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Pac-Man


Asmusr

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He posted some remarks in the comments section.

 

Ah, okay, thanks. I never see comments due to my plethora of blockers.

 

 

 

 

I'm actually the guy who wrote the TI-99/4A version of Pac-Man. I worked for a small company named K-Byte in Troy, Michigan, who got the contract from Atarisoft to develop it.

 

One of the reasons the game is slow is that I didn't like having single-color ghosts, and decided to give them white eyeballs. The video chip on the TI-99 only provided 4 single-color sprites. (For those who don't know, a sprite is a small square of pixels - 16x16 I think - that can be positioned anywhere and is superimposed over the playfield.) With 4 ghosts + 1 Pac-Man, I was already one short, and could not use sprites for the eyes. Thus, the eyes are actually bit-mapped as part of the background playfield. (If you notice, when they move horizontally they pass EXACTLY over the dots, and when they move vertically the dots fit EXACTLY in between them.)

 

I don't remember for certain, but I'm pretty sure that Atari agreed that the improved look was worth the slowness of play. (If not, they would have forced me to change it.)

 

At that time, the program did everything: The code, the graphics, and the sound/music. However I think I probably had some help with the music from my buddy Jeff. Soon after that we started using specialists for graphics, sounds, music, and then later key algorithms.

 

TI-99/4A cartridges only supported 8K of ROM. While developing Pac-Man, it became clear that I needed at least 12K, so the K-Byte engineering department came up with a way to have two ROM chips piggy-backed on top of one another, mapped to the same address space. Some additional hardware was added to the board that sensed when the code tried to write to ROM memory. When it sensed this, it switched which chip was enabled. Ingenious EE's...! That how we accessed the extra 4K.

 

The ROM issue was why there were no animations between the acts. I believe Atari decided to drop them early in an effort to try and stay under the 8K limit, and then never asked us to add them after it was obvious we had to go to 12K. This was probably because they wanted to get the game into stores in time for Christmas, and didn't want to spend any more time in development.

 

I also did Ms. Pac-Man. The main difference (other than the boards and the bouncing fruit) was that they wanted to change the ghost behavior. Half way through the development of Pac-Man they had hired a guy who had won a Pac-Man game contest, and employed him as a tester. He pointed out to me that the screens in Ms. Pac-Man had "safe spots", such that when Ms. Pac-Man went to these spots, the ghosts would stop chasing her and go into specific "orbits"; each ghost in their own region of the screen (upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right). If you play the game, try and find those spots...you'll see what I mean. That may be why occasionally it seems like the ghosts aren't chasing you - you were in a safe spot, and they weren't!

 

Working at K-Byte was an extremely fun time. Not only was I writing games, but I had many of my closest friends working with me. When I was developing Pac-Man, some of my buddies were developing Donkey Kong for the TI, as well as Donkey Kong, Defender, and Dig-Dug on the C-64.

 

Ahhh, the memories....(grin).

 

Thanks for taking an interest in my game!

 

 

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  • 3 months later...

I decided to put on my cape as the Thread Necromancer today. I know a lot of people have complaints about this game and its feminine counterpart, but has anyone ever taken a moment to try to update it some? Maybe add the board flashing at the end of a round or the intermissions? Maybe try to tweak the speed?

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I decided to put on my cape as the Thread Necromancer today. I know a lot of people have complaints about this game and its feminine counterpart, but has anyone ever taken a moment to try to update it some? Maybe add the board flashing at the end of a round or the intermissions? Maybe try to tweak the speed?

 

I like the game as is :) Besides, it will likely be too much effort to try to disassemble and tweak the game, with the end result being still Pac Man.

I think that kind of effort is better expended on developing new software IMHO.

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