Tengen Pac-Man

Technical info:
-The game has a dummied out routine that sets some of the mapper registers. The final game doesn't use any enhancement mappers, and settles for a 40KB NROM (same configuration as the original Super Mario Bros.). It's likely a leftover from during the development or from some other game.


-If the player(s) were to get out of bounds towards the score area, they would find themselves munching on invisible dots. This is because of accessing invalid data for tiles that count as dots. Oddly, you can't go out of bounds towards the item/life display if you removed the walls the same way.


-There's an unused code that would print the LEVEL string in the maze, alongside the current level number. This is likely an early implementation of the level counter that would be moved to the bottom HUD.

-There are a couple of unused frames related to Act 4 cutscene. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man were supposed to pop when going into the background, but they disappear too early for that to happen. Using Game Genie can reveal those frames.



-The game has an odd ordering of maze layouts, with the first few (Arcade 1-4 and Mini 1-4) being consistent, likely indicating that some of the layouts were shuffled around and some were added later, which would mean Big 11 was the last maze to be designed/inserted.

-The sound engine isn't capable of complex sound like most other games. The game assigns only one sound channel to one sound byte at all times. For more complex sound effects, like act cutscene music, the game essentially plays two sound effects that are assigned to two different sound channels, creating a more complex melody.

My personal experience:

-One of the earliest attempts at compiling the game. It's still Ms. Pac-Man judging by the title.

-Disassembling this game took me approximately 5 4 months. Yes, it sounds like a lot, and I know yoshifanatic takes shorter time to disassemble some of the SNES games, but that's because I don't have an automated enviorement to make them easy. That, and I generally like to take my time with these (especially since I like commenting and understanding the innards as much as possible). Still, this is the fastest I completed the disassembly, thanks to my previous experiences (it's kinda surprising, since the game is larger than the other two games I disasembled, Mario Bros. (NES) and Donkey Kong (NES)).

-I also feel like it's my most polished one yet, again, thanks to some of the previously gained knowledge and new techniques (i actually split some of the data into separate files this time!!). There are still some sections that I could comment, but I think it's fairly well documented as is.

-This game made me realize that... I'm not that much into Pac-Man. I don't find the general gameplay to be that engaging. Still, I do appreciate the new features added by this NES port of Ms. Pac-Man that gives it some replayability.