Pacman - the Amiga conversion from the arcade game

[turrican3]

look great for me !!!

[VincentGR]

1:1

[jotd]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

That is looking excellent, certainly looking arcade perfect.

thanks. Means a lot

No going back to C now, Assembler has you.
Geezer

C is crap. C++ is better. But for hardware hacks nothing beats assembler.


Thanks everyone for feedback. BTW here's the bugs/todo list

bugs:

- pac leaving a few pixels behind
- ghosts show where they're going too late (missing one tile?)
- pt player sample play issues: yes but covered by sound loop!!
- pacman super speed sometimes
- demo mode (record output not replaying properly!!)
- pacman traverses ghosts sometimes
- check clyde target sometimes upper left WTF!!

todo:

- use packed versions of musics, unpack when needed (in "press start" screen?)
- extra life: test & redraw
- leave pen behaviour after a life is lost
- elroy behaviour after a life is lost
- intermission sequences

BTW I came across Luca Carminati page there are awesome games there. Mostly for Windows but some for C64 and even amiga. The arcade "remakes" are just perfect

https://lowcarb.itch.io/

At least that means that I'm going to concentrate on Amiga versions now. Windows doesn't need my remakes. Luca took care of that

[chadderack]

Amazing work. Just checked out the latest YT vid. Really solid

[skyzoo73]

Just tested on my Amiga 600, really well done congratulations!

[BigD]

@jotd

You Sir are a star coder! It's a great effort so far! My kids love it and we've just played the original at RetroBlast Coffee Newquay and it's very accurate!

For feedback: A worrying AI bug includes two of the ghosts staying in their base for a protracted amount of time and there is the obvious 'Game Over' text staying up even when playing. I also had to downgrade to OCS display in the Boot Menu as AGA gave corrupted graphics. I hope that helps?

[jotd]

@BigD A.I. isn't definitive. There are still some bugs.

And thanks for the other remarks. I must have forgotten some BPLCON/FMODE degrade stuff for AGA. I'll fix those for sure.

[BigD]

Originally Posted by jotd

@BigD A.I. isn't definitive. There are still some bugs.

And thanks for the other remarks. I must have forgotten some BPLCON/FMODE degrade stuff for AGA. I'll fix those for sure.

It doesn’t seem to like 060 systems either. Just got a black screen :-( Fine with a 030 though with OCS mode enabled on the Boot Menu.

[jotd]

you have to set VBR to zero. There is no degrading/display switch code in the program.

new play session with the newest version

[ Show youtube player ]

Zoned the new version

[chadderack]

Looks and sounds great. The sound is a bit out of sync in the video, but I'm guessing that's an encoding issue.

I noticed something in the attract mode. When Pac-Man eats the power pill and grabs each ghost, it looks like the sprite priority draws him behind the blue ghosts. Maybe that's how it works in the arcade, though. Been a few years since I played it

[jotd]

sprites are before the bitplanes. And pacman is a 1-plane BOB. So it will probably remain like this (changing priority when ghosts are blue would mean that uneaten dots would show through the ghosts)

coding higher intermission screens now... funny as I'm not able to reach them because I'm a lousy player

edit: coded second intermission sequence.

[jotd]

new update with intermissions & ghost behaviour fixes in the zone. Very close to completion now

EDIT: considering it complete. https://itch.io/jam/amigamejam/rate/1195483

[DanyPPC]

Uploaded WHDLoad version with Icons and png image for iGame.
Delete it if contrary to the forum rules.

Thanks very much to Jotd for this perfect arcade conversion

http://eab.abime.net/zone/Pacman_v1.0.lha

[zzbylu]

and small gameplay
[ Show youtube player ]

[nikosidis]

I tried the game on my A1200. Impressive!! This is arcade perfect!
Only thing I did not like that much was the way the text, score was arranged on the right side.
Maybe a way to clean it up a big. No big deal though.

[jotd]

I know, that's sad but the game is a portrait game. That's not possible to fit all the lines in a PAL screen. There's already 280 lines with the maze alone.

If you check home console ports, the score is also on the side. There's no other way.

(that also posed a certain number of problems, because sometimes ghosts targets are out of the screen so I had to add an offset and use virtual coords...)

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by jotd

I know, that's sad but the game is a portrait game. That's not possible to fit all the lines in a PAL screen. There's already 280 lines with the maze alone.

If you check home console ports, the score is also on the side. There's no other way.

(that also posed a certain number of problems, because sometimes ghosts targets are out of the screen so I had to add an offset and use virtual coords...)

What if you create a portrait playfield with the PAL screen working as window around the playfield?

[paraj]

Very well done!

A very minor thing I noticed is that on the title screen (only! not ingame) when Pacman eats the ghosts Blinky's eye_frame_table is corrupted (MSW is set to $28 = 40 = MODE_EYES) since when a_ghost_was_eaten is called a4 points to Pacman rather than get the eaten ghost. Again no big deal since it's fixed when the level is shown, just something to be aware of if you're making any changes to the memory layout etc.

[jotd]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

What if you create a portrait playfield with the PAL screen working as window around the playfield?

Sorry I don't get it. Maybe you can mockup what you're trying to say?


@paraj: well spotted. This doesn't have any visible effect, but I'm going to fix it. Thanks

EDIT: fixed. As you may have noted, those intermission/demo sequences are a bit coded like wild wild west... Game code is pretty clean, but non-interactive parts aren't.

[Gordon]

Great work thank you!

Pac-Man plus next? IMO the best version. Or ms pac man ?