![]() ![]() Someone at some point must have fitted this PCB into a JAMMA cabinet because it came with this handmade converter. On the subject of those edge connectors, the bigger one may look like an industry standard JAMMA connector but it isn’t, it actually predates it and the pinout is different. I also wanted to give it the best possible chance of working so of course I cleaned the edge connectors too. You can definitely tell that this has seen some action. This board was filthy when it arrived so I decided to give it a good clean first. The date on here is 1980 which would make this an early version. It has the wiring for the edge connector which I’ll go into in a second, some notes on how the game can be configured, and the DIP switches which I’ll go into shortly. Just while we’re on the subject of paperwork, my PCB also came with this photocopied page from the instruction manual. The only real difference is the addition of the price at the bottom here, 100 Yen for a one player game or 200 yen for two players. Pretty much the same deal here, it has the “Pakkuman” name at the top. My PCB also came with this Japanese leaflet. Then there’s the bottom section all about the bonus fruits. Of course we all know how Pac-Man works by now but it would have been a really novel thing back in those days. I love this hand drawn artwork - Get higher points fighting with monsters! Make double points by continuous bites! How to warp to the other side through the tunnels and so on. These things are actually configurable by the arcade operator as we’ll see shortly. The next section just explains how many points and lives we get and that we get a bonus life at 10,000 points. As you can see this one has the original “Puckman” name at the top in English. They would have originally been stuck to the machine and show how the game works. ![]() So we’ll just take a quick look at these. I’m not sure of the best way to date my PCB but as it came with both “Pakkuman” and “Puckman” leaflets I’m going to assume it was from around this period. It was decided that it would probably be best to change it to “Pac-Man”, which was closer phonetically to the original Japanese name anyway. It was only when cabinets started to hit American shores in December of that year that problems started - problems in the form of young miscreants modifying the game’s marquee to make it spell something else entirely. When gearing up for the English language release, it was decided that the joke would be lost on Western audiences and so Namco decided to rename the character “Puckman” due to his resemblance to a hockey puck. ![]() Well one that I’ve had for a while and not really done anything with is this original Japanese Pac-Man arcade PCB, so I wanted to finally get it hooked up and see if it works.īut what’s this Puckman thing all about? Well, when this game was first released in Japan in July 1980, the game was known as “Pakkuman”, taken from the Japanese word “Paku” meaning “to chomp”. So in one of my early videos I talked a bit about importing some stuff from Yahoo Auctions Japan and showed off some of my pickups. Gameplay captured with an OSSC 1.6 on default settings, RGB SCART, 4x scaling, into a StarTech USB3HDCAP. In this video I explore an original Japanese Puckman arcade PCB, talk a bit about the story behind it, show you how it works, and show you some actual gameplay footage! Watch on YouTube: Puck Man Original Japanese Pac-Man Arcade PCB - History, Tech, And Demo!īefore Namco’s iconic Pac-Man was Pac-Man, he was Puckman. ![]()
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