PACMAN(6)

NAME
pacman - Food Eating CRT Game

SYNOPSIS
pacman [ -ehm ] [ -p ] [ -ncps ]

DESCRIPTION

Pacman is the familiar video game where the hero (``pacman'') runs around a maze, eating food off the floor. The pacman is controlled with either the hjkl convention, arrow keys, or a pad centered around the D key, using sefc. These keys cause an immediate change in direction. Hitting space or running into a wall causes the pacman to stop.

There are four monsters running around the maze. If they run into the pacman, he gets killed. Getting killed for the third time ends the game. (Reserve pacmen are shown by @'s in the lower left corner.)

There are four energizers in the corners of the maze. Eating an energizer allows the pacman to eat monsters for a limited time. The number of turns of monster-eating time remaining are shown in the countdown field as they tick off. The bell is sounded at 10 turns and for each turn from 4 down to 1.

After eating four monsters, a treasure will appear just below the monsters pen. This treasure is worth bonus points, depending on the round. It will disappear after a certain elapsed time.

The options control the display format and the difficulty of the game. Normally, the pacman and monsters are shown highlighted. On some terminals, at low speeds, this highlighting causes enough extra output to slow the game down, resulting in delayed response to direction changes. (You tend to overshoot your turns.) The -p option can be turned on to disable highlighting, often resulting in a better game.

Using the -n option you can give pacman an estimate of the number of characters needed per turn to update the screen. This estimate, along with your speed, is used to decide how often to draw the monsters. The monsters are updated every syncscreen turns. This value is shown in the lower left corner. The default, 60 characters, will usually result in a syncscreen value of 1 in the early rounds and higher values in subsequent rounds. A higher value will cause less output and less frequent updates of monster positions, and is useful if you have a very dumb terminal or one with very verbose escape sequences (such as an ANSI terminal, a VT100, or an HP). A lower value can be used to keep syncscreen at 1 in later rounds, on a terminal with very short escape sequences, such as a mime.

The -e(easy), -m(medium), and -h(hard) options control the difficulty of the game. The parameter varied is the intelligence of the monsters. In the easy game, the monsters have no intelligence. They always move at random. In the medium game, the monsters gradually get smarter, as the players score increases. At 10000 points, the monsters are totally smart. In the hard game, the monsters get smarter much faster, reaching total intelligence at 1000 points.

FILES
/usr/games/lib/paclog    Score file

BUGS

Large values of cps do not seem to help when trying to run at 1200 baud on an ANSI terminal with highlighting. The -p option seems to be necessary in this case.