Namco Pac-Man

Namco Pac-Man is the name given to a unique arcade system board, designed by Namco Limited for their game "Puckman" and released in Japan in 1980. Then licensed to Midway Manufacturing Co. under the name "Pac-Man" for distribution throughout the United States. Since its launch it has become one of the most recognizable and highest-grossing arcade video games of all time.

The hardware itself is an 8-bit computer system including a Zilog Z80A CPU clocked at 3.072MHz. It supports specialized RGB color graphics including a tilemap-based background and hardware sprite generation, I/O for two player joysticks, buttons and configurable dipswitches and a 3-channel waveform sound generator. All comprised of off-the-shelf 74-series logic chips (with the exception of two custom-made ASICs that are however often broken-up also into discrete logic).

Various memories are included on-board including 16KB of program ROM, 8KB of character ROM, 1KB of work RAM and 2KB of video RAM. As well as multiple PROMs for storing a 16-color palette, palette lookup entries, sound waveforms and timing logic.

[Work In Progress}

Hardware Reference

• Namco Pac-Man/Memory Map
• Namco Pac-Man/Custom IC Pinouts