Why did Ms Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 use lines instead of dots? Wouldn’t it have saved the developers more memory by making them dots?
In: Technology
An Atari 2600 have a very strange graphics system. It does not as a computer today have a frame buffer that contains all of the screens. The resolution is 320×200 and with 1 bit per pixel you need 320*200/8=8000 byes and at the time the cost of that would be too much. The system has a total of 128 bytes of ram. 8kb cost $250 back then and the Atari 2600 introduction price was $199
One result of that is that the labyrinth on each line is mirrored so the left side mirrored tot the right side.
So the likely result is that long line is the only way that is was possible to do
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor)
Keeping it simple, the 2600 essentially provided two types of graphics:-
* Background graphics extended across the entire width of the screen, but were *very* coarse- at most 40 pixels wide.
* Moving objects, which included character “sprites”. Sprites could be more detailed, but only covered a small part of the screen.
In Pac-Man, the maze has to cover the entire screen, and the sprites would already be in use for Pac-Man and the ghosts anyway.
So my guess was that the programmers of Pac-Man commandeered the coarse “background” graphics facility to generate the maze and pills. [This article](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/arcade-perfect-how-pac-man-was-ported-to-consoles/) confirms that’s how the original 2600 “Pac-Man” did it, and it’s most probably true for “Ms. Pac-Man” as well.
**In short, the background graphics facility didn’t provide enough resolution to draw them as circles- each “pill” *is* just one pixel wide(!)**
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