Tod Frye seems pretty cool to engage with a home coder's remake in a friendly way. Back in 1982 he did the best he could with the time and resources he had and made a decent, playable game.
I blame Atari for what it was. I was a little kid who used money saved over a long time to buy a game that he couldn’t afford to play much. I remember riding my bike to the game store, paying my $50, and riding home with such joy and anticipation only to be totally deflated and made to feel foolish when I played that steaming pile of crap the first time. The ‘thunk thunk thunk’ sound still haunts me to this day.
@@tomxavier4328 Maybe your childhood experiences raised your expectations a little too high, if at that young age the game was so disappointing? Not sure 'steaming pile of crap' is fair when you understand a little of how complicated it was to create games on the VCS, especially in those first few years.
@@JenevieveDeFer This was before teams of programmers helped each other out. Look at the list of everyone involved in a AAA game today. The list goes on longer than many MOVIES do now! I shudder to think how long the credit scroll will be on the Starfield or some of the other 'years in development' games that are upcoming, as of this writing. My co-worker and I call it: Rubberducking. Being able to bounce ideas, bug fixes, and code examination between us is incredibly valuable - even today.
Yes, that would explain why games such as E.T. did so poorly, and Aliens: Colonial Marines was a perfect example of what can happen if you rush things and don't work all the bugs out before releasing a game in this day and age.
i think the work environment of early Atari is a bit misrepresented. it wasn't quite like the exploitative corporate attitude of today. ATARI SALES GUY: "so we'd like to make a port of your game to our console. let's hash out the details in the company hot tub over some bourbon." CLIENT: "we're totally on board. do you think we could see something in two months?" CODER: (does a meter of cocaine) "SHIT I COULD HAVE IT ALL DONE IN TWO WEEKS! WOOOOO" SALES GUY: "fantastic. want to go to the gentleman's club later?"
We were all disappointed at how weird it looked, but at the end of the day the gameplay was still good and I played it a lot. I remember asking my parents if they made it worse than the arcade so we would keep spending quarters there. :D They set me straight. My mom even played it and found out the exact pattern so she could always clear the board without getting killed. I was always impressed by that!
Your mom played Pac-Man on the Atari 2600? Mine was disinterested in technology. Not interested in what a VHS is. Not interested in puttin in a cassette or turning it on. I think she didn't even know how to turn on the TV. When I had my NES, she played a lot of Super Mario Bros 1, 2, and 3.
@@louistournas120 Yah! A German-born immigrant playing video games in the 80s, and they were older when they had me, too, so she was in her mid-40s. :D She was always curious and loved puzzles.
One important note... Todd only had 5 weeks to make them game and when he handed Atari the prototype, they just ran with it. Their greed is ultimately what caused the video game crash of 83 when they again did the same thing with the E.T game. Just discovered your channel. Great stuff! Keep up the great work!
See, all he needed was a few decades, modern hardware, advanced dev tools and too much free time. lol Seriously though, I feel bad for the developers at those older studios/companies. They made digital magic and brought so much joy with their talent and didn't even get to enjoy it most of the time.
seeing as JR Pac Man for the 2600 was quite a faithful rendition, that version with just 1 maze size is how I'd imagine a more 80s accurate polished Pac Man
Just imagine what at the time Studios was working with the brand new console and at the moment we have a 30+ years old console with all that experience and information accumulated.
I probably don't need to point this out, but not being able to capture footage at 60fps is a big problem when it comes to Atari 2600 games, because you get situations like 7:50 where half of the on-screen sprites (including Pac-Man in this case) end up being totally absent. The flickering can be reduced with some neat, modern tricks, but it's still part of making visuals work on the VCS when there's more going on than the console was designed for-which is most of the time. The flickering alternates at 30Hz so if you're capturing at 30fps then your capture device literally never even sees half of what's going on.
It's not just the Atari 2600 but even through the 8- and 16-bit eras 60fps flickering was purposely used for various effects, and it actually worked with CRT displays rather well. Modern (LCD) displays literally can't reproduce this natively, it has to be simulated with a good CRT filter.
Tod Frye seems like an awesome guy. Having grown up on the Commodore 64 myself which led to my 30 year IT career, I have a lot of respect for what he did with the resources he had. That is a Commodore 1701/1702 monitor he is in front of!
The original 2600 version of Pac-Man changed my life…because it was so awful that, when I saw how much better the one for Atari computers was, I sold my 2600 and bought an Atari 400, leading me to try writing my own programs and an eventual career in computer game development. If the 2600 version had been an adequate reflection of the original, I might have been content to just play video games and not wound up writing them.
My brother and I got our allowance money together to buy 2600 Pac-Man on the day of it’s release back in ‘82. Hoo boy, the reaction we both had upon playing it was shock and disbelief. I tried to ignore just how f$&@ up the game was but it was tough because I was a huge fan of the arcade game.
Shock and disbelief describes my reaction perfectly! I never blamed the programmer - I blamed Atari for being cheap! Somehow, I just knew it was their fault! Atari missed such a great opportunity to really WOW the public…
I played PacMan quite a bit on the 2600 back in the day. I never thought about it as terrible, and considering what other games looked like at that time I knew nothing would resemble an arcade. It was fun, challenging, and at that time we caught a glimpse of what more the 2600 was capable of.
Add more hardware like the Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger and it changed the experience of playing "Atari". Pretty rare but I was a spoiled kid. The packed in game was Phaser Patrol and it was incredible! Activision's StarMaster was very similar and one of my favorite games.
Anytime an arcade game got ported to the 2600, it was going to be a pretty big step down, and Pac-Man was by no means the worst thing for the system, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't disappointing. It just seemed lifeless and boring, and I hardly played thing before effectively setting it aside. To be fair, even in the arcade, I think I always liked the idea of Pac-Man better than the actual game (I just don't think it's the kind of game I click with, mechanically-speaking, so it was mostly vibe that attracted me to it), so there may not have been a scenario in which it was going to be one of my most played games, but it would definitely have held my attention longer if it were better executed. I'm not blaming the programmer though. It sounds like the conditions he had to work under were far less than ideal.
I don't get how some people are okay with and allow their smoke detector to beep when battery is low. By the time I'm at beep number 2, I'm going insane and searching for a battery quick.
My neighbor has a bedroom that they kept the door closed to, due to mold or something, for a year and a half. No one slept in there. However, the bedroom did have a smoke alarm in there, and that alarm BEEPED for the whole YEAR AND A HALF. I could hear it in my backyard. WTF? I do not know how the residents could stand it. Or it could have been a carbon monoxide detector, hence the reason no one slept in there. However, that would have been worse, if they did have CO, and their response was to just close the door.
LoL. I paused it to make sure it wasn't mine. Last year, I had changed out all of my smoke detectors with 10 year battery versions, so I thought one was defective. But it was the bad voiceover in this video. Not real life. LoL.
One of my favorite early emulation experiences from 20+ years ago was a mysterious rom package I found for pacman arcade hardware. The roms basically made an arcade pacman machine play like the 2600 version, with those mazes and such. But the best part was the text file that indicated something about time travel, and it was your job to get these into the hands of the execs of Midway in the late 70's so this modified version would be version the world came to love and the Atari version would be arcade perfect, therefore saving Atari.
