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megalomaniac - 09/10/2023 |
Fine work. Whenever you see an ST game that's vastly inferior to the Amiga version, you have to think an STE conversion could have eliminated the gap. This version, with its smooth fullscreen scrolling and colourful graphics, is evidence as such. The view range here means you can actually plan ahead and coax the ghosts towards you before picking up the powerpill, in a way the tiny view area on the disappointing official version denies. You'll smash your ST version high score within a couple of goes.
There are a few bugs (hit a powerpill and enemy at once and you'll often both lose a life and the powerpill disappears, and enemies occasionally appear to be in thin air) and the music isn't an improvement. Plus, the fact that it needs 2Mb compared to the 512k of the standard version means its not 100% conclusive proof of Amiga v STE, but this is one guy coding in their bedroom as a hobby, so who knows what a full professional team could have done within 512k in 1989? |
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Other versions with a different title:
Pac-Mania.
Improved version of Pac-Mania for STe with smooth scrolling, sampled sound effects and overscan among with other graphical improvements. |
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"This project was a little bit more difficult to convert than I had first
suspected. The only thing I could use from the original ST version was
the game logic, collision detection and the music player.
The rest is rewritten from scratch."
"Firstly I had planned to keep the original intro menu but it looked like
crap compared to the Amiga version so I had to redo it.
The Amiga menu screen used thirty two colours and I tried to convert
it to sixteen, but it never turned out good so I had to keep it at thirty
two colours. That's why the grey background can't be behind the
Pacmania logo.I do a palette split here."
"The Amiga level select screen doesn't look so good, so I used the
arcade version here. It's also thirty two colours with sixteen colours
for the levels and another sixteen colours for the selected level
(the one in blue)."
"All sprites are drawn with the blitter and the palette is set up so
that I can do it as fast as possible. The score display is drawn in
1 bitplane, the lives in 2 bitplanes and the ghosts in 3 bitplanes.
This needs a 2Mb machine as a minimum, or else it can't run.
I had to use a lot of memory to be able to run it at 50fps." |
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Origins
Based on Namco 1987 coin-op. Unofficial version.
 Graphics
Features up to 25 colours on-screen simultaneously (introduction screen)
Features up to 27 colours on-screen simultaneously (options or static screen)
Features overscan (introduction screen)
Features overscan (options or static screen)
Features overscan (in-game)
Sound
Features digitized sound fx at 25KHz
Hardware
Supports Blitter
Supports STe DMA sound
Supports STe palette
Supports STe hardware scrolling
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