Pacman4K - for the Atari VCS/2600
Copyright 2007 - Dennis Debro

This game is freeware but copyrighted. Do not distribute source code. Instead, please reference this repository. The assembled binaries cannot be sold in any form without my permission.

Pacman4K started out as a challenge for me to see if I could get a no frills Pac-man written for the 2600 in 4K and stay faithful to the original arcade game. I made some sacrifices along the way. Most noticeable was the decision to flicker the objects at a rate of 20Hz instead of developing a variable flicker algorithm. I did some work in this direction but found that it took up too much ROM to include the other features.

Ebivision did a 4K Pac-man back in 1999. You can see pictures of their work at http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=1022 and short video clips of it running while at the 1999 Classic Gaming Expo at http://www.cyberroach.com/cyromag/six/cge991.htm I commend them for their work as this was a basis for my maze layout. They were able to do their game without using any undocumented 6502 opcodes. I used undocumented opcodes to reduce ROM and to help in kernel timing. Hats off to you Ebivision!

I also had some help in the testing department thanks to John Champeau, Robert DeCrescenzo, and Tony Wong. I would send ROMs to them as this project was nearing completion. They were kind enough to give me their feedback and report bugs I missed. Robert also sent me sound data from his 7800 Pac-man collection to help me in the TIA department.

The monster and Pac-man graphics were supplied by Stefan Haddewig (Retrofan) of AtariAge. I had originally gone with monster graphics that were supplied by Clay Halliwell (ZylonBane) of AtariAge. Clay's graphics were more of a cartoon type of look. A poll was conducted on AtariAge and the members of the message board voted that they preferred the A8/5200 look of the monsters so I changed them.

The game siren was taken from "A Better Pac-man" by Rob Kudla. Check out his hack at http://www.kudla.org/raindog/pac26.html. I checked with Rob to see if it was okay for me to use his data and he was fine with it. Thanks Rob, I think your siren sounds are perfect.

I released a number of demos on the AtariAge forum. One ask I received was to speed up the movement. The movement calculations were based on the frame delay values I had received from Eduardo Mello and doing frame delay calculations based on the 7800 version of Ms. Pac-man. I prefered the original movement values but increased them to satsify the players on AtariAge. You can manipulate the speed of your assembly by setting the FASTER_SPEED assembler switch. Setting this to TRUE will increase the original speeds by roughly 14%.