I got Baby Pacman on my mind because a few years back I started fixing this one pub's Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 cabs, and this time after I'd slapped a new power supply in MK real quick, dude said 🐇 Hey, a few years back you said you had some more games if I wanted one or two more, but we didn't have the room, well we've rearranged a bit and can you send me a list of what you've got

So on the outside I'm all 🦝 Yeah I've got a very nice Jaleco Lo-Pro that I can do some board-swapping and we can do a Guest Game Of The Month kinda thing, while on the inside I'm all 🦝 should I put Baby Pacman in a busy pub

I'd need a MUCH bigger cut of the take than my standard (and these days very generous but I'm old-school like that) 50/50 hey-this-is-just-for-fun-and-extra-pizza-money split if I were to put Baby Pacman out on route, because let's face it, I'd be back and forth four times a week to fix the bloody thing

Baby Pacman is a 42-year-old cantankerous mess of hot moving parts combined with early 80's computer, a bizarre experiment of a pinball/videogame hybrid made by a pinball company that doesn't know how to make videogames and doesn't particularly want to learn, but who has enough money at this moment in history to fling mud at the wall and see what sticks.

It works by wiring together three completely different computers who hate each other. Their communication is utterly dysfunctional. When pacman eats a dot, the videogame computer tells the pinball computer that a ball just hit a slingshot, and that's how 100 points is scored. The computer that keeps track of the scores and credits has no idea that Pacman exists, the computer that plays Pacman doesn't know how many lives or points you have (lives are BALLS), and the computer plugged into the monitor retrieves the scores for display through wires that are intended to be connected to 7-segment gas-discharge displays.

None of these computers are capable of crashing. Crashing hadn't been invented yet. If the computer does something that the programmer didn't intend then there's nothing to tell the computer to stop, it just keeps on going until something sets on fire. The game is full of high-current components that can set on fire if the computer tells them to set on fire, and it will.

There were seven thousand of these things made and very few remain because they all broke down so hard that techs specializing in EITHER videogames OR pinball couldn't fix them, to keep one of these running you need a tech that specializes in videogames AND pinball AND bad decisions.

So if I'm to route this game - in a pub, mark you, not in a place where there'll be a tech waiting in the back ready to have a good cry - then y'all are gonna have to up your fedi meta game, sincerely, it's gonna have to be against the backdrop of the most rancid ridiculous shit that's ever hit these cursed webbed sites, I hear quote-retweets are coming maybe y'all can do something with that