
The Pac-Man Dossier (2011) [pdf] - tosh
http://tralvex.com/download/forum/The%20Pac-Man%20Dossier.pdf
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bluedino
I loved PacMan as a kid in the early 80's. My mom and I would play it for
hours at home on the Atari 7800, and when we found an arcade cabinet we'd play
it as much as we could as well.

I never liked the original PacMan quite as much. I always loved the clones or
similar games for other systems or even DOS shareware.

However, it was always easy to spot a fake. They just didn't look right or
feel like. Even worse, a bad port like on the NES. It was actually a good port
but the characters were way, way too large for the maze! So distracting.

Later on I learned why the programmers made it that way. The original game is
a 224x288 screen, with a 28x36 playfield. Each tile is 8x8. The NES has
256x240 resolution, so of course they had to shrink everything down so they
could use the original maps.

A game like Pacman is deceptively simple until you start playing your creation
and realizing it just doesn't "feel right".

Luckily we have documents like these that point out all the quirks, the
original designers were quite intelligent to have these all in there, the
hours that went into tweaking these factors are really what makes the game.

A few years back I started writing a Javascript version of Ms Pacman but never
really finished it, thought it is playable.
[https://github.com/robilic/mspacman](https://github.com/robilic/mspacman)

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pan69
Great find and a great read as I just happen to be implementing a version of
Pac-Man in C (with a sprinkle x86 assembler) for 16 bit DOS using the original
Namco graphics. The biggest problem I currently have is to find a solution to
somehow fit the original portrait screen orientation into a landscape
orientation...

~~~
appstorelottery
Simply put the score and other information (lives etc) in a screen-high box to
the right of the playfield. Don't change the aspect ratio of the playfield
itself.

~~~
pan69
The play field itself is already taller than 240 pixels and even though there
are X modes that allow you to go beyond 240 scan lines, none of them work
consistently on newer LCD panels. Ideally I use 360 x 270 which gives me
square pixels and everything fits perfectly but it will only work in DOSBox
for most people these days. I'd like people to run this on real hardware...
Technically I could tilt the screen, as they did in the arcade (i.e. 240x320)
but who can tilt their 4:3 LCD panel? I just happen to have one but... I think
I have to use some form of panning...

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eventualhorizon
Nice to see this come back up. I worked with Jamey years ago and he was
brilliant. I think he has a write up for Ms Pacman as well.

