You know Pac-Man as that happy little yellow pie-chart-lookin’ dude who gorges himself on pellets and then has a few ghosts for dessert. And while that is how it looks on a screen, behind the scenes Pac-Man, just like any video game, is actually just a boatload of math.
This is what that looks like:
1. Take a snapshot of the Nintendo RAM every frame (60fps).
2. Plot each address in memory as a sparkline. pic.twitter.com/OFg2XA9rGY— Michael Fogleman (@FogleBird) January 22, 2019
What hacker Michael Fogleman has done here is gone behind the scenes of the NES version of Pac-Man using an emulator to look at the math that’s hiding back there. The chart is a visualisation of how every variable required to make the game run changes over the course of ten seconds of play. Each of these variables is then plotted as a “sparkline,” or in other words a small line graph.
If that still feels a little abstract, this example might help:
This video shows the actual ten seconds of gameplay that produced the plot above. Can you reverse engineer the meaning of any of the sparklines? pic.twitter.com/nNxi3mcsIC
— Michael Fogleman (@FogleBird) January 22, 2019
If you find the resulting image as fascinating as I do, there’s good news: Fogleman actually sells these images on his website, and takes commissions for any NES game you can think of, with the results being a unique print captured from a unique ten seconds of play. At $150 (R2 040), they’re a bit pricey, so maybe you’ll have to satisfy yourself by admiring them on the screen. But if you really want to commission a beautiful keepsake generated from a classic game like Yo! Noid, you know where to turn.
Source: Michael Fogleman
Originally posted on Popular Mechanics