Re: Ms Pac-Man. Atari got REALLY ambitious and later ported JR PAC-MAN to the Atari 2600, even having a scrolling play field (but at a 90 degree angle to the arcade original). Like Ms Pac-Man, an admirable effort.
What a great video! Amazing stuff to behold. I fault Atari (Warner) for a lot of this, but quite a bit of it was the technical limitations at the time and with it's ultimate remake, there was quite a bit of Internet crowd-sourcing at least in terms of advice and technical assistance to a considerable degree. I have the same mad respect for Frye that I have for Howard Scott Warshaw. Like with E.T., they were under pressure to get it done in a short period to maximize Corporate Profits. Gaming suffered for it, but these guys did the absolute best that they could under the circumstances. Love this video.
As someone old enough to remember the release of PacMan on the VCS (played it at a friends house; my family had the Odyssey 2 system; KCMunchkin rules!), I can say that Pac Man for the VCS was fine... We had fun playing it. Yeah, it was different from PacMan, but that didn't bother us... It wasn't until MSPacMan came out for the VCS that we kind of saw how it could have been better, but it was still fun...
I remember KC Munchkin. Oddysey 2 was a good bit inferior to the 2600. I had an intellivision. Not sure the graphics were all that much better but having the keyboard thing made for better gameplay. I'm 50 :)
I remember going to a friend's house and playing my first game on the 2600, Pac-Man. I was very disappointed. I don't remember what other games I played but I never asked my parents for a console. When the NES came out my dad bought one and I played that non-stop.
I was such a nut for videogames back in the day. Like RUN two miles to the arcade with all my allowance money on a Saturday morning, use all my quarters, run back home in the afternoon to check the sofa cushions and take empty bottles to the store and run down to the arcade, use all my quarters, RUN BACK AGAIN through the woods looking for beer bottles to take back to the store and RUN BACK AGAIN to the arcade that evening just because I knew that if I had one last quarter I could beat that level of some game or another and see what the next level was like ! "Time Pilot", "Gorf", "Tron", "Phoenix", "Spy Hunter" and "Pac Man" ! I was addicted ! So when "Pac Man" came out for Atari 2600, I LOVED IT ! And to this day that old sound, look and feel... even of Atari 2600 "Pac Man"... is like crack to me...
Tod Frye was a hero for even attempting to make what he did at the time and place he did, and in hindsight the only bad thing about the game is that it's +called+ Pac-Man. Oh it's a fun game on it's own, but being called something it neither looked nor played like both sold millions of copies and made millions of people upset. Call it "Maze Munch" or something and it would have sold far less but nobody would have a hate boner for it.
Tod Frye did an amazing job with what he had to work with. The hardware, the internal corporate Atari decisions, the time deadlines, etc.....I enjoyed this as a kid and ty Tod for the memories!
It is a veritable classic! I will never forget the impression it made. The sound of pac man eating those pills was like an elastic band being plucked. It is soooo Atari 2600!
Space invaders was not the first game to come from the arcade to the home via licensing. Breakout and Night Driver are two examples off the top of my head. But Pong was also licensed out from Atari to Coleco and many others.
@@macuser7048 That's debatable. The home version of SI on the 2600 had to compromise a lot. Pong was a near 1:1 clone. Combat is another clone that is very close to the arcade game it was based on.
@@macuser7048 Well, the 2600 hardware was certainly closer to the game it was based on. Later homebrews of SI improve it quite a bit, but still I don't think anyone has created a version of SI on the 2600 with the original 11x5 invader grid (5 rows of 11 invaders). The original Atari port of SI is a 6x6 grid Space instigator, a homebrew from the early 2000s get a 5x9 grid, which is a lot closer. I think he is currently working on "Space Instigators 2" right now. Another lost aspect is the ghostly appearance and background. The original arcade machine doesn't have a visible monitor. The monitor is actually facing the top of the machine. What you look at when you are playing the game is a type of mirror that you can see through and reflects the up pointing monitor. That is how they got the physical art background to be behind the invaders. This mirror system creates translucent invaders. There is also an analog sound board that creates the sound effects. Even to this day it is impossible to experience SI the right way without the arcade machine.
@@tarstarkusz Yeah and the slowdown was actually a feature. The more invaders you destroyed, the more hectic they would get and the invaders would move faster and faster towards the bottom.
Pretty stunning. The improvements made are incredible. Having additional resources and not being handcuffed, not to mention having unlimited time sure does make a difference.
My parents never dropped a quarter on Pac-Man in the arcade, but they spent hours laughing and playing together on the 2600 after putting us kids to bed. My parents didn't get along well in the 80s, but Atari Pac-Man were some of the best times they had. I'm forever grateful to Tod Frye for that. His game didn't really satisfy the arcade junkies, but for non-gamers like my parents, it was the only game they ever played on the 2600.
I watched Devs talk about how they had to be smart with their code due to the limitations you mentioned. Amazing programming for their time. Seems entertainment always pushes tech forward.
Tod Fry deserves every drop of respect he gets for producing a game single handedly on such harsh limitiations, but the one that did the most damage was clearly the time constraints. I'd rather have an awesome game take forever than some shit like Fallout 76's released to the public and have it be such a bad game that the modding community had to rescue it! Honestly, I'd be interested to hear what Frye would say about that lol!
As a part time idie game developer, I understand Atari's perspective. A company needs revenue to buy time to make better games, so the pressure to push something (anything) out the door in the hopes that it generates revenue is intense. I would need a minimum of $1.5M (after taxes and fees) to buy the kind of time needed to not care about the release schedule. And that assumes I remain a one-man outfit. It would take quite a bit more if I had hired help. I think I can presume Atari's financial needs dwarfed mine.
My friends and cousins and I all enjoyed the original. We understood it wasn't like the arcade but it was still Pac-Man and really fun to play. It also has its own character. I haven't watched this video yet (will do later) but I hope you're not giving Tod Frye a beating. He did very well under the circumstances. I'm not sure if perceptions might have been different in the UK to the US, but I don't remember a big fuss about it being a let-down at all. As mentioned, we all really liked it.
I've chatted with Tod about this in person several times. He made the decision that two-player gameplay was important, which meant instead of 23 bytes to store the current difficulty, dots on the current maze, remaining lives, and the score, he had to use 46 of the VCS's 128-byte memory. All these "better" games don't include the 2-player mode, so they get to use all the bytes devoted to a second player state for other things. So it's not just about the code, it's about the feature set.
