Who made Ms Pac-Man

[DEBRO]

Here, this should help, this is the list of what games were written by whom at GCC for Atari:

 

2600

 

Ms. Pac Man - Mike Horowitz and Josh Littlefield

 

Vanguard - Dave Payne

Well I guess they definitely shared code There are Vanguard graphics in the PAL ROM of Ms. Pac-man. It's never accessed as it seems to be in unreachable areas.

[NovaXpress]

Looks like Dave Payne slipped in his own brand of "easter egg." He named the moving barricade after himself. Very clever, I always thought it meant "window pane."

[ackerman]

Actually I'll claim part of Ms. PacMan and Galaxian. The other people on Ms Pac were Glenn Parker and myself, and Glenn and I did Galaxian. (If you don't believe me, you can check out the name on the Galaxian patent.)

 

Noellie Alito and I did Moon Patrol, btw.

 

Mark

[ackerman]

It's very unlikely there were unused graphics in the original games. The originals were only 8K (yes, K), and usually there were only a few bytes left over at best. Some of the gameplay code might have been the same, altho that's unlikely too given how stripped down everything was. (By the end of a game development cycle, the handwritten assembler code was pretty ugly. The data tables were usually partially overwritten with other data tables. You do anything to save a few hundred bytes.) What graphics do you think are copied? (Maybe the Atari logo or something similar?)

[ackerman]

I'm pretty sure that Glenn did the graphics code for Ms PacMan because I remember we decided to flip when we did Galaxian - him on gameplay and myself on graphics code. (I later helped with the gameplay code because it took longer.)

But perhaps it was Doug Macrae.

 

Doug Macrae did the graphics code on at least DigDug and Pole Position. He was the VP of the company and an awesome programmer. At one point I remember noting that he had done big chunks of 4 of the Billboard Top-10 games for the week.

 

Also, Patty Goodson did the music for all of the games and helped with the graphics on a lot.

[The_Laird]

Its cool to hear from one of the origianal programmers, they were all awsome games too.

[DEBRO]

Hi there,

(By the end of a game development cycle, the handwritten assembler code was pretty ugly.  The data tables were usually partially overwritten with other data tables.

That would probably explain it. The Vanguard graphics in the PAL Ms. Pac-man ROM are in "garbage" areas of the ROM. These bytes are never used. They are probably there from the overwriting you're mentioning. This is probably why there are Galaxian graphics in the Centipede ROM too. Again, they seem to reside in "garbage" areas.

 

BTW, I noticed the BRK vector in Ms. Pac-man seems to point to weird locations. I don't see where they are used for data tables. Could they have possibly been used by a debugger you guys had?

 

Also, there is data in the bankswitching hotspots. Could this have been part of a debugger too? They might be "garbage" data too.

 

Glad too see an old Atari programmer on the boards...welcome I hope I'm not getting too geeky. I'm just curious about this type of stuff.

[supercat]

Also, there is data in the bankswitching hotspots. Could this have been part of a debugger too? They might be "garbage" data too.

1017532[/snapback]

 

I would think it would make sense to put identifying information in the hotspots, at least in the unused bytes. An F8 cart will have two bytes that are completely inaccessible, an F6 will have twelve, and an F4 will have 56. And of course any SuperChip game will have an additional 256 bytes per bank. Putting identifying information in these areas could be useful for trying to prevent mistakes in ROM image preparation.

[DEBRO]

Hi John,

I would think it would make sense to put identifying information in the hotspots, at least in the unused bytes.  An F8 cart will have two bytes that are completely inaccessible, an F6 will have twelve, and an F4 will have 56.  And of course any SuperChip game will have an additional 256 bytes per bank.  Putting identifying information in these areas could be useful for trying to prevent mistakes in ROM image preparation.

That's what I thought too. I've seen this in other games. In the Ms. Pac-man ROM they don't map back to ASCII characters. I've checked ATASCII and they don't make sense for that character set either. Does the ST use a different character set?

 

For instance in the hotspots in BANK0 they have...

.byte $12,$22,$1A,$8F

 

and for the hotspots in BANK1 they have...

.byte $12,$22,$09,$82

 

BTW, this is from the NTSC ROM. The PAL ROM has different values. I guess this may be overwritten data like what has been mentioned in this thread already.

 

Again, I may be getting too geeky here but I'm just curious.