Spotlight › Dot Delirium

A maze chase sized to the screen

Guide Smiles through three mazes, eat the dots, and turn out of sight to escape four ghosts. Dot Delirium was written from scratch for os8088 and runs on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC/XT.

boards
3
on a 4.77 MHz XT
16 to 18 frames a second
smallest machine
128KB

The ghosts patrol until they see you down a straight row or column. Eat dots for points, use power pellets to eat ghosts, and save your score to disk with three initials.

How to run it Get the disk
Full screen
Dot Delirium filling the screen: a blue maze on black with white dots and four large power pellets, Smiles in yellow at the lower left, red and pink ghosts at the top left, a cyan and an orange ghost in the ghost house, and the word PAUSED. A column at the left reads SCORE 70, HIGH 20000, LEVEL 1 and two lives.
The game paused in full screen, with all four ghosts visible. Press F and the board is laid out again for the whole screen.

Playing it

Dots, pellets, ghosts and three boards.

A maze chase is a game of moving through passages while enemies pursue you. You steer Smiles, eat every dot on the board, and avoid four ghosts. A power pellet turns the ghosts blue, and while they are blue you can eat them for points.

There are three boards: the classic arcade layout with 240 dots, SPIRAL with 270 dots and long halls, and COMB with 278 dots, vertical combs and an open middle. The board changes every three levels.

A dot is 10 points and a power pellet 50. Ghosts eaten on one pellet are 200, 400, 800, then 1,600. Fruit appears twice a board, worth 100 points on the first level and up to 5,000 later. You get one extra life, at 10,000 points. The six best scores are saved to disk with three initials each.

Arrows or WASD steer. Enter or Space starts a game, P pauses and F switches full screen. Esc leaves full screen or ends the game. Sound comes from the PC speaker and is on when the game opens.

See it running

The title screen, a game in a window, and the menu.

Title screen
The Dot Delirium window on the os8088 desktop: DOT DELIRIUM in large yellow block letters, a HIGH SCORES table of six initials and scores from ACE 20000 to FUN 3000, and part of a maze below with ghosts and Smiles moving in a demo game.
The title screen. The high-score table, with a demo game playing itself underneath.
In a window
Dot Delirium in a window on the desktop with a game paused: the maze with dots, Smiles at the left, two ghosts in the ghost house and two out, and PAUSED in the middle. A column at the left reads SCORE 70, HIGH 20000, LEVEL 1 and two lives.
A game paused in a window. Score, high score, level and lives sit in a column to the left of the board.
Game menu
The Dot Delirium window with a game in progress behind its open Game menu, which lists New Game, Pause, Full Screen and Sound.
The Game menu. New Game, Pause, Full Screen and Sound.

How it works

A board that fits the screen, ghosts that need to see you, and what a frame costs.

The board

The board fits the screen

The maze is always 28 tiles across and 31 down. The size of a tile changes with the display. VGA and CGA are color graphics cards; Hercules is a monochrome graphics card from 1982.

displayscreentile
VGA, window640x48016x13
Hercules, window720x34816x9
CGA, window640x2008x4
CGA, full screen640x20016x6

So the board is bigger on a Hercules card than on CGA. Press F and it is laid out again for the whole screen.

The ghosts

Ghosts chase what they can see

Each ghost patrols its corner until it sees Smiles along a straight row or column. Then it heads straight for him and remembers the tile where it last saw him.

If he is gone when it gets there, it goes back to patrolling. To break a chase, turn out of sight.

The speed

16 to 18 frames a second on a 4.77 MHz PC

Each moving character is drawn with one drawing call a frame. Measured on an emulated 4.77 MHz IBM PC with the demo playing itself, in a window and full screen: VGA 17.8 and 18.2 frames a second, CGA 17.4 and 18.2, Hercules 16.8 and 18.2.

The system clock ticks 18.2 times a second, and that is the game's ceiling. A game you steer on the largest board, VGA in a window, runs at about 16.

What it does not do

Where it differs from the arcade game.

  • It is a new game in the Pac-Man tradition, not a port of the arcade game. For that, PaccMan has a page of its own.
  • Ghosts do not know where you are at all times.
  • There is one extra life, at 10,000 points, and no more.
  • It took the older Pac-Man's place on the floppies. That Pac-Man is still in The Wire.

Run it

It is on the software disk, in the games folder.

  1. Boot os8088 with the software disk in the second drive.

  2. Double-click Disk B, and open the GAMES folder.

  3. Double-click DOTDEL.O88.

  4. Press Enter to start.

On a 360KB XT it is also on games360.img, at the top of the disk.

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