Retrospectively, I can easily see the shortfalls of the Atari 2600 Pacman compared to the arcade. But I fall into an interesting age group because I was born after the Pacman craze, and the first time I'd even heard of it was when I played it on my friend's Atari some time around 1986. To me, this WAS Pacman. I knew of no other version. Even as late as 2000, I was occasionally playing it on an Atari 2600 clone system called the TV Boy with some friends I shared a house with, and still wouldn't know of the original or anything to do with how badly the Atari version was regarded for some years. I should mention that I live in the UK, and the video game console scene was not as prominent as in the US during the early years of gaming. Which is why the whole Pacman craze wasn't so talked about here, and that's how my knowledge of it all was zero. But I loved the Atari Pacman. I had nothing to compare it to, so it stood up fine to me. Yes, it was a seriously basic game. And I did have up to date consoles from the 90's onwards, I wasn't in any kind of time warp where Pacman seemed cutting edge by then. But it played real nice, it was a classic. Once I started to learn all about the history of Pacman, through the internet, I was surprised that the Atari version was overwhelmingly considered to be a bad game. I fully understand the perspective of someone who bought it at the time and was disappointed by how much of a downgrade it was from the arcade, but I think it gets a worse reputation than it deserves. The gameplay is there, I don't think it plays significantly different from the arcade version to the casual player. Any time I fancy a game of Pacman, I still choose the Atari version. It's what I grew up with, and I love it.
Change your smoke detector batteries! I was going crazy trying to figure out which smoke detector had gone bad at my house. LOL Turned out it came from your video. LMAO.
Back in the day, coders had to be artists. Not only do you have to devise the game, you also had to draw the display from scratch WITH RASTER INTERRUPTS!
In a very real sense, what they manage to capture in the ports of Ms. and Jr. may even be more impressive considering they lacked the emulation and debugger tools available today that make ports of even Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog possible on the 2600.
It sounds like Atari didn't give Tod Frye enough time to do what he could have to improve the game. Their attitude was "it's good enough" (even though it wasn't as good as it could have been). I had the cartridge back in the day but I don't remember when it was released - did it come out at Christmas season? That might be why there was a rush to get it done. They had to get it in stores before the holidays.
I remember watching a video on the 2600 - I think it might have been the one where they tried to find the dump of ET cartridges in the desert. Anyway, I'm sure Todd Frye said that in the middle of developing PacMan, he was asked to demo it to some execs from Warner, who owned Atari at the time. It wasn't finished, but they said that's great, let's get it in the shops - he was saying "but it's not finished" and they were like, it's good enough. I might be misrembering it, but that was my understanding as to why it was so bad.
I have such admiration for the home brew community and sticking with the limitations of the hardware to make game that are still compelling, dynamic, and fun. The 4k and 8K PacMan remind of the early computer ports in a good way. Both are worth to be played alongside Ms. Pac Man, which for me is maybe a Top 3 2600 port.
I would submit that it might have been interesting to include some details about the Atari 2600 version of Ms PacMan which was really really good. I own both and certainly played them a lot when I was a kid, but the Ms PacMan really shines vs. the original.
You should look up some of the history of Ms Pacman. It started as a rom hack of Pacman that Namco gave the green light to because they were desperate for a sequel to Pacman. During this time, the company (General Computer) was sued by Atari for their first rom hack, Super Missle Attack. Long story short, Atari settled out of court, General Computer began to work for Atari. General Computer made the 2600 version of Ms Pacman, a game they knew inside and out.
Makes me think of my first PC and using memory managers; "load high" to free up as much memory out of the 640k to run programs. The 8K looks closer to the Atari 800 computer version.
Good video, man. I always love the homebrew community. It constantly shows just what can be done with a console. Of course, having a few decades of past experience to look back on doesn't hurt. Personally, though, I had Pac Man on my 2600 and I remember my friends and I always comparing scores. It wasn't a great game, but it was playable, and we had fun with it. I think that's what often gets lost in trying to compare one thing to another. Is it still fun? For me back then, the answer was yes, it was. Also, RIP pojr's Smoke Detector battery. :)
You need to change the battery in your smoke detector. (I heard the beep in the background of your video, ha (edit: I just realized this video is 2 years old - TH-cam suggested it to me randomly today. Hopefully you figured it out. Ha.) love your videos!
What I heard about it was that Frye didn't have enough time to make it good. I heard about that with a few bad 2600 titles, like E.T., that they could've been better if the developer had more time.
What is interesting is that I remember this game as a kid. Not once did it occur to me that it "wasn't like the arcade" it was still PAC MAN. The concept was basically the same.....
that was really interestin'. To be honest. as a child I was completely blown away by playin' Pacman on the Atari. I didn'it even know of the arcade version, so to me Pacman was just an incredible game.
The smoke detector chirps in the background during the narration had me running all over the house trying to find out which one of my dozen smoke detectors was chirping. Then I rewound the video by 10 seconds and realized that the chirp was coming from the video itself. Nice. Probably had a dead battery in your smoke detector for so long that you don't even hear the chirp anymore.
I remember standing in line at Caldor for like 2.5 hours to get this cartridge the day it came out. lol Yeah, it was a bit disappointing, but I remember spending so much time playing this game that I got blisters. It still served. But yeah... when Ms. Pac-Man came out for the Atari, that game was WAAAAAY better. A really excellent port. Also... K.C. Munchkin was the far superior Pac-Man game back then... I so wanted that game for my Atari! heh :-)
Atari released a perfect version for the 8 bit computer back in the day. It was my first game for the system, but really for guests. A game I preferred was Defender.
I wonder if the same designer of Ms Pac-Man (late 1982 Mike Horowitz and Josh Littlefield) would of done the same quality of game for Pac-Man (also 1982). Or did Midway hand over to them the code document, thus creating a better looking and sounding game?
The better quality was not related to the pacman / ms pacman arcade code. But basically having more memory and also being better in using the Atari 2600 hardware
Years ago a developer told me that the ghosts flickered because there was only enough memory to render two at a time. So two would display at their locations and then turn off so the other two could display in their locations. They’d turn on and off quickly so that it worked. Sort of. But obviously the flicker was noticeable and is one of the first things I think of when I recall the 2600 version.
Flickering is a pretty innovative solution, it allows a programmer to double the amount of onscreen sprites using the same amount of memory. It just wasn't managed very well in Atari Pac-Man. I remember all the hype about Pac-Man coming to the Atari, it was everywhere: tv, magazines, in store promotions, etc etc etc.
I recently got my Atari 2600+ and am able to play my old cartridge games again that I haven’t played in years because my original 2600 crapped out like 25 years ago and the flashback consoles don’t include a lot of the non-Atari titles….with that said from a nostalgia perspective I love being able to play the old school Atari Pac-Man and Donkey Kong with all of their quirks and blemishes; brought back a lot of great memories and regardless of how the games look they are still fun.
Fun fact: optimizing a program to perform the same function w/ less code used to be known as "code bumming".... According to Steven Levy in his book "Hackers" the term was coined @ the MIT AI Lab to describe computer science students who became obsessed w/ seeing which student could write any given program using the fewest instructions possible, both to save on computer memory & to flex their programming prowess (the term supposedly came from "ski bums" who'd compete fiercely to see who could complete a ski run in the shortest time possible). An unintended consequence of this overall view was that, almost unanimously, programmers would encode all dates using only 2 digits instead of the full 4 to save on memory -- hence why the "Y2K Bug" became a thing during the late 1990s.
It wasn't "lack of resources" Frye had more "resources," like being paid his salary. Literally working in the same office as all of Atari's other 2600 programmers. Dintar had no deadlines. Frye was not given enough time. No marketing dept demanding a 2 player option (the dot map alone is 96 bits) . Dintar had people to ask when he ran into problems. I give Dintar a ton of props. He did a great job. Frye's version sucks and a lot of it is his fault. But a lot isn't. Imagine arguing with marketing about what color the background needs to be.
