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In the aftermath of the question about running the arcade Pac-Man ROM on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum I discovered that about the same time that was done, somebody else did the reverse, porting a classic Spectrum game to run on the original Pac-Man arcade hardware: Pac Manic Miner Man!

In the eight years since, the original site/page for it has disappeared but the link via which I discovered this includes this link to the ROM.

I thought that I could just rename it to pacman.zip and place it in the MAME roms folder and that MAME would warn me that the checksums didn't match but would then give me an option to run it anyway. It does tell me the checksums are wrong but I can't find any way to get it to ignore that and run the game anyway.

MAME checksum errors

I'm using the regular mame64 version for Windows 10 straight from the MAME homepage. I've pored over the commandline options. I've looked at MAME's issues on GitHub. I've gone through all the options menus and I've wasted quite a bit of time Googling for solutions. Since MAME has been around for over twenty years and has changed a lot over that time it's a bit hard to home in on current stuff actually.

But there must be a way to achieve this. Surely people would use this when finding new game variants or when making new games for old arcade hardware, which I've read is a thing.

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  • The easiest approach is likely to declare it as a new game. Clone the closest entry from the game database, replace the checksums, and give it a new name.
    – fadden
    Jul 28, 2020 at 3:59
  • @fadden: Would that require rebuilding MAME or just editing an XML file or such? I haven't played with MAME source for many years now.
    – hippietrail
    Jul 28, 2020 at 4:11
  • it looks like a bug in the GUI
    – Jean-François Fabre
    Jul 28, 2020 at 11:39

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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There's probably some obscure way to do it in the GUI... But it behaves exactly like you want it to if you just run MAME from the command line with the target machine as an argument.

In cmd.exe or a similar shell:

c:\Program Files\MAME>mame64.exe pacman
pacman.6e WRONG CHECKSUMS:
    EXPECTED: CRC(c1e6ab10) SHA1(e87e059c5be45753f7e9f33dff851f16d6751181)
       FOUND: CRC(11dee14e) SHA1(1aeb94299a33daa9b51fdab3c0abea98858cc7dd)
pacman.6f WRONG CHECKSUMS:
    EXPECTED: CRC(1a6fb2d4) SHA1(674d3a7f00d8be5e38b1fdc208ebef5a92d38329)
       FOUND: CRC(8c449bd7) SHA1(84233296683321f71fdef604ca19bfffd97e993c)
pacman.6h WRONG CHECKSUMS:
    EXPECTED: CRC(bcdd1beb) SHA1(8e47e8c2c4d6117d174cdac150392042d3e0a881)
       FOUND: CRC(a0e62570) SHA1(654a71144eae3c78d7baaeb9119aad0ece500e60)
pacman.6j WRONG CHECKSUMS:
    EXPECTED: CRC(817d94e3) SHA1(d4a70d56bb01d27d094d73db8667ffb00ca69cb9)
       FOUND: CRC(c71c0011) SHA1(1ceaf73df40e531df3bfb26b4fb7cd95fb7bff1d)
pacman.5e WRONG CHECKSUMS:
    EXPECTED: CRC(0c944964) SHA1(06ef227747a440831c9a3a613b76693d52a2f0a9)
       FOUND: CRC(9b3cc7cd) SHA1(9bfb71e71f7f61e26d23e6370d684cdc6c910899)
pacman.5f WRONG CHECKSUMS:
    EXPECTED: CRC(958fedf9) SHA1(4a937ac02216ea8c96477d4a15522070507fb599)
       FOUND: CRC(c1b2dc90) SHA1(3a089696bab9f3ff39e09c84117d22b861ddec40)
WARNING: the machine might not run correctly.

After which it lets you start it anyway.

enter image description here

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  • 2
    I actually found this, I don't know how, some time between posting the question and your answer, but I wanted to give somebody else the chance to answer it. I'd still welcome an answer on how to do it via the GUI too though.
    – hippietrail
    Jul 28, 2020 at 10:30
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You have to run the game without the MAMEUI, in order to do that, launch your game in cmd windows, with (example) mame64 pacman This will give you an error if you don't have the correct cksum for the roms, but the game will start ! Enjoy ! Gerald (COY)

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