XPacman

(c) Peter Warden 14th August 1996

This is a basic version of pacman. I've tried to concentrate on the essentials of the game for now, which means a lot of the original features are absent (ie no scores, no fruit, no special items, no lives). When all the pills have been cleared from a level, the difficulty level is notched up, and a new level is generated. If you collide with a ghost, all the pills are replaced, and you restart the current level from scratch. A new feature just added is the presence of large red pills that for a short time turn the ghosts grey and let you eat them.

Keys:

The default keys are:

 - a  :move left
 - s  :move right
 - z  :move down
 - w  :move up
 - q  :quit the game

The game is paused when it loses the keyboard input focus and unpauses when it regains it.

Command line options:

-upkey -downkey -leftkey & -rightkey followed by a character allow you to set which keys make you move in which directions.

-quitkey followed by a character sets the quit key.

-framerate followed by a number sets the maximum number of frames that will be displayed per second, so altering the games speed (default is 15).

-level followed by a number sets the difficulty level (default is 0).

-width & -height followed by a number specify the width and height of the playing area, in 16 pixel units (default is 33x33 squares).

Installation:

Installing xpacman:

autoreconf -i
automake
./configure
make
sudo make install

Original Greetings (from Peter Warden, year1996):

My thanks go to Danny Backx, Garland Stern, Larry Schwimmer, Oeyvind Roetvold and everybody else who's given their time and expertise to help me improve this project.

Absolutely no warranty is given for this program.

If you have any problems with xpacman, find any bugs, have a suggestion, or just enjoyed the game, email me and let me know.

Peter Warden (wardenp@cs.man.ac.uk)

Additional Greetings (from Joe Da Silva, year2024):

Thanks to Steve McIntyre stevem@chiark.greenend.org.uk, 1997, for creating xpacman.6 man page.

Fixed a few bugs, and added autoconf/automake to help build and install xpacman, and desktop GUI files for click-n-run expected in today's modern PCs. Go here if you need to report an issue, or better yet, please create a PR for a bug fix