Projects

Pacman for Pocket PC

Overview

Pacman for the Pocket PC is still under construction. It is written by Remon Spekreijse and me and it is still in beta phase. I guess, it will stay there for a pretty long while. My current engagement is pretty time consuming, so I don't have the time to finish it within the next few weeks (or even months).

The creation and evolution of Pacman

Remon started working on Pacman some time ago. He wanted to create an appealing version of Pacman for the Pocket PC. The first attempts were pretty hard, because Windows CE doesn't have a decent sprite library. The GDI was used for painting, but it turned out that GDI isn't very useful for writing games. I have had the same problems while programming Tetris for Pocket PC, so I decided to write a high-performance, flexible and easy to use graphics library using GAPI. This library is a template library, called GAPI Template Library and is a very fast C++ template based wrapper around the GAPI library. GAPI is fully functional, but lacks any form of documentation. That's why I have never released it, but you can get it on request (with some sample apps).

What's hot and what's not

The current version of Pacman is sufficient for a whole lot of fun. It has the following features:

• Pacman is just a great game to play and the Pocket PC is suited perfect to run this game. The game uses the same dimensions as the original arcade version, but the graphics have been enhanced to take advantage of the Pocket PC capabilities. Most graphics have been raytraced using POV-Ray for the best result.
• There are all kinds of playfields, which are identical to the original Pacman, Ms. Pacman, Ms. Pacman Plus playfields. These playfields are very challenging.
• A lot of time and effort have been made to make the gameplay the same as the original arcade versions. Ghost movements, field definitions, scores, etc... are all modelled after the original Pacman game.
• Playfield definitions are stored inside text-files, so adding playfields is relatively easy.

Some features are still missing. We'll try to implement these features pretty soon, so the game will be complete. The following features are planned:

• There are several differences with the original Pacman game, which should be resolved. The current game has no fruit, no ghost reversals, no speed increase, etc... These features are planned for the near future. Another mistake is that ghosts won't leave the ghosthole, when they are waiting to come out and Pacman has eaten an energizer.
• Highscores are not saved at this moment. We are working on a nice screen for displaying highscores. Of course, these can be exchanged with another Pocket PC using the infrared connection.
• Skin definition program, which makes creating skins for Pacman a bit easier. The game must be changed to allow more flexible fields, because some parts of a field are still hardcoded.

Legal statement

This program is copyrighted by Remon Spekreijse and Ramon de Klein.

Page last updated at Apr 23, 2009