Or was it just better use of the same hardware? I'm talking about how Ms. Pacman has eyes, but Mr. Pacman doesn't. Did the original game use 1-color sprites, but overlayed 2 sprites for the ghosts, and used the background as the ghosts' eyes, whereas Ms. Pacman use 3 color sprites, and the ghosts were now drawn as a single sprite?
I was always under the impression that they ran on the same hardware:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namco_Pac-Man
The hardware is identical.
Wait a minute psychopathicteen, what makes you think that the hardware that Pac Man is running on uses 1 color (1bpp) sprites? If you look at the ghosts and many other sprites, they are definitely 3 color (2bpp) like the NES, unless there are a lot of sprites being overlayed. (It seems like the system Pac Man is running on actually supports more color palettes than the NES, but the graphics shown could definitely be replicated on the NES by overlaying sprites. I just found out that you literally wouldn't have a single color to spare, as 12 colors are being used, but it's still possible.)
There was, of course, a Pacman port for the NES.
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Not terribly efficient, eh?
Yeah, that looks like garbage. I took Pac Man's sprite sheet and put it through the NES's color palette (which really isn't suited for Pac Man, considering there isn't even a true yellow) and I found that I had 1 free color left, (I used a color 2 times in the color palette) but I didn't really know how to make good palettes for the game, but I tried. I made memory my priority over how many sprites are overlayed, (I literally used a different palette for every ghost, because there a four) simply because I'm lazy, but the picture could still very well be done on the NES.
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"Never The Same Color" literally because I have played the game on real hardware (I own the cartridge) and those colors seem way off (especially the one that's supposed to be red, I don't recall it looking that dark). Ouch.
Pacman has a palette ROM, pointing to another palette ROM. WHY???
I see it as no sillier than the 2C03, 2C04, and 2C05, which have a 28-entry by 6-bit palette RAM pointing to a 64-entry by 9-bit palette ROM.
Except the latter have one of the tables modifiable... (although then again arcade hardware wasn't designed to be very efficient anyway, and that's assuming the two ROMs aren't swappable separately on different machines)
A lot of NROM-128 NES games set one palette and essentially stick with it. The system could have been designed to use a ROM at $3F00-$3F1F. It's just that unlike an arcade palette, an NES palette has to be swappable between one game and the next, and the Game Pak connector is already long enough as it is.
Weren't palette tricks used since early on in the NES, anyway? Making it easy to modify makes sense. Not having so many entries also helps (OAM takes up much more, for contrast).