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Hacking Atari Pacman


ravenxau

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I want to try and make a hack of the original atari 2600 pacman using hack-o-matic. Now, hacking the sprites to change the characters in the game is easy enough - but can anyone tell me the locations in the rom to change the color of the background, the maze and the sprites?... Nukey may be able to help as he did this on his awesome Pacman8k hack.

 

Thank in advance.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Here is my first attempt at "Hacking" with Hack-o-matic. It is a graphical hack of the original Pac Man from 1981. Like a lot of people, I could never feel comfortable with the blue/orange color scheme of the original release of Pacman for the 2600 by atari.....so now I have changed it.

 

Black background.....Blue maze.....The ghosts colors have been 'tweaked' to make them a bit more visable..... The Pacman Sprite has been slightly altered and the color changed the original yellow...... The Logo has been altered to reflect the games title.

 

Now... I know Nukey has already made a better Pacman with his 8K version of this, but this is just something i wanted to do for myself to learn hack-o-matic. Thanks MUST also go to Nukey as he helped me decipher the color tables in the ROM

 

Here is the bin file for anyone wanting to have a look at my work....oh, and as always, play Pacman on Game 6 for the most enjoyment..... Score over 4000 and you WILL need all the extra men the game gives you ;)

 

Latest Version of ROM here:-

 

PuckMan.bin

Edited by ravenxau
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  • 2 years later...

I want to try and make a hack of the original atari 2600 pacman using hack-o-matic. Now, hacking the sprites to change the characters in the game is easy enough - but can anyone tell me the locations in the rom to change the color of the background, the maze and the sprites?... Nukey may be able to help as he did this on his awesome Pacman8k hack.

 

Thank in advance.

Can you show a screen shot???

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  • 3 months later...
  • 5 years later...
On 1/28/2015 at 9:41 PM, ravenxau said:

Here is my first attempt at "Hacking" with Hack-o-matic. It is a graphical hack of the original Pac Man from 1981. Like a lot of people, I could never feel comfortable with the blue/orange color scheme of the original release of Pacman for the 2600 by atari.....so now I have changed it.

 

Black background.....Blue maze.....The ghosts colors have been 'tweaked' to make them a bit more visable..... The Pacman Sprite has been slightly altered and the color changed the original yellow...... The Logo has been altered to reflect the games title.

 

Now... I know Nukey has already made a better Pacman with his 8K version of this, but this is just something i wanted to do for myself to learn hack-o-matic. Thanks MUST also go to Nukey as he helped me decipher the color tables in the ROM

 

Here is the bin file for anyone wanting to have a look at my work....oh, and as always, play Pacman on Game 6 for the most enjoyment..... Score over 4000 and you WILL need all the extra men the game gives you ;)

 

Latest Version of ROM here:-

 

 

PuckMan.bin 4 kB · 420 downloads

Thank you for posting this.

I would have totally tolerated this as a kid. Sure, the sound sort of sucked, but the colors were good.

Yeah, too bad.

 

 

image.thumb.png.0748e0f38eba5cb38580394c6e8279ba.png

Edited by Zonie
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32 minutes ago, Zonie said:

Thank you for posting this.

I would have totally tolerated this as a kid. Sure, the sound sort of sucked, but the colors were good.

Yeah, too bad.

 

 

image.thumb.png.0748e0f38eba5cb38580394c6e8279ba.png

Do you know the excellent Pacman hack made by Nukey Shay? It has a title screen and the original Arcades sound.

 

 

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Of course. I have most if not all of them. The point of my original post elsewhere that led us here was not about what could be done now, but simply, what if just those two issues: blue background and orange maze walls were the right colors. It makes a ton of difference. It amazes me that the suits didn't just say something and change it!

 

The orange and blue is a horrible combination. The company I work for uses Orange and Turquoise. Drives me nuts!

 

 

 

Edited by Zonie
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On 10/15/2023 at 8:57 PM, alfredtdk said:

Do you know the excellent Pacman hack made by Nukey Shay? It has a title screen and the original Arcades sound.

 

 

You know, in memoriam of Nukey Shay I just might give this bad boy a run on my replacement Harmony Encore multicart on my 2600 Jr when the cart comes in on Monday.

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We also have to understand the context of the time. It's easy to criticize Atari's original Pacman nowadays, but we have to take into consideration that in those days there was a lot of pressure to get the game out of the oven straight away, there was no time for polishing and using new programming techniques.

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On 10/22/2023 at 12:46 AM, alfredtdk said:

We also have to understand the context of the time. It's easy to criticize Atari's original Pacman nowadays, but we have to take into consideration that in those days there was a lot of pressure to get the game out of the oven straight away, there was no time for polishing and using new programming techniques.

We criticized it back then too.   It was Atari's most important Game at the time, they should have taken the time to get it right, instead they seemed to take the attitude of "you can put the Pac-man name on anything and it'll sell".   The 400/800 version of Pac-man came out around the same time and stayed true to the source material without taking any unnecessary liberties with the game like the 2600 did.

 

In fact Atari knew it was bad, and tried to subtlety pin it on Coleco in this commercial:

 

 

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