Classic Pac-Man Source Code (commented) | Hacker News Reader

Classic Pac-Man Source Code (commented)

cubeman.org

31 pointshhm19 comments

There's a great article on Billy Mitchell who was the first guy to master the Pac Man kill screen in the July issue of Harpers.

His "reverse engineering" of the game was so detailed that he amazed the original programmers.

http://laweekly.blogs.com/joshuah_bearman/2008/08/finally-th...

Also, be sure to check out the movie "King of Kong" where Billy Mitchell is also a controversial figure.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/

yes, that movie is awesome

related: Atari 2600 Pac-Man code in one big poster. http://benfry.com/distellamap/

This YC comment just cost my company over $200.

Ms. Pac-Man: http://cubeman.org/arcade-source/mspac.asm and another one: http://www.donhodges.com/how_high_can_you_get2.htm

Interesting use of the term 'commented'.

This one is much better commented: http://umlautllama.com/projects/pacdocs/mspac/mspac.asm (for Ms. Pac-man).

I have a 6502 decompiler which can turn assembly code into a C-type construct (a code tree). You can also assign English names to memory locations, and even define structures. Then you decompile it with all that English and it makes readable code.

Edit: I wrote it myself and I'm usually at http://www.decompiler.org/ but the website is down, though the Lisp code of the decompiler is fine.

Atari 2600 Combat assembly code fully commented: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/combat_asm/index.html

Featuring tricks such as

    ; Only the first 180 degrees of rotation has been drawn into ROM.  In the
    ; case of the other 180 degrees, this subroutine renders a flipped version
    ; by doing the following:

Very cool. But apart from the fact that this is all assembly, I have no idea what the hell is happening. Still, very cool...

I've always felt that everybody should learn some assembly. It helps in understanding C, which in turn helps in understanding most of the other languages we work with.

That being said, to actually understand what was going on would take hours of carefully inspecting the code. That's why knowing assembly is like knowing latin.

what does "kick the dog" mean?

i believe you're referring to a comment that says "kick watchdog."

most videogame hardware contains watchdog circuitry. every so often, the software has to notify the watchdog hardware that it's still alive. if the hardware doesn't get the notification within the time allotted, it assumes the software is hung and reboots.

Why couldn't they just use Ruby? It would take fewer lines.

(kidding, kidding, don't downmod me)

Downmodded for begging.

Someone lamely attempting to comment raw assembly? Not so interesting...

ah, Z-80, another great* technology that didn't win.

* ==I liked

Don't feel too bad. Zilog still makes and sells them 33 years on. I should be so lucky if anything I do lasts so long.

A Zilog executive came to his former University (eg, mine), and rambled on about lossy audio compression without any knowledge of what goes on inside a music studio - where they try to make hi-fi music instead of lowering the quality because it's "hip".

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