I've heard Frye speak at Portland Retro Gaming Expo over several years and even got to confront him. (You can find the entire presentation on TH-cam) Basically he kept saying that nobody knew how to make a home conversion of an arcade game, that they were all figuring it out. I then asked him "what about space invaders?" which was released much earlier, was wildly successful AND a really fun game to play, even in 2023. His response was to more or less slag the programmer, avoiding my very good and relevant point completely. He has never taken responsibility, at least not publicly, but he knows he messed it up which is why he says the homebrew is "depressing". The old Atari guys at the conference did talk about how crazy those days were. Everyone was on drugs, and Frye would walk on the narrow hallway walls over people's heads and call himself spider man. He really came off to me as a kind of sad man, never able to move beyond this point in his life that has forever defined him.
"Playing games in the home was unheard of at the time." Uh, the Atari 2600 was created explicitly to play arcade games at home. Long before the Pac-Man port, games like Breakout, Combat, Night Driver, Gun Fight, Star Ship, Canyon Bomber, etc. had been released for it, which were ALL arcade ports.
Actually you're not wrong here. All of those games you did mention were previously arcade games. I should have specifically said licensed games rather than just arcade games. My bad.
Mr. Frye seems like a really great guy. I can only imagine the limitations being the first generation of console game coders. People like him paved the way. Only respect. Even whomever programed E.T. you can get out the hole you just gotta get to the very edge in the pit and neck float... thing out twice or so. As for gameplay no idea besides collect things in the holes and run away from weirdos.
I had acquired Dintar812's Pac-Man 8k for the Atari 2600 in 2019 from his AtariAge forum post, which I have played numerous times on my Windows PC using the Stella emulator program. I truly like and appreciate what Dintar812 has done. Eventually I am going to have someone turn his program file into an actual game cartridge so that I can play it on my genuine Atari 2600 as well. I rate the Pac-Man 8k by Dintar812 for the Atari 2600 VCS as ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ out of 5 stars.
If 4k is running on the same 4k cart Todd had to use then that's close to accurate for what could have been released at the time. I just saw a video where someone showed off a Ms. Pac-Man hack to turn it into regular Pac-Man and I think of the three versions that one is the closest to what would have actually been released if Todd has been allowed more time. Lastly this begs the question. Were is Ms Pac-Man 4k/8k?
This was an interesting video, well made. Just about stayed reasonably respectful to Tod Frye but he really deserves a lot more respect. Do flickering ghosts and a single direction Pac-Man really matter so much? The new version is great, no doubt about it, though it's not quite true to say it was near identical to the arcade version. One thing that puzzles me is how they got it to sound like that using the standard hardware??
BTW, I think a homebrewer made a better arcade port of Pac Man for the Atari 8-bit, as well. As I recall, this version is on a 128K bank-switched cartridge, giving better graphics, sound, and music, plus cut scenes. th-cam.com/video/jG3VoTX1S7k/w-d-xo.html
This is stunning and depressing. If Atari had pulled off a version like this, the entire video game industry would’ve changed. The original was still popular. But this would’ve blown peoples minds. Sales would have been even bigger. Who knows what would’ve happened.
Imagine a videogame landscape still dominated by Atari. No truly successful Nintendo proprietary home console titles. Coleco says, "Nah, let's stay to swimming pools and Pong knockoffs". Mattel backs down & sticks with Barbie and LED/LCD handhelds. Sega still struggles to be relevant; has a strong arcade presence but no chance making it into the living room. No Gameboy/Game Gear. The Tamiel family fucks straight off. Would it be the most boring monopoly or a total 80s - 90s Renaissance of killer games and consoles? ~We~ will never know - but in a parallel world.......
Frankly, back at that time, and given what was available to the programmers in both software and hardware, what they achieved was truly remarkable. I doubt there are many today that could do what those guys did with what was available to them. None of the modern tools, heavy time and direction constraints, no quick tips and hints from a non existent internet group, just them and their skills. 🤯
Biggest resource Frye never had was a powerful PC step-by-step emulator and debugging environment.
Or Time!
@@mikiex Yeah, and TIME was a big thing back then -- it isn't so much now (understatement).
As a Studio 2 programmer, this is the number one reason why. Way better development tools.
Or an entire internet forum of people reviewing and suggesting changes to his code.
Do not forget to add the new programming techniques to the equation.
Tod Frye seems pretty cool to engage with a home coder's remake in a friendly way. Back in 1982 he did the best he could with the time and resources he had and made a decent, playable game.
Exactly right.
I blame Atari for what it was. I was a little kid who used money saved over a long time to buy a game that he couldn’t afford to play much. I remember riding my bike to the game store, paying my $50, and riding home with such joy and anticipation only to be totally deflated and made to feel foolish when I played that steaming pile of crap the first time. The ‘thunk thunk thunk’ sound still haunts me to this day.
@@tomxavier4328 Maybe your childhood experiences raised your expectations a little too high, if at that young age the game was so disappointing? Not sure 'steaming pile of crap' is fair when you understand a little of how complicated it was to create games on the VCS, especially in those first few years.
He had 6 months, but they only gave him a 4KB ROM to work with, instead of the more expensive 8KB ROM.
@@JenevieveDeFer This was before teams of programmers helped each other out. Look at the list of everyone involved in a AAA game today. The list goes on longer than many MOVIES do now! I shudder to think how long the credit scroll will be on the Starfield or some of the other 'years in development' games that are upcoming, as of this writing.
My co-worker and I call it: Rubberducking. Being able to bounce ideas, bug fixes, and code examination between us is incredibly valuable - even today.
Atari developers had strict deadlines to get a game ready for sales. That usually meant that they couldn't research or use the systems full potential.
I am impressed that the Atari 5200, the 7800, the Jaguar was so bad.
For 1978, the 2600 was great but it looks like they fell asleep after that.
Yes, that would explain why games such as E.T. did so poorly, and Aliens: Colonial Marines was a perfect example of what can happen if you rush things and don't work all the bugs out before releasing a game in this day and age.
i think the work environment of early Atari is a bit misrepresented. it wasn't quite like the exploitative corporate attitude of today.
ATARI SALES GUY: "so we'd like to make a port of your game to our console. let's hash out the details in the company hot tub over some bourbon."
CLIENT: "we're totally on board. do you think we could see something in two months?"
CODER: (does a meter of cocaine) "SHIT I COULD HAVE IT ALL DONE IN TWO WEEKS! WOOOOO"
SALES GUY: "fantastic. want to go to the gentleman's club later?"
4:37 - I just spend the last 10 minutes going through my house, trying to figure out which of my smoke detectors was chirping. 8)
Lol. I was going to do the same after this video until I read your comment.
Yeah I got that too, really confused me.
Another one around 1:15
You could have just rewound the video like I did
I, too, just spent the last 10 minutes going through my house's smoke detector batteries
We were all disappointed at how weird it looked, but at the end of the day the gameplay was still good and I played it a lot. I remember asking my parents if they made it worse than the arcade so we would keep spending quarters there. :D They set me straight. My mom even played it and found out the exact pattern so she could always clear the board without getting killed. I was always impressed by that!
