Finally, we can get some playful use out of the MacBook touch bar: It’s perfect for Pac-Man.
In this YouTube video by Raymond Wong, who runs a tech video channel, we get to watch and hear the familiar sounds of the Pac-Man game sliding across the MacBook touch bar. The video tries out 15-year-old developer Henry Franks’ Pac-Man hack for the new Macs’ touch bar, which serves functions like letting you edit videos with the touch of your finger or pick out emojis. The app is available on GitHub.
Videos by VICE
Pac-Bar, the touchbar version of Pac-Man, was written by Franks in Swift, an open-source programming language by Apple. As the video shows, it uses Pac-Man’s sounds and graphics. The arrow keys, rather than the Touch Bar, itself, are used as controls. And the game is limited to a single horizontal line.
Franks said he wrote the game on his MacBook Air. “I made the app for fun and to see what the Touch Bar is capable of in terms of running games,” he told VentureBeat. “I would definitely be open to supporting it in more serious apps in the future because I thought it proved to be quite versatile.”
Whether more Touch Bar only apps will be developed remains to be seen, but currently, a mini sub culture of gaming is developing around the new MacBook’s latest feature.
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