Pacman (C64)

How To Play

• Move around the maze using joystick, avoiding the ghosts and collecting all the pellets. 

• Collect the flashing power pellets to turn the tables. Now for a brief period you can eat the frightened ghost that have turned blue. Eat all four for the maximum bonus.

• Hold a direction just before a turn to 'slide' round corners and gain a speed advantage over chasing ghosts

• Go through the tunnel on the edge of the map to lose a chasing ghost, as they slow down when moving through them.

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Scoring

• Pellet = 10
• Power Pellet = 50
• 1st Ghost = 200
• 2nd Ghost = 400
• 3rd Ghost = 800
• 4th Ghost = 1600
• Cherry = 100
• Strawberry = 300
• Orange = 500
• Apple = 700
• Melon = 1000
• Galaxian = 2000
• Bell = 3000
• Key = 5000

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Tips

I cannot accept payment for this game but if you'd like to support my game development in general you can leave a tip here. Your kind donations allow me to occasionally take my wife out for lunch in lieu of the hundreds of hours a year spent on C64 development, and are greatly appreciated!

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Background

I was inspired to attempt to create a really accurate port of Pacman after reading The Pacman Dossier by Jamey Pittman. There have been some good ports and clones on the C64, and of course there is the definitive Ms Pacman conversion in the shape of Lady Pac, but the level of detail in the dossier gave me everything I needed to get as close as possible to the original arcade game. 

In order to achieve my ultimate aim that a player who can play a perfect game on the arcade can also do so on the C64, it was clear the map would need to scroll so that it would be exactly the same as the arcade. Therefore there would be no adjustments needed to the logic behind the movement of Pacman or the ghosts. On PAL I fake 60fps by running the game loop twice every 5th frame, while skipping the sound code every 6th frame on NTSC.

This initial version might not be quite there, but I have been working with some Pacman experts, including some of the few people in the world to play a perfect game and will hopefully continue to do so until the goal is reached. It only takes a pixel difference two minutes into a frame-perfect pattern to throw things off, but of course you need to be a great player to play the patterns in the first place and notice the difference.....for us casual players it should play near-identically to the arcade.

I even went as far as including an 8K lookup table that returns exactly the same sequence of random numbers as the arcade machine, which is often one area where conversions diverge as ghosts in 'frightened' mode make 'random' turns, but always in the same sequence.

I also included the famous kill screen that occurs when completing level 255. This probably won't play 100% like the arcade game because a lot of its behaviour depends on the tile data layout of the arcade ROM, but then again, only a handful of people in the world are good enough to reach it!

For more details on ghost AI, speeds, timers, and general strategy see the dossier.

The game does function on NTSC machines  but I recommend running on PAL if possible to avoid flickering. I will attempt to address the NTSC flickering in a future update.

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Special thanks to Eric Akeson for his help and patience in tracking down some particularly infuriating bugs over the past few months.