New Game: Pac-Man!

[Jhysaun]

lol, he's small ... but he thinks everything is his so he would chew it apart (he has strong teeth)

>J

[paul]

Your Pac-Man had the honor of being the first thing ever programmed to my breadboard grayscale Uzebox. I posted a photo in the thread here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=343

Very cool! I assume that score is from the demo AI? The highest I have seen him score is 4450, which was pretty close to finishing the level. The code does not account for him actually finishing a level, though...

Edit:

no joytstick (yes really)

All the pretty pictures had me only reading the first sentence

[steve.chamberlin]

He scored 4450 in my more recent tests, as you can see in the second set of photos I posted. I'm still waiting for my SNES controllers to arrive, so I can do something more than watch the attract screen!

[paul]

I added a link to pacman-lite in case anyone has just bought a fuzebox and wants to eat some bootloaded pellets

[jrseattle]

Hi, Paul.

Great game, as many others have already reported. I'm running into 1 problem though. My "original" uzebox is actually a breadboard connected to a Sharp RGB LCD, which generates a very sharp picture, quite impressive, but it uses the old NES controllers. I rebuilt the application with "-DJOYSTICK=1". Most buttons on the NES controller works, but NOT the "A" button. This means I can play the game once, but I can't "insert coins". Is there a difference between the 'A' buttons on the NES and SNES controllers.

I also have a fuzebox which generates an NTSC signal and uses an SNES controller. Pacman on that system works great but the video just isn't as sharp. (I did apply the video capacitor fix).

Thanks for your help. I'll look at the source code but am not that familiar with how these controllers work.

jrseattle

[paul]

Hi, Paul.

Great game, as many others have already reported. I'm running into 1 problem though. My "original" uzebox is actually a breadboard connected to a Sharp RGB LCD, which generates a very sharp picture, quite impressive, but it uses the old NES controllers. I rebuilt the application with "-DJOYSTICK=1". Most buttons on the NES controller works, but NOT the "A" button. This means I can play the game once, but I can't "insert coins". Is there a difference between the 'A' buttons on the NES and SNES controllers.

I also have a fuzebox which generates an NTSC signal and uses an SNES controller. Pacman on that system works great but the video just isn't as sharp. (I did apply the video capacitor fix).

Thanks for your help. I'll look at the source code but am not that familiar with how these controllers work.

jrseattle

Thanks for the kind words, jrseattle

I've been meaning to release a final version of Pac-Man - I'll get onto that this week. I think I'll relax the insert coin requirement while still leaving the aesthetics of it in place. That way folks won't have to rebuild it for such a minor annoyance that doesn't affect gameplay. I've also toyed with the idea of a generic input configuration menu that people can just include in their game. You'd wrap calls to ReadJoypad with say a ConvertJoypad function and then the controls could be reassigned on the fly and perhaps even stored in eeprom. It would need to have a very small footprint for anyone to use it.

Hmm, now that I think of it, I believe there was a bug in the older kernel upon which Pac-Man was built. It didn't map nes joypads correctly, so that's likely where your problem lies. I'm not sure which version fixed it, but I'll rebuild the final version against the latest kernel and you can let me know if that fixes things. You can try to build against the latest kernel, but you may get some redefinition errors . I'll post back here today or tomorrow.

[uze6666]

Hmm, now that I think of it, I believe there was a bug in the older kernel upon which Pac-Man was built. It didn't map nes joypads correctly, so that's likely where your problem lies. I'm not sure which version fixed it, but I'll rebuild the final version against the latest kernel and you can let me know if that fixes things. You can try to build against the latest kernel, but you may get some redefinition errors . I'll post back here today or tomorrow.

True. The button map was wrong for NES and I fixed this recently for David Cranor's Uzebox-in-NES-controller. It's committed under the beta5 branch.

I also have a fuzebox which generates an NTSC signal and uses an SNES controller. Pacman on that system works great but the video just isn't as sharp. (I did apply the video capacitor fix).

I guess that's with the composite output? What about the The S-VIDEO out, usually it's as good as it can get.

-Uze

[paul]

I've decided I'd like to spend some more time on the final version. I'd like to get Pac-Man under 61440 bytes and get rid of the lite version. I might be able to do that with sprite flipping and cleaning up the code (especially state management).

I've attached both versions built against the beta5 kernel with -DJOYSTICK=1. Let me know if that doesn't work. The title screen no longer flashes when inserting credits (as a small fix) and credits are no longer required (just in case it doesn't work, you can still play).

[martinsustek]

I love this game.

Last week I had a chance to play Ms. Pac-Man on original arcade (group of enthusiastic people runs arcade museum near Prague - http://arcadehry.cz/ ), and it is very addictive (mainly because of speed mod - player moves much faster). I'm about to try to recreate Ms. Pac-Man for Uzebox. That means:

- new home screen
- new in-game decoration graphics on sides
- new Ms. Pac-Man graphics (eye, lipstick, bow, dying animation)
- new mazes (there are 4 in Ms. Pac-Man), each with different number of dots
- support for 2 tunnels (3 of 4 mazes has two tunnels)
- different colors of maze and dots
- 4th ghost is renamed to Sue
- new ghost AI (reported to be less predictable)
- moving fruit (and new fruit graphics)
- new intermissions with new music
- speed hack (switch)

Not all of this may be achievable because of size limit, I just want to try to find where to save some space and make it possible. But I need sources to .inc files, to be able to edit and re-generate them. Does anybody (maybe Paul) know, if there are any?

What do you think about the idea of Ms. Pac-Man for Uzebox? Is it worth the effort?

[Janka]

What do you think about the idea of Ms. Pac-Man for Uzebox? Is it worth the effort?

Sure. Because of the different mazes I see it as a sequel to PAC-MAN, not just a pink-washed version of it.