Pac-Man Template with Original Ghost AI (Help)

Question

I'm currently trying to implement a fully autonomous Pac-Man game, where you just watch. I plan on making the actual yellow guy's AI to play the game flawlessly. I want to make it so that the Ghosts have the personalities like in the original Pac-Man, but I'm more so looking for a template, a Pac-Man game that is already made, and has that feature, so that I can work on the Pac-Man himself.

Does anyone know if that source code is available? I've tried github, but I haven't found anything that resembles the original ghost behavior as described here: http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior

thanks

Answer 1

There's a huge amount of information about how pac-man works here. Some of the information may be useful when you are trying to build the AI for the "perfect" pac-man player.

I think you will have a hard time getting access to the original pac-man source code (Namco usually gets people to remove it). The original pac-man was written in ASM so you may have a hard time reading that even if you do get a hold of it.

Answer 2

Just thinking out loud here, but Google just put out a full html5 version of PacMan for its 30th anniversary (PacMan's that is). It's minified, and I'm not sure if they are holding any copyrights for it, but it might be a place to start.

Cheers!

Answer 3

This is not much of answer, but if you are still looking for the AI, I will send you what I got so far. It's the original AI, but generating something that is 100% accurate is going to be rather difficult. Back in the old days, games did not use back buffers, so the screen was updated on every vertical refresh that was ~1/60 of a second. most of the game logic was done when that interrupt happened, but the ghosts AI was done after. so it is hard to tell how many assembly instructions where executed before the interrupt went on again. But 99% is also nice.