What is "catchum"

CatChum is a text-only clone of Pac-Man written for the CP/M operating system and made to be operated on the early Kaypro line of luggable computers.

CatChum was made within the limitations of Kaypro's early text-only computers. As a result, the maze is made from a series of dashes and other punctuation marks. The Pac-Man character is a letter "C", which goes from upper to lower case intermittently (to simulate a chomping Pac-Man). The four ghosts are letters "A" (which turn to "M"s when the CatChum Pac-Man chomps a power-pellet), and the "fruits" are represented by a dollar signs. One of the major down sides of this clone is that Kaypros of that era did not have the ability to flip the text characters. As a result, even when the CatChum Pac-Man is chomping pellets on his left, for example, his chomping mouth is still on the right.

There was no sound in this game. Instead, flashing text messages would appear every now and then saying things like "Get Set!", "Get Ready!" or "Go for it!"

Along with Star Trek, Aliens and Ladder, CatChum was one of the games that came with the software bundle of the early Kaypro computers.

CatChum was written by Yahoo Software of Los Angeles, California.