There’s a BETTER Version of Namco Museum on GBA

Hey there! I worked on both Namco Museum and Pac-Man Collection on the GBA. I want to clarify a few things. Firstly, (and I'm including the N64 version here) we used the original arcade ROMs disassembled and the Z80 instruction set was rewritten in C, so they are pretty much as close as you can get to an emulation, not a conversion. Assembler routines were modified a bit to work with the hardware (joystick mapping, music & sound playing, backgrounds, and sprite output) but most of the original arcade code was untouched. The challenging stage music bug in Galaga was someone picking the wrong music where we patched the arcade code to the native player (they were swapped) - I noticed this when I worked on the GBA version and fixed it. Lastly, to add context - we were given a stupidly tight deadline (~5 months I think) to rush these out for the GBA launch and were hampered with unreliable prototype devkits, so it was quite a crunch. PS. We had high score save working, but Namco made us remove it because adding a battery doubled the price of the cart and at $19.99 there was no margin. PPS. Namco Museum GBA sold around 2.5 Million copies, and Pac-Man collection sold about 1.9 Million. Namco capped the royalties, so we didn't see any of that once our advance was met. Cheers! Bob

Inception: playing gba on emulator that plays 50th namco games emulated on gba

The original GBA Namco Museum was my first GBA game

The pic of the whole PS collection spelling out NMOCA really messes with me.

Keep up the videos mate. Will be great to see this channel grow

The reason the "Full Screen" games may not have filled the screen top to bottom is likely to avoid shimmering issues, so you don't have lines (vertical, or horizontal) doubled in few spots.

You probably can't ghoose between scroll mode and full screen as the're most likely two completely different games on the cartridge.

I had one of the ps1 ones and both the original and better one on gba. Really enjoyed the actual museum with the themed rooms for each game!

The Namco Museum series started in 1995 and the most recent entry is from 2020. Since 1995 Namco worked on a museum game for almost every console. But the biggest thing is that almost all of them contains Namco's most popular/well known games like Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Rally-X, Galaga, Poll Position, and more. But some of them includes newer updated version of the classic arcade hit. While others have more obscure Namco games. But really it seems like Namco has been re-releasing there arcade games onto so many different systems. Several years ago I found the 2001 Game cube release of the Namco Museum at a yard sale for only $1. It's nothing really special other than seeing 5 super well known Namco games along with a newer updated version of the arcade classic.

The PS1 versions aren't emulation. Just very very very good ports. The start ups that look like the arcade system booting up really fooled me, but that can be turned off in options. I thought it was emulation but was corrected by someone in the know. When you said that a downside to the N64 version was that it wasnt emulation, just wanted to let you know the PS1 versions arent either. But they were done so well im not sure if any Namco Museum is emulation, they may have used the PS1 versions again and again. Just like the Capcom Collection for PS2/XBOX simply used the PS1 ports because they were so well done. Something that gives those away is the ability to move where the score counter is and such, as well as the title screen dates, and same custom music in options. "Though Final Fight and a couple others are emulation, the other dozen in that compilation are from the PS1 games" The Namco Museum boarders arent part of the arcade game either, as well as some vertical games changed to fit the screen.

Mass Media's Namco Museum 64 was released on the Dreamcast as well (with 64 removed from the title ofc) with the same number of games and Dreamcast game discs were about 1gb in size, so it just seems they couldn't be asked to port any more games, only extra DC had was a Pac Dot VMU you could save.

Corrections: Vol. 6/Namco Museum Encore is a Japanese exclusive. The west only got Volumes 1-5. There was also a Namco Museum for Dreamcast but it's based upon the N64 version rather than the PSX ones.

Great video! You should check out the namco collection and the konami collection on the nintendo DS, digital takes what they learn on the GBA and take advantage of the Ds double screen for a nice emulation experience!

Really love your videos, they’re really high quality and great. Really want a video from you explaining the history of plug n plays like the namco ones for example, but that’s up to you of course

Back in the late 90's I remember that my Sound Blaster AWE32 would create that echoy sound effect when playing Ms. Pacman using the early version of mame. I remember thinking it was really cool. :)

Well, at the time, this was the way to play these games. Nowadays, things have changed because of the fact that emulation came into play. Because of this, you get the arcade experience overall. Some have minor changes however, like the Taito Memories version of Rainbow Islands having the Over the Rainbow-like theme changed with an altered arrangement heard in the Rainbow Islands DS game.

Its funny because i saw 50th anniv way more then the other version in store during this era !!!

I had the Pac-Man collection, and one issue I remember with that is that for whatever reason they cut down the music in Pac-Man Arrangement and Pac-Mania. But why? Surely they had enough ROM space for the full music, it's not like it was in MP3 format or something like that, it was in a MIDI-like format like the original, the song data should've been mere kilobytes!

Still got the first one myself, even got the box and other things too. Properly done or not these are the sort of games I like to play on the go thanks to the pick up and play nature.

I still have my copy and box version. Even though it sucks with the game light on the GBA was limited, I had much fun with this game. It had both full screen and a scrolling screen for ms pacman which I always go scrolling screen. I had loads of fun playing this with my dad during the time of my GBA phase. I can still remember the jingle of the menu goes. Galaga was one of the ones I mostly played on it. Sure it's not like the other one with loads of games on it. But at the time this was a huge deal for me playing oldies on a game boy with little games I had at the time. I really prefer all these old school stuff. Nothing beats the classics. I was stun to find out that digdug has loads of sequels to the point where the name was changed for the spin offs. Heck I'm going to go play my version thanks to this video now.