Pac-Man Collection

Pac-Man Collection arrived on Game Boy Advance in July 2001 and became one of the most successful handheld compilations ever released, eventually selling over 2.9 million copies worldwide. Today we are playing it on the MiSTER FPGA with full gameplay and commentary. If you are new to the channel, welcome. This is exactly what we cover.

The collection was developed by Mass Media and published by Namco as a companion release to Namco Museum on the same handheld platform. It was originally announced under the working title Pac-Man Fever before its full reveal at E3 2001. The cartridge contains four carefully selected Pac-Man titles spanning decades of arcade gaming, each one representing a different evolution of the franchise.

The first game is the original Pac-Man from 1980, the arcade classic that needs no introduction. This version is based on the common Namco Museum port of the game and can be played in two different visual presentations on the GBA. The second title is Pac-Mania from 1987, an isometric update that introduced the ability to jump to avoid ghosts while navigating redesigned mazes in full 3D perspective. The third game is Pac-Attack from 1993, a falling-block puzzle game that blends traditional Pac-Man mechanics with strategic tile-clearing gameplay similar to Tetris and Columns. The fourth and final game is Pac-Man Arrangement from 1996, an enhanced arcade remake that had previously been exclusive to arcade cabinets and never widely available at home until this GBA release. Arrangement features new power-ups, warp points, and introduces a fifth ghost character that changes shape and size during play.

The games themselves are custom ports rather than emulations, which means they were specifically adapted for Game Boy Advance hardware. To save cartridge space, some games feature slightly reduced music tracks, particularly Pac-Mania, and altered graphics compared to their original arcade versions. Despite these trade-offs, the core gameplay of each title controls with precision and plays closely to the originals.

By 2007 the collection had become the ninth best-selling Game Boy Advance game of all time and the sixth best-selling GBA title in North America alone. Critics praised the selection of games and the customizable features, though some players noted the absence of Ms. Pac-Man, which was not included in this compilation. The game was released across multiple regions with different timing: North America in July 2001, Europe and Australia in December 2001, and Japan in January 2002. In Japan it was re-released in 2006 as a budget title. The collection later appeared on the Wii U Virtual Console in 2014 before that service was discontinued.

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Euro Champ '92

Euro Champ '92 arrived in 1992 from Taito as a response to the massive success of the original Football Champ, and today we are playing it on the MiSTER FPGA with full gameplay and commentary. If you are new to the channel, welcome. This is the kind of arcade action we cover every week.

The game is a soccer arcade experience released to capitalise on the timing of the 1992 European Football Championship. In Japan it was known as Hattrick Hero, and outside Europe it carried the name Football Champ. The arcade cabinet featured a bright, energetic visual style that captured the excitement of tournament play. The gameplay is deliberately frantic, designed to pull coins from players attempting to win matches against the arcade.

The core mechanic revolves around standard soccer match play with a twist. When the score reaches a deadlock and becomes tied at any level, from 0-0 through to 3-3 and beyond, a special power move becomes available called the Super Shoot. Only the Captain character can perform this, and only once per entire match. To execute it, the Captain must be completely motionless in a specific area of the field while receiving a High Pass from a teammate. When performed successfully, the Super Shoot delivers a nearly unstoppable shot.

The arcade version you are seeing here on MiSTER FPGA runs the worldwide configuration with specific rules tailored for the European market release. Different regions of the arcade cabinet had slightly different tuning for the Super Shoot requirements, making this version distinctive. The game supports two-player simultaneous play, and matches are structured to progress through rounds with increasing difficulty against tougher opposition.

The cabinet hardware was solid for 1992, delivering fast sprite animation and responsive controls. The arcade version received subsequent upgrades and sequels. Taito Cup Finals appeared in 1993, International Cup '94 in 1994, and Taito Power Goal in 1994. The game was also ported to the Super Nintendo in 1992 under the title Euro Football Champ, appearing on the Atari ST as European Football Champ, and later included in the Taito Legends 2 compilation for PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

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Mario Bros.

Mario Bros. from the Game & Watch Multi Screen series released on March 14, 1983, and today we are playing it on the MiSTER FPGA with full gameplay and commentary. If you are new here, welcome. This is exactly the kind of classic handheld gaming the channel is built around.

