7800 Jr. Pac-man Construction Set Build 1– 2009

Entry posted by jwierer May 30, 2009

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Ever since I saw Pacman Plus’s original 5200 hack of Pac-man I wanted to create a graphic editor for manipulating Pac-man mazes. I’ve looked at the mazes using HOM3 and other text editors, but the exact format always confused me. Creating a graphical tool is pretty easy, but decoding the maze is another thing! Unlike Beef Drop (aka Burger Time), the mazes are not as straight forward.

Last week Bob shared with me some partial source to Jr. Pac-man. It was just enough for me to finally figure out how the 7800 mazes are stored for Jr. Pac-man. Probably also works for any of the 7800 variants since they are all based on Ms. Pac-man, but I haven’t bothered to check if I can find the maze locations.

Anyway my in-laws were in town over Memorial Day weekend so I found myself a reason to sit in front of my computer for a few hours. Here is a screen shot of the first couple days of work. I can already modify mazes, dot and energy pill locations. Editing is still pretty primitive, but it works!

Perhaps once I am done I will go back and create a single application that can be used to hack any of the 5200/7800 variants of Pac-man. I am sure I will need a project to work on in 2010