the way, and now the machine will not boot up. I think when I was removing the heat sinks from the processor, I bumped something and did some serious damage. I will fuss with it when I later, but if I come up empty handed again, I will either try to find a cheap Shuttle on Craigslist, or just drop my eee inside as the brains of the operation. The latter is probably the best solution though I hate to sacrifice that fun little machine to an existence inside a pressed wood box. Easy come, easy go I suppose.

I still have not figured out how to assign color palletes to specific sprites in Pacman using TURACO. As of this moment, my character (Pacguy) is yellow like pacman, with blue pants and blue hair. Need to fix that. If anyone is savy with hex or can shine some light onto editing colors in Pacman it would be much appreciated.

I have much more work to do. I will take my camera with me next time I go to the studio which should be soon so you all can see pics of what I am getting myself into.

What is PACGUY?

I just realized that I never really explained the purpose of this blog. Here it is in a nutshell:

I received funding from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities to construct a cocktail style arcade console that is intended to be somewhat of an art installation. The video game is titled Pacguy and riffs off the classic Pacman, replacing the iconic graphics with objects that reference my own artist practice. The changes are all subtle enough that this arcade console will be able to exist as an art object with function in a non art context. The purpose of this blog is to chronicle the contruction of this thing, and perhaps gain insight on how to approach the technical nuts and bolts on recoding the Pacman ROM.

Status Update 2/28/09

Still tweaking the sprites to fit into the initial map of Pacman, and trying to figure out how to edit the text, as soon as I have a prototype of the ROM I will put it up here. I am also trying to decide how to best run the software inside the cabinet. As of now my best option seems to place a CPU inside the cabinet (minus the casing of the CPU), load Xandros on it, and have MAME boot on start up. If anyone has recommendations, I welcome them.

I have two meetings next week with places interested in hosting Pacguy. I do not want to disclose locations until everything is official.

The Initial Set of Sprites

Here is my first edit of Sprites for animating the game. As you can see they are really small (I have already upsampled them for viewing purposes here). The "sprites" or graphics in the original pacman are only a whopping 16x16 pixes so as you can imagine, they show up really really small on Hi-Res Monitors.

It begins

Organizing, arranging. Pacguy is underway