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Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: garethmur on April 23, 2025, 05:47:57 pm

Title: Mame - Pacman (Midway) Score output? script?
Post by: garethmur on April 23, 2025, 05:47:57 pm

Hi all,

I have built my own cabinet and want to take it to the next level by displaying the score after each set of pacman on an LED matrix in the marquee above the player.
I have got some interesting help from chatGPT so far but seem to have a problem locating the correct memory address where the scores are for Pacman (Midway).
I'm using Mame and got a script that is supposed to extract the score, but its given garbage values so far.

Has anyone done this before or something similar that could point me in th right direction. Ill be using an Arduino board to do the physical interactions...

Thanks🤙

Title: Re: Mame - Pacman (Midway) Score output? script?
Post by: PL1 on April 23, 2025, 10:05:49 pm

Quote from: garethmur on April 23, 2025, 05:47:57 pm

I have got some interesting help from chatGPT so far but seem to have a problem locating the correct memory address where the scores are for Pacman (Midway).
I'm using Mame and got a script that is supposed to extract the score, but its given garbage values so far.

Hope this helps.   :cheers:

I'm just spitballing here, but check out the screen overlay on page 12 for the high score memory addresses and the "Tile (Character) ROM" (pacman.5e ROM) section on pages 6-7.

https://www.lomont.org/software/games/pacman/PacmanEmulation.pdf (https://www.lomont.org/software/games/pacman/PacmanEmulation.pdf)

Given that the highest possible score is 3,333,360, it looks like you should find the score-related tile data in the 7 memory addresses 3F3 - 3ED.

When you pull the tile data from each memory address, you'll need to translate it to get the related number/blank for that digit of the score.

The LUA script and Arduino sketch that you need to do that is beyond my skillset.   :dunno

Have you looked at the MAME Hiscore (https://docs.mamedev.org/plugins/hiscore.html) plugin?
- The plugin LUA script would have to extract and translate the score to save it to highscore.dat.
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/tree/master/plugins/hiscore (https://github.com/mamedev/mame/tree/master/plugins/hiscore)


Scott

Title: Re: Mame - Pacman (Midway) Score output? script?
Post by: garethmur on April 24, 2025, 07:37:07 am

Hi, thanks for that, ill check it out... ;D