A faithful browser port of PACKMAN.EXE, a Pac-Man clone made in Kiev, Ukraine in 1990 by Free Masters.
I played this game as a kid in the early '90s on a CGA monitor. Decades later, I found the original 42 KB DOS executable and decided to bring it back to life — this time in a browser.
Play it now — just open js/index.html, no build step needed.
The original game was written in Turbo C/Pascal for DOS, using Borland's BGI (Borland Graphics Interface) library for rendering. It runs in CGA 320x200 mode with 4-color palettes and uses the PC speaker for sound. The binary embeds the string "CGA Device Driver 2.00 — Mar 21 1988", which is the BGI CGA driver.
All text in the game is in Russian (CP866 encoding). The start screen reads:
Вы имеете возможность посетить мир приключений ненасытной мордашки ПакМен. Имея 5 попыток его нужно провести через 15 комнат. Опасайтесь кровавых жуков!
Translation: "You have the opportunity to visit the world of adventures of the insatiable PacMan. With 5 attempts you need to guide him through 15 rooms. Beware of the bloody bugs!"
The enemies aren't ghosts — they're "кровавые жуки" (bloody bugs), rendered as star-shaped sprites.
The original PACKMAN.EXE is a 42 KB MZ DOS executable. To port it faithfully, I disassembled and decompiled it:
-
Reko Decompiler — produced a 6944-line x86 ASM listing (
PACKMAN_0800.asm) and a decompiled C approximation (PACKMAN_0800.c). When the ASM and C disagreed, ASM was treated as ground truth. -
Manual binary analysis — extracted sprite data, level grids, movement patterns, and string tables directly from the EXE using file offset arithmetic (
file_offset = DS_offset + 0x400). -
Node.js extractor (
tools/extract.js) — reads the original EXE and generatessrc/data.jscontaining all 15 level grids, 29 CGA sprites, and palette data.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Screen resolution | 320x200, CGA 4-color |
| Graphics library | BGI (Borland Graphics Interface) |
| Maze grid | 20 columns x 12 rows |
| Tile size | 16x14 pixels |
| Sprite format | 56 bytes each (14 rows x 4 bytes, 2bpp CGA) |
| Total sprites | 29 (walls, dots, Pacman frames, enemy frames) |
| Levels | 15 |
| Starting lives | 5 (0x23 / 7 via idiv) |
| RNG | Linear congruential: seed = seed * 0x015A4E35 + 1 |
| Movement | Asymmetric: 4px/step horizontal, 2px/step vertical |
| Enemy AI | Chase when aligned, otherwise follow predefined patterns |
| Collision | Always fatal — no power-ups or fright mode |
| Score | +2 per dot eaten |
| Extra lives | At 600, 1200, 2000, 2600 points |
| Speed control | Keys 0-9, stored as inverted value (0x39 - keycode) |
The game was built with Borland's BGI graphics library, which provided:
- Vector fonts — the title "ПакМен" uses BGI Gothic font (font #4), menu text uses Triplex font (font #1)
putimage/bar/outtextxy— standard BGI drawing primitives for sprites, rectangles, and text- CGA palette switching — 4 selectable palettes (green, cyan/magenta, bright green, bright cyan)
settextstyle/setcolor/setfillstyle— BGI state machine for rendering attributes
The BGI CGA driver renders into CGA video memory at segment B800h with interleaved even/odd scanlines, but the game's own sprite data uses a simple linear 2bpp layout (4 pixels per byte).
index.html Entry point (no build step)
tools/
└── extract.js extracts 15 levels, 29 sprites, fixes level 13, writes `data.js`
src/
├── data.js Generated: 15 levels, 29 sprites, palettes
├── input.js Keyboard state tracker
├── sound.js Web Audio API PC-speaker emulation
├── renderer.js Canvas 2D renderer (2bpp sprite decode)
└── game.js Game logic (state machine, AI, collision)
Five plain JavaScript files loaded in order by index.html. No frameworks, no bundler, no dependencies.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | Move Pacman |
| Space / Enter | Start game |
| 0–9 | Speed (0 = slowest, 9 = fastest) |
| F1 / F2 | Sound off / on |
| ESC | Return to menu |
| S / L (menu) | Save / Load game |
The browser version also supports WASD for movement and adds a palette selector and cheat buttons in the UI.
The game supports 4 CGA color palettes, selectable from the UI:
| Palette | Color 0 | Color 1 | Color 2 | Color 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C0 (low) | Black | Green | Red | Brown |
| C1 (low) | Black | Cyan | Magenta | White |
| C2 (high) | Black | Bright Green | Bright Red | Yellow |
| C3 (high) | Black | Bright Cyan | Bright Magenta | White |
Default is C2 (bright green) — the palette I remember from childhood.
- Original game: PACKMAN by Free Masters, Kiev, Ukraine, 1990
- Decompilation: Reko Decompiler by Uxmal
This port is a clean-room reimplementation based on reverse engineering of the original binary for educational and preservation purposes.