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
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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