Pac-Man for the DEC VT420

Pac-Man is a graphical game designed in 1979 by a team of five people and implemented in Z80 assembly language over the course of seventeen months. This presentation will be an evolutionary account of my own Forth implementation in ANS94 Forth for the Digital VT420 text terminal over a three month period. The C port of the resulting application to Linux and OpenVMS 9.2 will also be briefly covered.

Stress will be laid upon the value of standards throughout this talk. Various development/prototyping tools were required for this implementation to be successful. In essence, this paper is a first person account of an experience in retrocomputing.