Your mom played Pac-Man on the Atari 2600? Mine was disinterested in technology. Not interested in what a VHS is. Not interested in puttin in a cassette or turning it on. I think she didn't even know how to turn on the TV.
When I had my NES, she played a lot of Super Mario Bros 1, 2, and 3.
@@louistournas120 Yah! A German-born immigrant playing video games in the 80s, and they were older when they had me, too, so she was in her mid-40s. :D She was always curious and loved puzzles.
Your mom sounded like a cool person.
@@IAMTheNiteOwl :) ty!
One important note... Todd only had 5 weeks to make them game and when he handed Atari the prototype, they just ran with it. Their greed is ultimately what caused the video game crash of 83 when they again did the same thing with the E.T game.
Just discovered your channel. Great stuff! Keep up the great work!
See, all he needed was a few decades, modern hardware, advanced dev tools and too much free time. lol Seriously though, I feel bad for the developers at those older studios/companies. They made digital magic and brought so much joy with their talent and didn't even get to enjoy it most of the time.
seeing as JR Pac Man for the 2600 was quite a faithful rendition, that version with just 1 maze size is how I'd imagine a more 80s accurate polished Pac Man
Just imagine what at the time Studios was working with the brand new console and at the moment we have a 30+ years old console with all that experience and information accumulated.
Biggest thing is no deadline.
Change the battery in your smoke alarm
Yeah, seriously. I stoped the video and sat listening to figure out which of my rooms was beeping.
If you just do nothing the hall chirps just go away after a while.
oh my lordy. lol. i heard that to and was just thinking " darn it, i just replaced all them batteries."
I probably don't need to point this out, but not being able to capture footage at 60fps is a big problem when it comes to Atari 2600 games, because you get situations like 7:50 where half of the on-screen sprites (including Pac-Man in this case) end up being totally absent. The flickering can be reduced with some neat, modern tricks, but it's still part of making visuals work on the VCS when there's more going on than the console was designed for-which is most of the time. The flickering alternates at 30Hz so if you're capturing at 30fps then your capture device literally never even sees half of what's going on.
It's not just the Atari 2600 but even through the 8- and 16-bit eras 60fps flickering was purposely used for various effects, and it actually worked with CRT displays rather well. Modern (LCD) displays literally can't reproduce this natively, it has to be simulated with a good CRT filter.
The question was answered less than a year later with the 2600's port of Ms. Pac-Man which was considerably improved.
Tod Frye seems like an awesome guy. Having grown up on the Commodore 64 myself which led to my 30 year IT career, I have a lot of respect for what he did with the resources he had. That is a Commodore 1701/1702 monitor he is in front of!
Tod Frye > Todd Howard
The original 2600 version of Pac-Man changed my life…because it was so awful that, when I saw how much better the one for Atari computers was, I sold my 2600 and bought an Atari 400, leading me to try writing my own programs and an eventual career in computer game development. If the 2600 version had been an adequate reflection of the original, I might have been content to just play video games and not wound up writing them.
My brother and I got our allowance money together to buy 2600 Pac-Man on the day of it’s release back in ‘82. Hoo boy, the reaction we both had upon playing it was shock and disbelief. I tried to ignore just how f$&@ up the game was but it was tough because I was a huge fan of the arcade game.
Thats how I felt when I asked for Galaxian post-crash, not realizing that it wasn't Galaga, and god, when I first put in Crystal Castles.....
Shock and disbelief describes my reaction perfectly!
I never blamed the programmer - I blamed Atari for being cheap! Somehow, I just knew it was their fault!
Atari missed such a great opportunity to really WOW the public…
I played PacMan quite a bit on the 2600 back in the day. I never thought about it as terrible, and considering what other games looked like at that time I knew nothing would resemble an arcade. It was fun, challenging, and at that time we caught a glimpse of what more the 2600 was capable of.
Add more hardware like the Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger and it changed the experience of playing "Atari". Pretty rare but I was a spoiled kid. The packed in game was Phaser Patrol and it was incredible!
Activision's StarMaster was very similar and one of my favorite games.
Anytime an arcade game got ported to the 2600, it was going to be a pretty big step down, and Pac-Man was by no means the worst thing for the system, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't disappointing. It just seemed lifeless and boring, and I hardly played thing before effectively setting it aside. To be fair, even in the arcade, I think I always liked the idea of Pac-Man better than the actual game (I just don't think it's the kind of game I click with, mechanically-speaking, so it was mostly vibe that attracted me to it), so there may not have been a scenario in which it was going to be one of my most played games, but it would definitely have held my attention longer if it were better executed. I'm not blaming the programmer though. It sounds like the conditions he had to work under were far less than ideal.
I don't get how some people are okay with and allow their smoke detector to beep when battery is low. By the time I'm at beep number 2, I'm going insane and searching for a battery quick.
lmao that was the video? I paused the video to switch out the 9v in mine. XD
My neighbor has a bedroom that they kept the door closed to, due to mold or something, for a year and a half. No one slept in there. However, the bedroom did have a smoke alarm in there, and that alarm BEEPED for the whole YEAR AND A HALF. I could hear it in my backyard. WTF? I do not know how the residents could stand it. Or it could have been a carbon monoxide detector, hence the reason no one slept in there. However, that would have been worse, if they did have CO, and their response was to just close the door.
This always bugs me gaming online. I have no idea how these people put up with this beeping all day
LoL. I paused it to make sure it wasn't mine. Last year, I had changed out all of my smoke detectors with 10 year battery versions, so I thought one was defective. But it was the bad voiceover in this video. Not real life. LoL.
It's always blaquepipo
One of my favorite early emulation experiences from 20+ years ago was a mysterious rom package I found for pacman arcade hardware. The roms basically made an arcade pacman machine play like the 2600 version, with those mazes and such. But the best part was the text file that indicated something about time travel, and it was your job to get these into the hands of the execs of Midway in the late 70's so this modified version would be version the world came to love and the Atari version would be arcade perfect, therefore saving Atari.
Re: Ms Pac-Man. Atari got REALLY ambitious and later ported JR PAC-MAN to the Atari 2600, even having a scrolling play field (but at a 90 degree angle to the arcade original). Like Ms Pac-Man, an admirable effort.
What a great video! Amazing stuff to behold. I fault Atari (Warner) for a lot of this, but quite a bit of it was the technical limitations at the time and with it's ultimate remake, there was quite a bit of Internet crowd-sourcing at least in terms of advice and technical assistance to a considerable degree. I have the same mad respect for Frye that I have for Howard Scott Warshaw. Like with E.T., they were under pressure to get it done in a short period to maximize Corporate Profits. Gaming suffered for it, but these guys did the absolute best that they could under the circumstances. Love this video.
As someone old enough to remember the release of PacMan on the VCS (played it at a friends house; my family had the Odyssey 2 system; KCMunchkin rules!), I can say that Pac Man for the VCS was fine...
We had fun playing it. Yeah, it was different from PacMan, but that didn't bother us...
It wasn't until MSPacMan came out for the VCS that we kind of saw how it could have been better, but it was still fun...
