Fort Worth Star-Telegram from Fort Worth, Texas • 83

tft tr- rV fy hWnfflli Saturday Star-Telegram MARCH 13 1982 ivV vVT-'fef5 if ett 46fcv4 9S litAst 4 ti -I W-W 1 tWv' this- MiHf FT QQOOD t' i f' -s4 if rinfmpm 0p' i 3 4 s' 'i J9 'W 1 4 The mystique beckons 5 I i 1 i I i yi1 cnit 4 it £Sk KJV i 1-i tv rtaiU1' I I more And more And more And more It has spawned a world of spinoffs like no other video game or maybe any other game period Cube included There are Pac-Man T-shirts coffee cups shoelaces pajamas even a rock song Pac-Man Fever which last week was No 22 on the Billboard chart and climbing It has become so popular two books on how to master its maze have been published one of which is on the paperback best-seller list All this mind you from a device which numbers only 100000 nationwide: A large number for its kind but actually less than one for every 2000 Americans But there are considerably more than one in every 2000 Americans who are Pac-Man junkies And it has even spawned a second generation of Itself to combat its own popularity It turns out that after lots of practice andor perhaps reading one of the how-to books Pac-Man can be beat Enter then Ms Pac-Man something of a contradiction in terms The missus was developed largely to combat a rising fever in video game parlor operators alarmed over the development of what they held to be the real Pac-Man Monster: A habitue of the booth who educated along gobbling up dots making squeaking noises Meanwhile being chased by four ghosts named Inky Blinky Pinky and Clyde and will be deflated if it get to the Power Pills first in which case it can turn around and start chasing the ghosts threatening to gobble them up Occasionally a piece of fruit shows itself offering bonus points if consumed Somehow in the cold black and white of the printed word it loses a little But somehow drowning in the amplified raucousity and garish lighting of exploding space invaders and lasered asteroids and smashed star fighters and red-lined night drivers the Mystique begins to beckon only a game you know But it is a game that has climbed to the very top of a very volatile market reaching out and grabbing innocent neopohytes and transforming them into obedient quarter-feeders with more gusto than any of its predecessors It is in the words of one parent a brilliantly-done movie: It is designed to separate the customer from his (and more importantly perhaps her) Pac-Man simply has found the magic formula: It is simple to operate tough to beat Easy enough to score on so even beginners keep coming back for INSTRUCTIONS 1 nsert quarter (Most important!) 2 Read Instructions 3 Pick up this page get ready to read when "READY?" appears 4 Start at the top of this column read it and the one next to it and (important!) follow the instructions Please See at the bottom of the third column 5 Turn back to this page and read the sidebar article below following the instuctlons at the bottom of it too 6 If you get confused worry Insert another quarter and start again figure it out eventually if you have enough quarters 7 8 READ! (By Star-Telegram writers Denise Hensley Lou Hudson Sheryl Maxey and Carolyn Poirot Page designed by Dale Rushing Snuck that one In on you didn't we? Give us a quarter give us a quarter give us a quarter give us a quarter) Call it the Pac-Man Mystique: You have control of a little round face of sorts with a mouth that goes Please see The Mystique on Page 6 Games get down to basics Atari game he said has about 16000 (16K) bits of information in its ROM A commercial unit such as a Pac-Man arcade game may have 160000 An Atari console may be had for $150 while a commercial unit will cost between $2000 and $3000 The fine details of the graphics are a function of elements called picture elements which are the smallest component of the picture pixel area is 256 by 190 (meaning there are 265 picture horizontally and 190 vertically) In the more detailed (and more expensive) Intellivision games there are 512 by 190 pixels The more elements in a given area the smaller they are and the more detailed the picture (the same reason why a small television picture tube has a sharper picture than a large tube when viewed from the same distance) Arcade games have 512 by 512 pixels Owens said Developing a new game is not just a simple matter of picking an ROM from shelf A and combining it with a Please see Basic on Page 6 short-term memory also called a that is chang-able and in essense carries out the orders from the ROM Makes the individual decisions necessary to carry out the particular game program Can be talked back to by the CPU and elements changed from time to time as the game dictates Is usually buried somewhere in the console of home units Central Processing Unit The traffic cop On a home game is in the console Compiles and relates the information from the inputs Read Only Memory and Random Access Memory feeds it to a Video Processor which converts it into a TV picture Video Processor Converts the signals into a signal that a television set (or the screen in an arcade game) turns into a picture It is the Read Only Memory that determines the expense of the game says Dr John Owens electrical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Arlington The more information stored in the ROM the more complex and expensive the game A normal By DENISE IIENSLEY and LOU HUDSON Star-Telegram Writers Video games leaping upon the American scene during the last decade all operate on the same basic principles some to more degree than others And all followed the development of the microprocessor on a technology that continues to jam more and more into less and less constantly offering smaller and smaller computers All video games have several elements in common: Inputs The controls1 such as joysticks or paddle controls heavy-knobbed joystick Read Only Memory The permanent outline of the game has all the orders and definitions to produce the basic parts and elements Called a Read Only Memory because it can only be read and followed by the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and not changed Information can only be read from it not put into it Is in the cartridge of home games Random Access Memory A DO vrn-? t- -W 1.