Dwedit wrote:
NES Pac-man is a really good port, other than the screen size, it gets the ghost behaviors right.
Nope, it doesn't. Try it out: In the arcade version, there is a corner where you can move where the ghosts will never follow you. (At least for about 15 minutes.) Try this in the NES version and you're dead in less than 20 seconds.
Besides, the NES version doesn't have the exact same labyrinth layout. It comes closer than any other of the old conversions, so, yes, I would say that the NES version is the best port of all 8 bit consoles, but it isn't arcade perfect.
lidnariq wrote:
Why would I jest? A source code port has a better chance of being correct than one that necessarily requires a rewrite.
Well, we don't need to speculate which version
could be arcade-perfect. Take a look at the Spectrum version and you see that it
isn't arcade-perfect.
lidnariq wrote:
Similarly, a port to a machine that has a tilemap and sprites is more likely to be correct than one that only has a tilemap, which is why you're complaining about the Spectrum.
No, I'm complaining about the Spectrum version because it doesn't look like the original one. Arcade-perfection requires everything to be the same.
O.k., if the image is scaled down, that's something we have to swallow if the arcade version uses a vertical monitor. As long as it's only the output itself that's scaled. In memory, the graphics should of course be at full size.
tepples wrote:
Unless, of course, the sprite handling in the original source code is abstracted enough (movement vs. display) that the port team can
swap views on top of an existing model. The collision detection in
Pac-Man is tile-based anyway.
The collision detection maybe, but Pac-Man still walks so-and-so many pixels per frame which is tied to the actual output graphics. So, unless a conversion looks exactly like the arcade game, down to the pixel (again, except for conversions for modern consoles where the whole screen is clearly in memory and they output a scaled version of the whole image instead of manually resizing the labyrinth itself, as it's done in the NES version), I would declare it non-arcade-perfect.