[jeffwass]

Are you talking about the bonus 'fruit'?

That was he one thing I complained most about with the Atari PacMan. I don't think I ever noticed the flickering ghosts specifically, or even how different the bird layout was vs the arcade version.

But instead of a cherry/orange/pretzel that moved around the screen, the bonus fruit was a dark-brown square inside another slightly-larger light-brown square. It didn't move, it didn't look good, and as a kid I felt like this was the classic example of either the game designers cutting corners or limitations of the system.

I used to joke about this specific example as one of the key reasons to move on to better consoles when they came around.