Racing the Beam : the Atari Video Computer System - Index of

was quite challenging. The game was programmed by Tod Frye in an irrationally
short time: six weeks. Worse, the game was to be manufactured as
a 4K ROM rather than using the 8K bank-switched ROM that had become
possible by this time. This approach was taken to save money on what
would become an irresponsibly large production run of more than ten
million cartridges.
Adaptation is a long-standing concern in cultural forms of all kinds.
In 1972, the year of Pong, the fi lm adaptation of the Mario Puzo book The
Godfather won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 1980, the year Pac-
Man ruled the arcade, the Oscar went to another fi lm developed from a
book, Robert Redford’s adaptation of Judith Guest’s 1976 novel Ordinary
People. Adapting novels to fi lms is not always simple, but both media forms
are good at telling stories with strong, deep, subtle characterization.
Adapting fi lms to video games poses a different set of challenges, as is
discussed in chapter 7.
Pac-Man, of course, was already a video game before it was a VCS
cartridge. Porting a graphical video game from one computer platform
(the arcade board) to another (the Atari VCS) does not demand a change
in fundamental representational or functional mode. Both versions are
games, rule-based representations of an abstract challenge of hunter and
hunted. Where the two versions diverge is in their technical foundations—
in their platforms. And in the case of this title, those differences were
signifi cant enough to doom the VCS rendition of Pac-Man, by some
accounts even causing a major crash in the videogame market during
1983.
Bitmaps and Mazes
The Pac-Man coin-op cabinet ran on a custom-made arcade system board.
(Later, Rally X and Ms. Pac-Man used the same board.) It featured a Zilog
Z80 CPU, a cheap eight-bit microprocessor that, along with the 6502,
dominated the microcontroller market of the 1970s and 1980s. 3 At this
time, arcade hardware was still much more advanced than home console
hardware, because the latter needed to be so much cheaper to make home
machines affordable. The Z80 CPU runs three times as fast as the 6502,
but more signifi cant differences are seen in the amounts of RAM and
ROM. Pac-Man’s boards hold 16K of ROM, 2K of video RAM, and 2K of
general RAM. The VCS Pac-Man cartridge is has only 4K, a quarter of the
ROM in Pac-Man’s arcade incarnation. The 2K of RAM on the coin-op’s
board is sixteen times the amount in the Atari VCS. The home system, of
course, has no video memory.
4 Pac-Man [67]