Tod Frye

Leaving Sunpower in late 2016, Tod joined Bonsai AI, which was developing an artificial intelligence platform, focusing primarily on reinforcement learning.

In 2015 he was working as Senior Embedded Software Engineer for the SunPower Corporation, where he worked in the field of IoT, developing hardware and software systems for monitoring solar power systems. His work extended from 'edge' devices, collecting and transmitting device telemetry, to cloud hosted Big Data systems for storing, analyzing, and reporting device data.

Frye's Pac-Man port was started in May 1981, and was the most anticipated release for 1982, so marketing pressed Frye to produce the game on a very strict timetable (lead times on the cartridge ROMs was several months, so the code needed to be completed in September 1981 to get the product into stores during the first quarter of 1982). Atari corporate management demanded Frye complete the game in the standard 4K ROM, as the 8K ROM form factor was not quite available at the time. Frye made several decisions which later proved controversial. First, he decided that supporting two-player gameplay was important, which meant 25–30 bytes of the 2600's meager 128 byte memory was utilized to store the second player's game state, score, etc. as opposed to using it for game data and features. Second, he chose to abandon plans for a flicker-management system which would have minimized the flashing of objects. Finally, his game did not conform to the arcade game's color scheme in order to comply with Atari's official home product policy that only space type games should feature black backgrounds. Frye states that there were no negative comments within Atari about these elements, but upon release the title drew criticism for not closely hewing to the specifics of its arcade counterpart.

Tod R. Frye (born 1955) is an American computer programmer once employed by Atari, Inc., and is most notable for being charged with the home adaptation of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 video computer system, which, while reputedly the top selling title for that system, is popularly claimed to have been a factor in both Atari Inc.'s downfall and the video game crash of 1983. Following the collapse of Atari he worked at video game and computer game companies such as 3DO and Pronto Games.