[paolo]

(05-29-2010, 05:04 AM)darkpuppet Wrote: yup -- that 256th level is the kill screen. It's more of a memory overlap than a glitch per se. Those old arcade machines were rather limited in their resources.

Quote:Pac-Man technically has no ending—as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to continue playing indefinitely. However, because of a bug in the routine that draws the fruit, the right side of the 256th level becomes a scrambled mixture of text and symbols, rendering the level impossible to pass by legitimate means. Normally, no more than seven fruits are displayed at any one time, but when the internal level counter (stored in a single byte) reaches 255, the subroutine erroneously causes this value to "roll over" to zero before drawing the fruit. This causes the routine to attempt to draw 256 fruits, which corrupts the bottom of the screen and the whole right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols