Ms. Pac-Man (NES, Namco)

Ms. Pac-Man
Developer: Now Production Publisher: Namco Platform: NES Released in US: November 1993 This game has unused areas. This game has hidden developer credits. This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden sound test. This game has a hidden level select. This game has a Data Crystal page

Namco's NES Ms. Pac-Man is a port of an unofficial-made-official hack. Also featuring the world's first video game heroine!

Developer Credit

The reset routine uses the string "NAOKI HIGASHIO" to check if the game was soft or hard reset. Naoki Higashio was a programmer from Now Production, the company that developed this port.

Unused Mazes

Of the seventeen maze layouts stored in the ROM, only eight are actually referenced in the maze pointer table, leaving a whopping nine mazes unused and inaccessible via normal means. Several of these mazes have very strange, asymmetrical designs, and one has no internal walls at all. For some reason, the data for the seventeenth maze (at $A926) is not compressed, perhaps indicating that it is a fairly old leftover.

The Game Genie codes listed below will replace the first maze with the corresponding unused maze. If you'd prefer to modify the ROM instead, change the pointer at $896A (0x97A in the ROM file) to the appropriate address.

Maze	Game Genie code	ROM address
	SATEXP + EPTEUO	$9885
	LGTEXP + XPTEUO	$9A43
	SATEXO + UPTEUO	$9B8D
	UITEXO + VPTEUO	$9EDB
	ELTEXP + EZTEUP	$A0B0
	YTTEXP + XZTEUP	$A267
	AZTEXP + KZTEUP	$A420
	YYTEXO + NZTEUP	$A77F
	TZTEXP + OZTEUO	$A926

(Source: Original TCRF research)

Debug Mode

Use Game Genie code EEOGAAAA (0x40A0 = 80 in a headered ROM) to enable the debug mode. This unlocks a variety of features:

Press Start + Select at any time to reset the game. At the title screen, press Left or Right to select a starting level (though be aware that the controls are backwards: Left goes up one level, and Right goes down one level). At the title screen, hold B and press Start to start the game with invulnerability enabled. Amusingly, this will also turn Ms. Pac-Man a Hulk-like green color. During the game, press A or B while paused to change the brightness of the primary maze color. During the game, hold Select and press A to set the internal "dots remaining" counter to three. After eating three dots, you will advance to the next level. During the game, hold B and press A to make the ghosts change direction. During a two-player game, Pac-Man can be controlled with either controller. During a cutscene, press Start to pause the action.

Debug Menu

Press Select + A at the title screen to open the debug menu.

CHR TEST

Use the D-Pad to scroll the screen vertically or horizontally. You can also change the colors, though it's a bit tricky: while holding Select, press Up or Down to select a background palette entry, and then press A or B to change it. You can edit all 16 background palette entries, though only the first palette is actually visible. Press Start to return to the main menu.

While the final game doesn't use any mappers, the CHR viewer does have some extra functionality that only works if the game is running on an MMC3 board: you can press A or B to cycle through the game's CHR banks.

OBJ TEST

Use the D-Pad to move the object around the screen. Press A or B to cycle through objects, or Start to exit to the main menu. Note that most of the object values are invalid and may crash the game.

SOUND TEST

Press Up or Down to change the sound number, and A to play it. Selecting any value above 20 will crash the game.

(Source: Original TCRF research)