Getting new software on your custom cabinet

[shopguy]

New here, so sorry if I do anything wrong on my first post.  I'm building a simple retro-arcade cabinet, easy.  However, I also really want to have a separate cabinet exclusively for my favorite arcade game - PacMan Battle Royal CHOMPionship.  This game is pretty new (I think released in 2023), so there is no PC version available yet, and it could be years until there is.  The older PacMan Battle Royal (not CHOMPionship version) is part of PacMan Museum available on Steam, but I really don't like that version.

So, my question -- what options do I have for getting this game in my custom built cabinet?  I really am not going to spend $9,000 to buy the commercial game + cabinet, so want to build my own cabinet.  I don't mind spending some money on software are PCBs to get the game legally, maybe $1,000... but it really isn't worth $9,000 for something I'm just going to play at home, and can easily build a cabinet myself.  Do I have any real options to get the software to run on some emulator or PC I can buy?  Can I find a dealer or someone to sell me just the PCBs, like someone might need if they own the commercial game and their PCB/motherboard/controller dies?  Can I work with some people that create ROMs for other games and put in like 500 hours of work to help them create a ROM for this game?  I am a professional software engineer with 20+ years experience (including ASM and C, low-level stuff), but really never tried to do anything like this, so not sure where to start.

Hopefully nobody gets upset with my post, feel free to delete if needed.  I'm not really looking to be a hacker or steal IP from anyone, I'm just looking for a reasonable cost for home usage of a product that the manufacture is marketing to arcades only currently, and I don't want to wait years before I can easily buy this software from Steam for like $20... willing to pay up to 50 times that to buy it today, just not 500 times that.

I did already try to contact Bandi Namco (sp?), the owners/makers of the game -- no response, of course.

[PL1]

what options do I have for getting this game in my custom built cabinet?

None at this time, unless you code your own version of the game like Sjaak did with Banana Royale. (his Pac Man Battle Royale Redesign Contest)

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,122718.0.html

Do I have any real options to get the software to run on some emulator or PC I can buy?  Can I find a dealer or someone to sell me just the PCBs, like someone might need if they own the commercial game and their PCB/motherboard/controller dies?  Can I work with some people that create ROMs for other games and put in like 500 hours of work to help them create a ROM for this game?

As a general rule, the MAME devs won't do anything with a game until it has been out for over 10 years.

MAME emulates the original hardware and runs the original program code from the ROMs and CHDs (Compressed Hunks of Data -- think laserdisk, hard drive, etc.) on that emulated hardware.

Most recent games run on either a modern PC or latest generation console so full-speed emulation is not likely to happen any time soon.  For perspective, the GameCube uses a 486 MHz IBM "Gekko" PowerPC CPU from about 20 years ago and even some fairly modern PCs have trouble emulating GameCube games at full speed.

What is far more likely is that at some point (several years from now) when the manufacturer has sold as many cabs as possible, they will consider porting a version to Steam and/or releasing a PC version.


Scott