I remember KC Munchkin. Oddysey 2 was a good bit inferior to the 2600. I had an intellivision. Not sure the graphics were all that much better but having the keyboard thing made for better gameplay. I'm 50 :)
Same this end here in the UK, we all liked it very much, we never really discussed the fact it was different to the arcade one.
Mrs Pac-Man rocked back in the day.
I remember going to a friend's house and playing my first game on the 2600, Pac-Man. I was very disappointed. I don't remember what other games I played but I never asked my parents for a console. When the NES came out my dad bought one and I played that non-stop.
I just turned 50 years old and I loved the game when it came out. Never questioned anything about it. My sister's and I just had fun.
Understandable, it was the best home console option at the time
@@pojr Good or bad, it was just a fun time.
I was such a nut for videogames back in the day. Like RUN two miles to the arcade with all my allowance money on a Saturday morning, use all my quarters, run back home in the afternoon to check the sofa cushions and take empty bottles to the store and run down to the arcade, use all my quarters, RUN BACK AGAIN through the woods looking for beer bottles to take back to the store and RUN BACK AGAIN to the arcade that evening just because I knew that if I had one last quarter I could beat that level of some game or another and see what the next level was like ! "Time Pilot", "Gorf", "Tron", "Phoenix", "Spy Hunter" and "Pac Man" ! I was addicted !
So when "Pac Man" came out for Atari 2600, I LOVED IT ! And to this day that old sound, look and feel... even of Atari 2600 "Pac Man"... is like crack to me...
Tod Frye was a hero for even attempting to make what he did at the time and place he did, and in hindsight the only bad thing about the game is that it's +called+ Pac-Man. Oh it's a fun game on it's own, but being called something it neither looked nor played like both sold millions of copies and made millions of people upset. Call it "Maze Munch" or something and it would have sold far less but nobody would have a hate boner for it.
Tod Frye did an amazing job with what he had to work with. The hardware, the internal corporate Atari decisions, the time deadlines, etc.....I enjoyed this as a kid and ty Tod for the memories!
It is a veritable classic! I will never forget the impression it made. The sound of pac man eating those pills was like an elastic band being plucked. It is soooo Atari 2600!
It's funny because the sounds on the 2600 Pac-Man are constantly used for stock video game sounds in TV shows lol.
This video brought to you by First Alert smoke detectors.
Space invaders was not the first game to come from the arcade to the home via licensing. Breakout and Night Driver are two examples off the top of my head. But Pong was also licensed out from Atari to Coleco and many others.
It's the best one though!
@@macuser7048 That's debatable. The home version of SI on the 2600 had to compromise a lot. Pong was a near 1:1 clone. Combat is another clone that is very close to the arcade game it was based on.
@@tarstarkusz Combat was probably easier to make.
@@macuser7048 Well, the 2600 hardware was certainly closer to the game it was based on.
Later homebrews of SI improve it quite a bit, but still I don't think anyone has created a version of SI on the 2600 with the original 11x5 invader grid (5 rows of 11 invaders).
The original Atari port of SI is a 6x6 grid
Space instigator, a homebrew from the early 2000s get a 5x9 grid, which is a lot closer. I think he is currently working on "Space Instigators 2" right now.
Another lost aspect is the ghostly appearance and background. The original arcade machine doesn't have a visible monitor. The monitor is actually facing the top of the machine. What you look at when you are playing the game is a type of mirror that you can see through and reflects the up pointing monitor. That is how they got the physical art background to be behind the invaders. This mirror system creates translucent invaders. There is also an analog sound board that creates the sound effects. Even to this day it is impossible to experience SI the right way without the arcade machine.
@@tarstarkusz Yeah and the slowdown was actually a feature. The more invaders you destroyed, the more hectic they would get and the invaders would move faster and faster towards the bottom.
TODD Frye Thank you for everything.. and this is an impressive version... I would have loveed this as a kid
I came here because I was watching this on my TV and the smoke alarm beep gave me full blown PTSD.
Pretty stunning. The improvements made are incredible. Having additional resources and not being handcuffed, not to mention having unlimited time sure does make a difference.
My parents never dropped a quarter on Pac-Man in the arcade, but they spent hours laughing and playing together on the 2600 after putting us kids to bed. My parents didn't get along well in the 80s, but Atari Pac-Man were some of the best times they had. I'm forever grateful to Tod Frye for that. His game didn't really satisfy the arcade junkies, but for non-gamers like my parents, it was the only game they ever played on the 2600.
Props to Tod Frye for his humility and giving us Pac-Man at that time, it was still fun to play when I was a kid!
The 2600 was such a difficult system to develop for that anyone that was able to create a playable game for it deserves praise.
I watched Devs talk about how they had to be smart with their code due to the limitations you mentioned. Amazing programming for their time. Seems entertainment always pushes tech forward.
Tod Fry deserves every drop of respect he gets for producing a game single handedly on such harsh limitiations, but the one that did the most damage was clearly the time constraints.
I'd rather have an awesome game take forever than some shit like Fallout 76's released to the public and have it be such a bad game that the modding community had to rescue it!
Honestly, I'd be interested to hear what Frye would say about that lol!
Seems like Fleetwood Mac should have released "Little Lies" seven years earlier just for Atari's benefit.
As a part time idie game developer, I understand Atari's perspective. A company needs revenue to buy time to make better games, so the pressure to push something (anything) out the door in the hopes that it generates revenue is intense. I would need a minimum of $1.5M (after taxes and fees) to buy the kind of time needed to not care about the release schedule. And that assumes I remain a one-man outfit. It would take quite a bit more if I had hired help.
I think I can presume Atari's financial needs dwarfed mine.
My friends and cousins and I all enjoyed the original. We understood it wasn't like the arcade but it was still Pac-Man and really fun to play. It also has its own character. I haven't watched this video yet (will do later) but I hope you're not giving Tod Frye a beating. He did very well under the circumstances. I'm not sure if perceptions might have been different in the UK to the US, but I don't remember a big fuss about it being a let-down at all. As mentioned, we all really liked it.
I've chatted with Tod about this in person several times. He made the decision that two-player gameplay was important, which meant instead of 23 bytes to store the current difficulty, dots on the current maze, remaining lives, and the score, he had to use 46 of the VCS's 128-byte memory. All these "better" games don't include the 2-player mode, so they get to use all the bytes devoted to a second player state for other things. So it's not just about the code, it's about the feature set.
It is so cool to see developers of commercial bombs see what the fans work on. It is very much like the Old Man and the Sea.
I couldn't finish watching this as it was driving me nuts
It wasn't a commercial bomb though. It sold 7 million copies.
