> This didn't happen for Pac-Man because Atari rushed it to release in too short a timeframe to implement that, and also the code wouldn't have fit into a standard 4k cartridge and would have needed more expensive hardware with bankswitching logic chips. 2600 Pac-Man's terribleness was a business decision, not a technical limitation.
There's a lot of myths around 2600 Pac-Man. The game was made in around 5 months, which was a normal amount of dev time for a 2600 game. The ghosts flickering was due to insufficient RAM, not insufficient ROM. Tod Frye, the game's programmer, had a kernel that would reposition the sprites as the screen drew, but it needed additional RAM. Frye really wanted Pac-Man to have a 2-player mode, as the arcade version did and he felt that having a 2-player mode gave the consumer more value. This meant that there wasn't enough RAM to get rid of the flicker, since the game had to keep track of the game state for each player. The 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man was 1-player only, which is how they avoided the flickering.
There's a lot of myths around 2600 Pac-Man. The game was made in around 5 months, which was a normal amount of dev time for a 2600 game. The ghosts flickering was due to insufficient RAM, not insufficient ROM. Tod Frye, the game's programmer, had a kernel that would reposition the sprites as the screen drew, but it needed additional RAM. Frye really wanted Pac-Man to have a 2-player mode, as the arcade version did and he felt that having a 2-player mode gave the consumer more value. This meant that there wasn't enough RAM to get rid of the flicker, since the game had to keep track of the game state for each player. The 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man was 1-player only, which is how they avoided the flickering.