This is a landmark game in Nintendo history. It was the very first appearance of Luigi in any video game, predating the arcade Mario Bros. release by almost two weeks. The game features Mario and Luigi working together in a bottling factory across two LCD screens connected by a clamshell design. Players control both characters moving them up and down as cases move along conveyor belts operating in alternating directions.

The objective is straightforward. Catch the cases at the end of each belt and lift them onto the conveyor above. Each case loaded earns 1 point. When eight cases reach the top, they load onto a waiting delivery truck, earning 10 points. When a case is dropped, it counts as a miss. Score three misses and the game ends. The score counter and truck driver animation trigger specific events as you progress.

The hardware specification was cutting edge for 1983 handheld gaming. The device used a Sharp SM510 chipset running at 32.768 kHz with dual LCD screens and required two LR44 button cell batteries for operation. The foldable clamshell design allowed Nintendo to feature two distinct action areas in a portable package, making the game feel more expansive than single-screen competitors.

The Model Number MW-56 hardware was manufactured in 1983 and featured background foil artwork behind the LCD elements, a design signature of the Multi Screen series. Controls were simple, just directional buttons and an action button, making the game instantly accessible but requiring precise timing and coordination to succeed.

At 300 points with no misses, the game enters Chance Time where all points scored are doubled until you make a mistake. This escalation system kept players coming back to beat their high scores, and the game became one of the most sought-after Game & Watch titles in the collector's market today.

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Manic Miner

The ZX Touch handheld console launched on November 18, 2023, and features a 7-inch IPS touchscreen running at 1024x600 resolution with a 480 MHz ARM Cortex-M7 processor. The FX system is a real-time enhancement that applies dynamic visual effects to games without modifying the original code. For Manic Miner, this includes the Edge Colour Shader, backgrounds that switch automatically between scenes, and the Game Rewind feature that lets you rewind gameplay by up to 60 seconds. These enhancements were added in firmware updates starting with v1.12 and refined in the current v1.13.

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Retro Gamer has called Manic Miner one of the most influential platform games of all time. It has been ported across dozens of systems from the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro to modern mobile phones. The ZX Touch carries 34 built-in licensed ZX Spectrum games, and supports loading thousands more via microSD card or Wi-Fi file transfer.

Manic Miner is the 1983 platformer by Matthew Smith that launched on the ZX Spectrum as a Bug-Byte release in August 1983, hitting the UK charts at number one. Today we are playing it on the ZX Touch handheld with the full FX enhancement system running real-time visual effects, and we are providing full gameplay and commentary throughout. If you are new here, welcome to the channel.

The game consists of twenty caverns, each one screen in size, where your job as Miner Willy is to collect all the flashing objects scattered across each level before your oxygen supply depletes. Once you grab everything, a portal lights up and sends you to the next cavern. The enemies you face along the way are documented in the original 1983 cassette inlay as Poisonous Pansies, Spiders, Slime, and worst of all, Manic Mining Robots that patrol predefined paths at constant speeds.

The game was designed to require pixel-perfect timing. Falls from too great a height kill you instantly, so every jump must be calculated. The controls are straightforward but executing them flawlessly under pressure is the real challenge. Extra lives are earned every 10,000 points, and the difficulty of each successive cavern was designed to drain quarters had this appeared in an arcade cabinet.

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D-Con

D-Con is a two-player arcade shooter released in 1992 by Success Corp, and today we are playing it on the MiSTer FPGA with full gameplay and commentary. If this is your first time here, welcome. This channel exists to cover classic arcade games and retro gaming, and we play them exactly as they were meant to be played.

The setup is straightforward but demanding. One or two players control a spaceship and must defend a city by shooting enemy spaceships across multiple waves of increasing difficulty. The arcade cabinet used an 8-way joystick and 2 buttons for controls. The hardware was solid for 1992, running a Motorola 68000 processor at 10 MHz for the main CPU and a Zilog Z80 at 4 MHz handling sound duties. Audio came from a YM3812 and OKI6295 sound chip combination running in mono.

