A free Sega 32X port of the 1995 DOS shooter Pacamaze is out now

Developer haroldo-ok has released version 0.0.1 of a free Sega 32X port of Pacamaze, bringing the 1995 MS-DOS raycaster to Sega's short-lived 32-bit add-on. The work-in-progress build is available as a name-your-own-price download on itch.io.

For those unfamiliar with the mid-nineties freeware scene, Pacamaze is exactly what the title implies. Originally developed by Moons Vestin in 1995, the game drops the classic arcade pellet-eating formula into a first-person 3D perspective. You navigate grid-based corridors, collect dots, pick up ammunition, and shoot ghosts across five distinct stages. The concept of giving a maze mascot a gun is inherently funny, and Moons Vestin executed it with a surprising amount of charm for a 1995 release. The layouts require actual spatial awareness, since you can no longer see the entire board from a top-down perspective. You have to check corners for ghosts and manage your ammunition carefully.

It was part of a weird era of PC gaming where independent developers were figuring out how to build their own Wolfenstein 3D clones, often by cramming raycasting engines into incredibly small DOS executables.

Two CPUs for eating pellets

The Sega 32X is a notoriously strange piece of hardware, but its architecture is perfectly suited for this kind of early 3D math. Sega released the peripheral in November 1994 as a stopgap before the Saturn, packing it with dual Hitachi SH-2 RISC processors running at 23 MHz. The add-on only saw a handful of official releases like Star Wars Arcade and Knuckles' Chaotix before Sega pulled the plug. Today, it is a playground for programmers who want to experiment with early 32-bit architecture.

This new port reverse-engineers the original PACAMAZE.EXE binary and uses the Arena generation toolchain alongside Chilly Willy's 32XDK to get the game running on a cartridge. The workload is split across the hardware. The Master SH-2 processor handles the heavy lifting of the raycasting math, textured wall rendering, and sprite projection. Meanwhile, the Slave SH-2 processor generates the pulse-width modulation audio, and the base Genesis Motorola 68000 bus reads the controller inputs.

The 32X homebrew scene has been surprisingly active lately when it comes to first-person games, as seen when the system got a free Backrooms raycaster. Developers keep finding new ways to push those twin processors.

Hardware and emulation support

The current 0.0.1 release is an early build, but it is fully playable. You can run the ROM on original hardware using a flash cartridge, provided your 32X tower is actually functioning and you have the necessary mess of video cables connected. If you prefer modern conveniences, it also runs well in emulators like PicoDrive.

I want to see how the framerate holds up in the later stages on a real CRT setup. Early 3D games often struggle when the screen fills with sprites, and a maze full of ghosts is a good stress test for the SH-2 chips. The download includes the ROM file and the source code for anyone curious about how the engine handles the conversion.