Retrospectively, I can easily see the shortfalls of the Atari 2600 Pacman compared to the arcade. But I fall into an interesting age group because I was born after the Pacman craze, and the first time I'd even heard of it was when I played it on my friend's Atari some time around 1986. To me, this WAS Pacman. I knew of no other version. Even as late as 2000, I was occasionally playing it on an Atari 2600 clone system called the TV Boy with some friends I shared a house with, and still wouldn't know of the original or anything to do with how badly the Atari version was regarded for some years. I should mention that I live in the UK, and the video game console scene was not as prominent as in the US during the early years of gaming. Which is why the whole Pacman craze wasn't so talked about here, and that's how my knowledge of it all was zero. But I loved the Atari Pacman. I had nothing to compare it to, so it stood up fine to me. Yes, it was a seriously basic game. And I did have up to date consoles from the 90's onwards, I wasn't in any kind of time warp where Pacman seemed cutting edge by then. But it played real nice, it was a classic. Once I started to learn all about the history of Pacman, through the internet, I was surprised that the Atari version was overwhelmingly considered to be a bad game. I fully understand the perspective of someone who bought it at the time and was disappointed by how much of a downgrade it was from the arcade, but I think it gets a worse reputation than it deserves. The gameplay is there, I don't think it plays significantly different from the arcade version to the casual player. Any time I fancy a game of Pacman, I still choose the Atari version. It's what I grew up with, and I love it.
Man, if that 8k version was available in the early 80s, I bet sales would be been way better. That's a really good version of the game.
Change your smoke detector batteries! I was going crazy trying to figure out which smoke detector had gone bad at my house. LOL Turned out it came from your video. LMAO.
I beg of you, please change that battery in the smoke detector “ BEEP”. Other than that good video
Back in the day, coders had to be artists. Not only do you have to devise the game, you also had to draw the display from scratch WITH RASTER INTERRUPTS!
In a very real sense, what they manage to capture in the ports of Ms. and Jr. may even be more impressive considering they lacked the emulation and debugger tools available today that make ports of even Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog possible on the 2600.
It sounds like Atari didn't give Tod Frye enough time to do what he could have to improve the game. Their attitude was "it's good enough" (even though it wasn't as good as it could have been). I had the cartridge back in the day but I don't remember when it was released - did it come out at Christmas season? That might be why there was a rush to get it done. They had to get it in stores before the holidays.
I remember watching a video on the 2600 - I think it might have been the one where they tried to find the dump of ET cartridges in the desert. Anyway, I'm sure Todd Frye said that in the middle of developing PacMan, he was asked to demo it to some execs from Warner, who owned Atari at the time. It wasn't finished, but they said that's great, let's get it in the shops - he was saying "but it's not finished" and they were like, it's good enough. I might be misrembering it, but that was my understanding as to why it was so bad.
I have such admiration for the home brew community and sticking with the limitations of the hardware to make game that are still compelling, dynamic, and fun. The 4k and 8K PacMan remind of the early computer ports in a good way. Both are worth to be played alongside Ms. Pac Man, which for me is maybe a Top 3 2600 port.
I would submit that it might have been interesting to include some details about the Atari 2600 version of Ms PacMan which was really really good. I own both and certainly played them a lot when I was a kid, but the Ms PacMan really shines vs. the original.
You should look up some of the history of Ms Pacman. It started as a rom hack of Pacman that Namco gave the green light to because they were desperate for a sequel to Pacman. During this time, the company (General Computer) was sued by Atari for their first rom hack, Super Missle Attack. Long story short, Atari settled out of court, General Computer began to work for Atari. General Computer made the 2600 version of Ms Pacman, a game they knew inside and out.
ms. Pac Man and Pac Man Jr, are perfect back in a day on Atari 2600
I really wanted to talk about Jr Pac-Man in this video, but the video was getting too long and I ended up not. Someday I plan on it.
Ms. Pac-Man on Atari 2600 and 7800 are my go-to Pac-Man games, for some reason I get the best feel out of them.
Thought I was going mad hearing my smoke alarm... Check the comments and it's the video. Great video but you cancel out the ping using audacity.
Makes me think of my first PC and using memory managers; "load high" to free up as much memory out of the 640k to run programs. The 8K looks closer to the Atari 800 computer version.
Superb coverage - thanks for taking the time to do this - it's a lot of time writing the script plus editing etc.
We've trashed the original release and praised the homebrews more than once on our channel. Love how you dug deep into the history!
Good video, man. I always love the homebrew community. It constantly shows just what can be done with a console. Of course, having a few decades of past experience to look back on doesn't hurt. Personally, though, I had Pac Man on my 2600 and I remember my friends and I always comparing scores. It wasn't a great game, but it was playable, and we had fun with it. I think that's what often gets lost in trying to compare one thing to another. Is it still fun? For me back then, the answer was yes, it was.
Also, RIP pojr's Smoke Detector battery. :)
Oh what a relief, I thought that was my smoke alarm!
I had that game back in the day. I knew it was no where near close to the arcade but still loved it.
You need to change the battery in your smoke detector. (I heard the beep in the background of your video, ha (edit: I just realized this video is 2 years old - TH-cam suggested it to me randomly today. Hopefully you figured it out. Ha.) love your videos!
What I heard about it was that Frye didn't have enough time to make it good. I heard about that with a few bad 2600 titles, like E.T., that they could've been better if the developer had more time.
I have the 2600 version myself, and I loved talking shit about it, until I saw this vid. I had no idea it had such a complex backstory!
Yup! It's still bad, but I have just a little bit more respect for it.
And I still LOVE playing PacMan all these years later!
I remember as a kid being confused by how different the 2600 version was. When the 4k version came on screen my jaw dropped. Thanks for making this.
It's kind of like the ET scenario......... lack of time and resources. When that gets considered, it wasn't horrid.
The digital wildwest of game design and programming is so unique.
What is interesting is that I remember this game as a kid. Not once did it occur to me that it "wasn't like the arcade" it was still PAC MAN. The concept was basically the same.....
that was really interestin'. To be honest. as a child I was completely blown away by playin' Pacman on the Atari. I didn'it even know of the arcade version, so to me Pacman was just an incredible game.
The smoke detector chirps in the background during the narration had me running all over the house trying to find out which one of my dozen smoke detectors was chirping. Then I rewound the video by 10 seconds and realized that the chirp was coming from the video itself. Nice. Probably had a dead battery in your smoke detector for so long that you don't even hear the chirp anymore.
I remember standing in line at Caldor for like 2.5 hours to get this cartridge the day it came out. lol Yeah, it was a bit disappointing, but I remember spending so much time playing this game that I got blisters. It still served. But yeah... when Ms. Pac-Man came out for the Atari, that game was WAAAAAY better. A really excellent port.
Also... K.C. Munchkin was the far superior Pac-Man game back then... I so wanted that game for my Atari! heh :-)
i always loved the original 2600 Pac Man, esp. the harsh sound when eating pills "deng! deng! deng! ..." :-)
Out of all of the sound affects they could have chosen haha.
I hope you replaced your smoke detector battery. Good video!
As a matter of fact I did lol.
Atari released a perfect version for the 8 bit computer back in the day. It was my first game for the system, but really for guests. A game I preferred was Defender.
I wonder if the same designer of Ms Pac-Man (late 1982 Mike Horowitz and Josh Littlefield) would of done the same quality of game for Pac-Man (also 1982). Or did Midway hand over to them the code document, thus creating a better looking and sounding game?
The better quality was not related to the pacman / ms pacman arcade code. But basically having more memory and also being better in using the Atari 2600 hardware
Years ago a developer told me that the ghosts flickered because there was only enough memory to render two at a time. So two would display at their locations and then turn off so the other two could display in their locations. They’d turn on and off quickly so that it worked. Sort of. But obviously the flicker was noticeable and is one of the first things I think of when I recall the 2600 version.
