The Pac-Man Dossier (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The Pac-Man Dossier (2009)

pacman.holenet.info

49 pointsPaulHoule13 comments

I remember downloading shareware/freeware Pac-Man clones in the old days, they usually ran on DOS or Windows 3.1.

Some played great, some looked great, but very few of them were "Pac-Man"

The speed was off, the maps weren't the right size, and you notice little things like the ghost AI or how Pac-Man corners.

I started writing my own a long time ago, and although it's simple enough to get the basics right, there are a lot of little things that if you miss, it will just feel like a cheap clone.

This document covers the details on those things, it's great. Some things you can figure out yourself (slowing down when 'eating' pellets, for example) but the AI and cornering is a little tougher.

I give a lot of respect to the pioneers that came up with this 40+ years ago, in such early times of video games.

When I was making my pac-man clone, I used this as a reference. All the details add up, as you said.

The Pac-Man Dossier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26134332 - Feb 2021 (10 comments)

The Pac-Man Dossier (2011) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529487 - March 2019 (5 comments)

The Pac-Man Dossier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879398 - Nov 2016 (11 comments)

The Pac-Man Dossier – Meet the Ghosts (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831567 - Jan 2015 (4 comments)

Not sure of the correct year but 2009 is an upper bound (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12886902) - anyone know?

With certainty? No, but the Meta content on a version of the page I could find suggests January 2009:

  <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="OpenOffice.org 3.0  (Win32)">
  <META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Jamey Pittman">
  <META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20090110;8512900">

One of these days I’m going to find a reasonably-sized hobby that interests me and curate a Web 1.0 page just like this for every nook and cranny of the topic. I’m probably feeling nostalgia for a simpler time where the internet was magical and wondrous and I had no responsibilities to distract me once my homework was done.

Good idea, but I hope you will update your new site once in a while unlike this Pacman site that still features Billy Mitchell as some kind of role model.

I will write about an up-and-coming comedian and then stop updating it just before they get cancelled.

I would really, really like to see a recording of his “perfect game” because that story sounded like BS long before we knew he was full of BS.

Related contemporary work:

https://www.digitpress.com/library/books/book_mastering_pac-...

Since I was a teenager, this has been one of my favorite documents on the Internet. It's amazing how "dumb" the pathfinding is while you would never realize that when playing the original Pac-Man.

The dumb pathfinding only works because the maze is like a grid, and there's no need to backtrack to progress towards the player.

Is there any kind of Pac-Man pattern trainer?

I want to read the sections on maze logic, but I’m afraid it will spoil the game for me if I learn how to “beat it.”

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