Monday, March 10, 2008

Ticky Tacky Dough--and how many men could a Pacman pack if a Pacman could pack?

I found an old CD with some of my old home projects, written in Visual Basic.

First is a shoddy version of Pacman. If you're wondering why it looks so much like the arcade version--I screenprinted the real thing and used the bitmap as a background. (Hopefully this snapshot is not violating copyright--if it is, tell me and I'll take it down.)

To the right is a behind the scenes look at how the program works. Basically, Pacman, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde ran on "rails".

Unfortunately, the backup wasn't up-to-date. It only encompassed Pacman running the maze, while moving his mouth. Later versions had his enemies, working power pellets(that is the ghosts turned blue when they were eaten), dots, and I had the ghosts regenerating in the ghost box. What I had not perfected was how the ghosts hunted or fled Pacman--and even the disembodied eyes had a time getting back to the ghost box.

As with many home projects, I got to the point where I saw I could do the window dressing. But then, what? The mountain was basically climbed at that point. I moved on.

In the bottom righthand corner is a screenprint of the obligatory Tic Tac Toe program. If memory serves me correct, it was just a matter of a few sittings to code. If you're interested in the code, navigate over to my Livejournal.