Because of the unusual nature of Baby Pac-Man, it was never converted for home play. Therefore, in order to play it at home, you have only two choices. The first, of course, is to buy yourself a copy of the game. There are usually a couple on sale on eBay each month. Nothing else will ever come close to the feeling of playing the actual pinball game than the real thing.
For the rest of you who do not mind giving up the physical sensation of playing pinball, the developers of PinMAME have come to your rescue. PinMAME is the pinball equivalent of MAME, and its sole purpose is to emulate pinball related hardware. Of course, it's difficult to do anything meaningful with a pinball program and a scoreboard without an actual pinball table to interact with. Enter Randy Davis' fantastic pinball simulator Visual Pinball, a modern freeware equivalent of the old Pinball Construction Set. Through proper installation, PinMAME can be set up to communicate with Visual Pinball and provide realistic simulations of actual pinball tables whose ROM programs can be successfully emulated. Baby Pac-Man is one such programs.
The table has been loving and meticulously recreated in Visual Pinball by David Britten and Kristian, and the emulation was worked on by Steve Ellenoff. The effect is a complete simulation of the Baby Pac-Man game with proper emulation of the video screen component of the game. There are many great guides on how to install Visual Pinball and PinMAME on your computer, so this will only describe the basic steps on what you need to do to get Baby Pac-Man up and running.
- Follow the instructions on the five downloads that you will need from this page.
- You can find both the Visual Pinball table and the PinMAME ROMs for Baby Pac-Man on this page. Make sure that you put the table in the Tables folder under Visual Pinball, and that you put the rom in the rom folder under PinMAME.
- After you have successfully run the PinMAME setup program that allows Visual Pinball to communicate with PinMAME, open Visual Pinball and load the Baby Pac-Man table. Press F5 to start playing.
- The basic controls are 5 to insert a quarter, 1 to start a game, the arrow keys to direct Baby Pac-Man, and the left and right Shift keys to operate the flippers. Make sure that Windows' focus is on the table, and not the video screen, or your input will not be accepted.
It should be noted that if you go to all the trouble to download and play Baby Pac-Man, then you can use Visual Pinball and PinMAME to play the Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man game as well. That game features a far less elaborate "video game" where you must light up all of the dots in the center of the play field while avoiding the red "ghost" dot. You can find the Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man table and ROMs on this page.