PacMan Museum - Battle Royale fullscreen?

[BadMouth]

Did anyone ever come up with a workaround to get this fullscreen instead of having the purple bezel?

Gamersgate has it on sale for $5, but I'm still reluctant to buy because of this.
http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-PMM/pac-man-museum

[SegaOutrun]

i believe it was hardcoded. probably to keep people from making fake cabinets or just plain lazyness. also they only way to do multiplayer is with xbox controllers. you cant do multiplayer on one keyboard. it was a great disappointment

[Howard_Casto]

Well I've been telling people a lot lately, the solution to all your input problems is to just use 360 gamepad hacks.  Which reminds me, I need to order those. 

Has anyone tried to hack it?  I ask because I have a pacman cab, so I might be willing to break into it.  There has to be a screen area defined due to that cruddy bezel and the way it draws offscreen.  It might be as simple as enlarging it. 

[JDFan]

Steam has it also for $4.99 for the next 36 hours and the Mrs. Pacman add on is only $1.25 - figure it's worth that much but they really messed up not allowing for adjustments to get rid of that border area (it's even worse on a 4:3 monitor - not so bad if you have a widescreen but on a 4:3 display you wind up with black bars on top and bottom and the bezel since it is only designed for widescreen display !!) Shame they didn't put in the effort to really make it useable (ie. reprogramming keys used - multiple players on a single keyboard rather than a separate controller for each player

[bulbousbeard]

You might be able to use GedoSato to force it to run at a different resolution.

[BadMouth]

Someone gifted me a copy for being a good upstanding BYOAC member. 

There are only two files there aside from the redistributables and steam api.
PACMuseum.exe and then in a data folder, dataDX9.lpk

I fiddled around with the .lpk for a few minutes, but couldn't figure out a way to open it on my laptop.
I would have a go at them with a hex editor and look for notes (which is about all my skill level allows for), but I have other things to do that are more pressing.

[BadMouth]

You might be able to use GedoSato to force it to run at a different resolution.

I see where some people have used it to remove the HUD in first person shooters and it can also force resolutions.
Looks promising, but I probably won't have time to mess with it for a few days.

[Howard_Casto]

Is there a way to take screenshots?   I'm working on it as we speak but I need to know what to look for. 

[JDFan]

Is there a way to take screenshots?   I'm working on it as we speak but I need to know what to look for.

Fraps works for taking screens of the game ( www.fraps.com )

First screen is 4:3 800x600 second is 16:9 1280x720

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah that'll work, thanks.  This one looks like a tough nut to crack.  Typically finding the value in memory is the hard part but in this case it appears to be finding the right value.  I put in the apparent resolution of the gameplay area and got about 1000 matches......  I wonder if I can get into that lpk file. 

[Howard_Casto]

Ok I looked into it and via some help with dxwnd, the game will runwindowed just fine and when you stretch the window it scales the game.  That means I need to pull out one of my old taito wrappers.  I probably won't be able to scale it automatically, but I can map a toggle so that once you are in the game you can stretch it. 

[Howard_Casto]

Hmm....

Well this is going to be one of those games that kicks my butt.  I can get it into windowed mode no problem but it won't stretch the window beyond the screen bounds.  So the idea of stretching it to zoom in won't work. 

[BadMouth]

Thanks for looking at it Howard.

I think SegaOutrun called it when he said they did it this way on purpose to keep people from using it commercially.

I have a screen area magnification program somewhere that would allow you to display the original game on one screen and then display an enlarged version of just the game area on another screen.  The previous setup I used this on had a TV connected as the secondary monitor and it would still work even if the tv wasn't turned on, but IMO the whole thing would be too convoluted at that point.  The scaling would probably look pretty rough too.

[Howard_Casto]

Well that's what I ran into.  I could stretch it but the resolution didn't change so it looked really really rough and I couldn't stretch it beyond the bounds of the monitor, so a secondary monitor would be required.

[thatpurplestuff]

Very short-sighted of them to release the game like this.  I was really excited to buy this before it came out... once I saw the ridiculous bezels and lack of control options I didn't want to support that crap.

[yotsuya]

Very short-sighted of them to release the game like this.  I was really excited to buy this before it came out... once I saw the ridiculous bezels and lack of control options I didn't want to support that crap.

To play devil's advocate, I don't think they care about playability in your Mame cab...

But I agree. I would have bought it otherwise.

[JDFan]

To play devil's advocate, I don't think they care about playability in your Mame cab...

Problem isn't just with Mame cabs - trying to play it on a 4:3 1600x1200 monitor results in a playfield of approx 1065x620 pixels so you lose about 1/3 of the width and 1/2 of the height of the playfield that you could have if they had just allowed for full screen gameplay.

I measured the various game screens on my 16" x 12" monitor (hp 2065) - For games that are original 3:4 format I get a game screen of 12" x 5.5" and for widescreen formats like Battle Royal I get 11.5" x 7" game screens which is utterly ridiculous on a PC game 

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah I've got a 20 inch 16x9 monitor on this desktop, which I think is fairly average for the typical pc just sitting on a desk (aka their target demographic)  Most of the games are fairly large even with the bezels but battle museum in particular is a postage stamp.  It makes even less sense when you take into account the fact that pacman ce, which is included in the game, is fullscreen.  They only did this nonsense with the arcade titles. 

I still haven't given up though... I'm just taking a break because the game pisses me off in terms of memory hacking.... it's surprisingly difficult for such simple games.  So complex, in fact, that I'm thinking the package included with the game actually contains different exes and data for each game and it's just unpacked to memory.

[thatpurplestuff]

Very short-sighted of them to release the game like this.  I was really excited to buy this before it came out... once I saw the ridiculous bezels and lack of control options I didn't want to support that crap.

To play devil's advocate, I don't think they care about playability in your Mame cab...

But I agree. I would have bought it otherwise.

Honestly it would be nice to play on a MAME cab, but I would most likely be playing this on my HTPC more often than not.  The bezel is a cross-platform dealbreaker.