Pac-Man

Game: Pac-Man → (Arcade, 1980)

A native Windows player for the 1980 arcade game, with a modern front end. It carries a software copy of the arcade board (memory map and video and sound chips) and the game rewritten as native C++ that reproduces the original program; from your own pacman.zip it only reads the data tables (maze, text, levels, graphics, and sound). It contains no Z80 processor: according to its author, every frame, with its exact timing, was checked identical to the real program on a Z80 across millions of frames (the Z80 core is kept only in the tests), with the same ghosts, speeds, and bugs, including level 256. It adds menus, save states and rewind, gamepads, screen effects, and the arcade’s DIP settings. The repository includes code generated from the game’s program: src/game/attract_prog.h is the instruction list of the attract-mode routines as C++ data, taken from a disassembled listing that isn’t published (only its blocks and labels are kept), with no ROM bytes. Version 2.1.0, from October 28, is the latest and is Windows-only. It states it was made with the help of Claude.

You needYour own copy of the Midway Pac-Man ROM set, pacman.zip (the same 10 files MAME uses), next to the executable; the program checks it is the right one. 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 (the source also builds and is tested on Linux, but the published release is Windows-only).

How it gets to PC

Game-specific engine

Console

Arcade board

Original studio

Namco

Year

1980

Author

mariqtereza-del

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