This was a coin-operated arcade release during the era when arcades were packed with crowd-pleasing shooter games. D-Con never achieved the same household recognition as some of its contemporaries, which makes it a perfect candidate for rediscovery. The gameplay is relentless, the two-player co-op is where the real fun happens, and the difficulty ramp is designed to pull more coins from your pocket if you actually wanted to progress back on the original cabinet.

The MiSTer FPGA is running this at full arcade accuracy, which means the sprite animation, the sound, and the input lag are all faithful to what you would have experienced standing in front of the actual machine. No filters, no upscaling, no modern conveniences. Just pure 1992 arcade.

Tharkys the Knight

Tharkys the Knight came out on the 31st of May 2026 and the Spectrum community has been buzzing about it ever since. Today we are playing it on the MiSTer FPGA with full gameplay and commentary, and if you have landed here for the first time, welcome to the channel. This is exactly what we are here for.

The game was created by Jay-droid133 and runs on ZX Spectrum 128K hardware. It is a free release on itch.io and is openly inspired by two of the most beloved titles from the legendary Ultimate Play The Game catalogue, Sabre Wulf and Atic Atac. The developer has been completely upfront about the fact that the entire codebase was produced using AI tools, with no single line written manually. Custom editors for sprite design, room layout, sound tuning, and music were all built using the same process. The source code is publicly available on GitHub.

The story of the game is embedded within the software itself, so playing is the only way to get it. You take on the role of the knight Tharkys, moving through a world populated by skeletons, ghosts, serpents, and bats across castle buildings and gated environments. Both health and stamina are tracked on an interface styled after both sides of an old pocket watch. When hunger sets in, you can eat whatever junk food you find scattered through the world, but eating rubbish comes with toxic consequences. To reverse those effects and fully restore your health and stamina together, you need to find a well and drink from it. Be careful though, because any active power-up you are carrying gets washed out at the same time.

To recover stamina you rest, but standing still for too long is dangerous because the boogeyman will hunt you down if you give it the chance. Navigation through the world uses a default compass that always points toward your next objective, a magic compass that shows the precise route to take, and a map that appears randomly during play and must be grabbed quickly before the wind carries it off. The game is linear despite the open world feel, meaning objectives must be reached in sequence. There is no time limit, but every passing day the creatures become faster and more aggressive.

The game also supports an English and Spanish language option, keyboard, gamepad, and touchscreen controls, and received a controls update for FUSE emulator compatibility within days of launch. A TAP file is available for use on real hardware and MiSTer FPGA.

One player in the comments described it as the best thing they had played in twenty years. Another completed it in a single session without wanting to stop. That is the kind of reception this one has already earned.
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Available from https://jay-droid133.itch.io/tharkys-the-knight

Poopy Platforms

Poopy Platforms came out on the 18th of May 2026 and it is exactly the kind of game that reminds you why the ZX Spectrum homebrew scene is still one of the best things in retro gaming. Today we are playing it on the MiSTer FPGA with full gameplay and commentary, and if you are new here, welcome. This is the sort of thing we cover on this channel and there is plenty more of it.

The game was created by PuttyCAD, with graphics by Ric Lumb and programming by Nigel Critten of 100 Tin Soldiers. It was built using KWYLL, a newer ZX Spectrum game creation tool developed by Paul Gregory, and no generative AI was used anywhere in its production.

The setup is wonderfully daft. Platform 2 at a railway station has been nicknamed Platform Poo, because a flock of dirty pigeons have taken up residence and will not stop doing what pigeons do all over it. Poor Little Miss Moppet is responsible for keeping the platform clean, and her solution is to hire Slug the cat to drive the station steam train. Why a cat? Nobody really knows. The developers admitted they just thought it would look funny. It does.

Your job as Slug is to fire carefully timed blasts of steam from the train to vapourise the pigeon droppings before they hit the platform. The pigeons have their own response to this situation in the form of Slammy the seagull, who swoops in from time to time dropping heavy weights on you from above. Controls are O for left, P for right, and M to fire the steam. The game was updated on the 3rd of June 2026 with a bug fix and a tweak, so the version you are seeing here is already patched.

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Available from https://puttycad.itch.io/poopy