Oregon Pacifist 
The Atari 2600 version of Pac Man is an interesting interpretation of the arcade game. 
The maze is completely different, Pac Man has eyes, and instead of eating dots he eats… pencils?
Kasey Strube@Oregon_Pacifist
So the 2600 is so limited compared to arcade hardware (by like orders of magnitude) that major shortcuts had to be taken to make ports possible. In the case of the pills in Pac-Man, the ghosts and Pac-Man himself take up the available sprite slots and so the maze and pills have to be rendered as background. Backgrounds on the 2600 are limited to 40 pixels wide. Each “pencil” is actually a single pixel of background.
This article glosses over some of the technical details of it but is a great story of what it took to port Pac-Man to Atari- https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/arcade-perfect-how-pac-man-was-ported-to-consoles/
@kmstrube81 for sure, the limitations of the 2600 definitely played a part in the final product, but I believe a more faithful port could’ve been possible with the right developer. Still, it’s an admirable effort!
Xandowsk@Oregon_Pacifist @kmstrube81 Atari 2600 limitations are so harsh (like 128 bytes of RAM) that all the good games are kind of a technical marvel to me.
Xeronarth
Tokyo By Bike@Oregon_Pacifist If I recall correctly the ghosts blink in and out of existence. If you manage to eat 1 ghost, they all momentarily disappear.
Pac-Man is on heavy rotation on my handheld (but not the Atari version!) as is Tetris and Puyo Puyo. Great for short bursts of play.
