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After hearing that the Genesis port of Pac-Mania offered a 'Pac-Booster' mode that sped up the general flow of gameplay by making Pac-Man faster, I was curious to give this port a shot.

While the Genesis port is otherwise excellent and offers more customization than the original arcade release, the visuals leave a lot to be desired. The well done dithering shading on the original sprites for all the objects is noticeably absent. Pac-Man's sprite in the unpatched version for instance has very inconsistent shading that causes him to noticeably 'blink' often. There are some slightly odd color choices that just make the game feel darker. It's not awful, but considering how pleasant the original looked, it's a little disappointing this is probably the biggest thing holding the port back.

This patch does an amazing job at overhauling the visuals and they look extremely close to the arcade release now. The game feels much more vibrant, and there are few things that look different. The biggest issue is the ghosts looking 'up' when Pac-Man jumps being absent, though that fault lies on the Genesis port rather than the effort displayed here. I'd say this is perhaps the best way to play Pac-Mania, even when compared to the arcade original. The Booster and Difficulty settings gives the game more replay value to the average joe, and are great if you pretty religiously used to play Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man in the arcade with the speedup hack. Highly recommended!

The original arcade release (found in numerous Namco Museums and Pac-Man collections) moves too slow and the viewport is too narrow. Tengen, with their Genesis port, fixed the latter issues and added an optional "Pac-Boost" feature for the former. Plus some difficulty settings thrown in. Would have been a solid console port.

However, it looked absolutely atrocious.

Pac-Mania is known for its distinctive "3D" isometric look. And while the original Genesis port is still isometric, the artwork was all redrawn and resembles a cartoon. It looks almost like dummy assets they meant to replace later and didn't. Just bad.

This hack gives the Genesis port a makeover. It isn't 100% identical to the arcade original. But it is pretty dang close. It is really impressive and looks professional (save for one giant ghost in a cutscene that doesn't look like it was revised). Combined with Tengen's quality of life improvements, this is now a version of Pac-Mania that's enjoyable and worth playing.

Downloaded this figuring, "oh well, let me see what different colors this person put into the game to try making it look close to arcade-like", and was really surprised by the big leap in visuals.

Lots of hacks that mess with palettes are usually marginally better, but this really makes a difference.

I ran two Kega Fusion emulators side by side, one with the original Genesis version, the other with this arcade fix, and I gotta tell ya, this new one makes the original look like animated drawings....while the new one looks ALMOST CGI-like by comparison.

This patch obviously won't do anything for the gameplay, but that's not what this is about. Nothing really wrong with the Genesis original, but I rather like this new polish afforded by this color fix.

Outstanding. I recommend!

Genesis arcade games originally looked arcade-like, but their colors looks a bit brighter or darker than their arcade counterparts. This is when you came in and used the arcade original as a reference and fixed it to make Genesis Arcade games which is now possible thanks to HivePAL, GIMP, and TileLayer. Great job with Pac-Mania and Well done making the Genesis version look just like the arcade version!