Biggest resource Frye never had was a powerful PC step-by-step emulator and debugging environment.

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.

Change the battery in your smoke alarm

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)

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.

The question was answered less than a year later with the 2600's port of Ms. Pac-Man which was considerably improved.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This video brought to you by First Alert smoke detectors.

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.

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.

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...

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 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.

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!

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!

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!

Superb coverage - thanks for taking the time to do this - it's a lot of time writing the script plus editing etc.

The 2600 was such a difficult system to develop for that anyone that was able to create a playable game for it deserves praise.

TODD Frye Thank you for everything.. and this is an impressive version... I would have loveed this as a kid

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.

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 beg of you, please change that battery in the smoke detector “ BEEP”. Other than that good video

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.

I came here because I was watching this on my TV and the smoke alarm beep gave me full blown PTSD.

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.

ms. Pac Man and Pac Man Jr, are perfect back in a day on Atari 2600

1:13 I thought my smoke detector was low on batteries 😂

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

I had that game back in the day. I knew it was no where near close to the arcade but still loved it.

Great video subbed

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

And I still LOVE playing PacMan all these years later!

The low battery chime from a smoke detector was a nice touch.

We've trashed the original release and praised the homebrews more than once on our channel. Love how you dug deep into the history!

Great video Pojr! Never knew Atari had that bizarre black background rule.

Great video, thank you!

This is a great story, thanks!

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.

Took me a few rewinds... but I finally realized my smoke detector was fine.

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 have that exact Pacman 40th Anniversary Arcade1up cabinet in my man-cave! Also, love the intro with Pac-Attack music :)

Could you imagine if the 2k Pac-Man would have been made back in the Day

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.

Great video where 4k and 8k 🤔 roms in your description

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.

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

The 2600 propelled Atari, but the hardware limitation decisions were quite crippling once prices on memory fell.

This is great content.

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.

The biggest issue then was "He had to fit it in 4KB", 8KB was not an option.

I appreciate your video, also, Frye's cool too 😎

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.

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.

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.

It's kind of like the ET scenario......... lack of time and resources. When that gets considered, it wasn't horrid.

i always loved the original 2600 Pac Man, esp. the harsh sound when eating pills "deng! deng! deng! ..." :-)

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?

I sometimes circle back to my old code and implement new tricks - hoping no one will dig out my work in 30 years and make a video about it 😅

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 KZfaq) 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.

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.

Pac Man for the 2600 actually was the final nail in the coffin for the console crash. It was the icing on the cake after the release of ET.

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.

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!

Wonder what would have been if the Game had released back then

I hope you replaced your smoke detector battery. Good video!

I love seeing people work within the hardware limits of the systems of those times and finding way to improve or make new games to run smoothly in the hardware. I think the lesson learned can be stepping stones for improving modern games because designers are always pushing games to the limits of their systems. If images can be compressed, reduce lag, expand assents and sprites it makes for more dynamic games.

Is it not possible to have some more colors per character on the Atari 2600? I have a Coleco Gemini and it is my understanding that it has better hardware. It doesn't have flickering problem. However, I don't own Pac-Man so I can't test it.

Nice video! However, you need to change the battery in your smoke alarm! ;)

Why are the regular pellets still minus signs instead of 4x4 pixel dots?!

I loved PacMan when I was young! It was a game where I would play for hours on in.

Let the binge start

Best thing about this video is it's use of TMNT soundtrack. Jk, awesome video and great story telling, but the NES, music was an awesome touch.

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.

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 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.

That was my first game growing up.yes I'm very ancient

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 - KZfaq suggested it to me randomly today. Hopefully you figured it out. Ha.) love your videos!

5:39 very funny smoke alarm beep in the background.