Flickering is a pretty innovative solution, it allows a programmer to double the amount of onscreen sprites using the same amount of memory. It just wasn't managed very well in Atari Pac-Man. I remember all the hype about Pac-Man coming to the Atari, it was everywhere: tv, magazines, in store promotions, etc etc etc.
Replace the batteries in your damn fire alarm
I recently got my Atari 2600+ and am able to play my old cartridge games again that I haven’t played in years because my original 2600 crapped out like 25 years ago and the flashback consoles don’t include a lot of the non-Atari titles….with that said from a nostalgia perspective I love being able to play the old school Atari Pac-Man and Donkey Kong with all of their quirks and blemishes; brought back a lot of great memories and regardless of how the games look they are still fun.
Fun fact: optimizing a program to perform the same function w/ less code used to be known as "code bumming"....
According to Steven Levy in his book "Hackers" the term was coined @ the MIT AI Lab to describe computer science students who became obsessed w/ seeing which student could write any given program using the fewest instructions possible, both to save on computer memory & to flex their programming prowess (the term supposedly came from "ski bums" who'd compete fiercely to see who could complete a ski run in the shortest time possible).
An unintended consequence of this overall view was that, almost unanimously, programmers would encode all dates using only 2 digits instead of the full 4 to save on memory -- hence why the "Y2K Bug" became a thing during the late 1990s.
As a kid I actually liked the original 2600 versión.
Great video where 4k and 8k 🤔 roms in your description
The 2600 propelled Atari, but the hardware limitation decisions were quite crippling once prices on memory fell.
It wasn't "lack of resources" Frye had more "resources," like being paid his salary. Literally working in the same office as all of Atari's other 2600 programmers.
Dintar had no deadlines. Frye was not given enough time. No marketing dept demanding a 2 player option (the dot map alone is 96 bits) . Dintar had people to ask when he ran into problems.
I give Dintar a ton of props. He did a great job. Frye's version sucks and a lot of it is his fault. But a lot isn't. Imagine arguing with marketing about what color the background needs to be.
1:13 I thought my smoke detector was low on batteries 😂
One of my smoke detectors was chirping at me literally just this morning, so this majorly triggered me.
I've heard Frye speak at Portland Retro Gaming Expo over several years and even got to confront him. (You can find the entire presentation on TH-cam)
Basically he kept saying that nobody knew how to make a home conversion of an arcade game, that they were all figuring it out. I then asked him "what about space invaders?" which was released much earlier, was wildly successful AND a really fun game to play, even in 2023. His response was to more or less slag the programmer, avoiding my very good and relevant point completely. He has never taken responsibility, at least not publicly, but he knows he messed it up which is why he says the homebrew is "depressing".
The old Atari guys at the conference did talk about how crazy those days were. Everyone was on drugs, and Frye would walk on the narrow hallway walls over people's heads and call himself spider man.
He really came off to me as a kind of sad man, never able to move beyond this point in his life that has forever defined him.
0:48 I heard that smoke detector beep and did a double take. It sounded in my room with my iPhone 13 Pro speakers haha
My bad lol.
Time for a new 9volt battery pojr 🤣
"Playing games in the home was unheard of at the time." Uh, the Atari 2600 was created explicitly to play arcade games at home. Long before the Pac-Man port, games like Breakout, Combat, Night Driver, Gun Fight, Star Ship, Canyon Bomber, etc. had been released for it, which were ALL arcade ports.
Actually you're not wrong here. All of those games you did mention were previously arcade games. I should have specifically said licensed games rather than just arcade games. My bad.
Mr. Frye seems like a really great guy. I can only imagine the limitations being the first generation of console game coders. People like him paved the way. Only respect. Even whomever programed E.T. you can get out the hole you just gotta get to the very edge in the pit and neck float... thing out twice or so. As for gameplay no idea besides collect things in the holes and run away from weirdos.
Because of Tod Frye we have the greatest Pac-Man moment in all of movies: Jackie Chan trying to play it in Cannonball Run 2.
I had acquired Dintar812's Pac-Man 8k for the Atari 2600 in 2019 from his AtariAge forum post, which I have played numerous times on my Windows PC using the Stella emulator program. I truly like and appreciate what Dintar812 has done. Eventually I am going to have someone turn his program file into an actual game cartridge so that I can play it on my genuine Atari 2600 as well. I rate the Pac-Man 8k by Dintar812 for the Atari 2600 VCS as ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ out of 5 stars.
I hope that in the 2 years since this video was published you have changed the battery in your smoke detector.
If 4k is running on the same 4k cart Todd had to use then that's close to accurate for what could have been released at the time.
I just saw a video where someone showed off a Ms. Pac-Man hack to turn it into regular Pac-Man and I think of the three versions that one is the closest to what would have actually been released if Todd has been allowed more time.
Lastly this begs the question. Were is Ms Pac-Man 4k/8k?
Great video Pojr! Never knew Atari had that bizarre black background rule.
The biggest issue then was "He had to fit it in 4KB", 8KB was not an option.
The low battery chime from a smoke detector was a nice touch.
This was an interesting video, well made. Just about stayed reasonably respectful to Tod Frye but he really deserves a lot more respect. Do flickering ghosts and a single direction Pac-Man really matter so much? The new version is great, no doubt about it, though it's not quite true to say it was near identical to the arcade version. One thing that puzzles me is how they got it to sound like that using the standard hardware??
Took me a few rewinds... but I finally realized my smoke detector was fine.
BTW, I think a homebrewer made a better arcade port of Pac Man for the Atari 8-bit, as well. As I recall, this version is on a 128K bank-switched cartridge, giving better graphics, sound, and music, plus cut scenes.
th-cam.com/video/jG3VoTX1S7k/w-d-xo.html
The new version would have blown our minds back when we played the 2600. I remember being very disappointed, even though I still played it a lot.
This is stunning and depressing. If Atari had pulled off a version like this, the entire video game industry would’ve changed. The original was still popular. But this would’ve blown peoples minds. Sales would have been even bigger. Who knows what would’ve happened.
Might have even saved Atari
Imagine a videogame landscape still dominated by Atari. No truly successful Nintendo proprietary home console titles. Coleco says, "Nah, let's stay to swimming pools and Pong knockoffs". Mattel backs down & sticks with Barbie and LED/LCD handhelds. Sega still struggles to be relevant; has a strong arcade presence but no chance making it into the living room. No Gameboy/Game Gear. The Tamiel family fucks straight off. Would it be the most boring monopoly or a total 80s - 90s Renaissance of killer games and consoles? ~We~ will never know - but in a parallel world.......
Great video subbed
0:46. You had me rewinding this cause on my TV the random beep sounded like a battery backup or fire detector was alerting low battery.
Frankly, back at that time, and given what was available to the programmers in both software and hardware, what they achieved was truly remarkable. I doubt there are many today that could do what those guys did with what was available to them. None of the modern tools, heavy time and direction constraints, no quick tips and hints from a non existent internet group, just them and their skills. 🤯