At first glance, Paku Paku appears to be yet another Pac-Man clone. It is remarkably faithful to the original Pac-Man arcade game, but this game is also an incredible technological achievement: it's a text-mode game. CGA graphics cards had the ability to take the normal 80×25 text mode and only give each line two pixels instead of the usual eight, quadrupling the number of lines to 100. Then, by using two of the characters from the extended ASCII character set's box drawing symbols that fill in the left or right half of a character, and playing with the text color and background color, you can effectively turn each character into two "pixels", creating a horizontal resolution of 160. Whereas CGA only allowed four colors in graphics mode, all 16 colors are available in text mode, so this complicated programming trick created a fake 160×80×16c graphics mode! Very few games ever took advantage of this unofficial CGA "graphics" mode, but Paku Paku uses it to great effect, creating an oddly beautiful game. You would never know that this game was running in text mode. The audio is also impressive, given that the game is designed to run on a 5150 – the original IBM PC. Duplicating the background sound from Pac-Man in all of its annoying repetitiveness, Paku Paku can use PC Speaker, Tandy, Adlib, and even OPL sound. Joystick support was added in v1.3. As far as gameplay, all of the features that you would expect are present: there are side tunnels, the ghosts become edible when Paku eats a power pellet, and a special "fruit" bonus appears every level. Paku Paku must be seen to be believed.

Graphics

Downloads

Complete version history:

Paku Paku v1.6 with Source code in Turbo Pascal 7 (60,210 bytes)	9 November 2011	DOS	Play online
Paku Paku v1.5 with Source code in Turbo Pascal 7 (84,605 bytes)	21 March 2011	DOS
Paku Paku v1.4 with Source code in Turbo Pascal 7 (57,417 bytes)	5 March 2011	DOS
Paku Paku v1.3 with Source code in Turbo Pascal 7 (56,652 bytes)	13 February 2011	DOS
Paku Paku v1.2 with Source code in Turbo Pascal 7 (52,282 bytes)	10 February 2011	DOS
Paku Paku v1.01 with Source code in Turbo Pascal 7 (52,564 bytes)	8 February 2011	DOS
Paku Paku v1.0 with Source code in Turbo Pascal 7 (52,652 bytes)	8 February 2011	DOS

Help running DOS games

Availability

This game was originally released under the Paku Paku Public Domain License.