How to access Pac-Man or the speed up hacks in the 20th Anniversary Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga cabinets
By goz
This post is mostly for myself so I can quickly lookup the joystick sequence to enable Pac-Man or use the speedup hacks in the 20th Anniversary Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga cabinets. It seems like this is the most common cabinet, I see it the most out in the wild.
Play Pac-Man
Ms. Pac-Man started out as a ROM hack of the original Pac-Man board, and because of that, Ms. Pac-Man ran on the same hardware as the Pac-Man cabinets. The 20th Anniversary cabinet has the original Pac-Man on board. To play it, you enter the following sequence when the cabinet asks you to Press Start Button:
up, up, up, down, down, down, left, right, left, right,left
Ms. Pac-Man will change color and you’ll hear a sound. Select Ms. Pac-Man and you’ll be playing the original!
Speed up hack
Do you want to feel like you’re amazing at Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man but you don’t want to memorize patterns? Then do I have a hack for you. Entering this sequence will turn on the speed up hack for the character, allowing you to zip around the maze at an amazing speed.
left, right, left, right, up, up, up, fire
(Note: if the machines has the speed hack enabled by default, this puts it into normal mode)
Waiting
I’ve played as Pac-Man several times at Dave & Busters with this code, and I have yet to have someone notice that I’m playing a game that is not on the cabinet. One of these days…
Let me know if you have any other hacks for this cabinet, and I’ll add it to the list!