Q:

Could Pac-Man be replicated perfectly on the ZX Spectrum?

We all know that various ports of Pac-Man exist but my question is just for one specific computer. Could the Spectrum, with time and proper knowledge, run the Arcade version of Pac-Man despite it's Z80 processor running a 3.5 MHZ?
Let's assume that everything has been optimized perfectly and there are zero mistakes in the code.
How well, in a side by side comparison, will the Z80 compare to the arcade release? I won't even attempt to program it until some time (I.E I will be OLD when i do) has passed.

A:

Both the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Pac-Man arcade machine used the Zilog Z 80 CPU.
Pac-Man's display was slightly larger and vertical at 224×288 while the Speccy's was horizontal at 256×192.
The Speccy did not have hardware sprites or pixel-addressable colours.
The original 48K Speccy only had "1 bit" beeper sound though later models had an AY sound chip. The arcade machine had a Namco PSG sound chip.
But if you're willing to scale down the graphics just a tiny bit and put up with a bit of colour clash when different coloured things are too close to each other, you should actually be able to port the Pac-Man arcade ROM code to work on the Spectrum hardware.
No need though since Simon Owen already did exactly that nearly a decade ago:

It's not a port. You need to provide the Pac-Man arcade board's ROMs. It runs the ROM code and just emulates the hardware differences. As a nice coincidence he just released the first update in four years this March.

By the way:
I just discovered that somebody has actually done the opposite of this too. The early Spectrum classic game Manic Miner was converted to run on original Pac-Man arcade hardware! Also almost a decade ago.

