Mame - Pacman (Midway) Score output? script?

[garethmur]

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🤙

[PL1]

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.   

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

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.   

Have you looked at the MAME Hiscore 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


Scott

[garethmur]

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