[castone]

Google.ca has Pacman on it's home page for Pacman's 30th anniversary!
You can even play it

[paolo]

I have the original Pac-Man electronic handheld game by Tomy, that came out in the 1980's somewhere in my storage. I bet that thing is worth a pretty penny now.

[ZX3_2NV]

I spent a good 20 min playing then I forgot what I wanted to look up lol

[darkpuppet]

over 4 billion hours have been spent by people playing that game..

and the most amazing thing is it's all just javascript... no flash or plugin required.

And it contains a full 256 levels, along with kill screen...

[ZX3_2NV]

really that many levels? I only played a few times and I figured it would just start repeating it self.

[paolo]

didn't the origional pac-man crash at the 256th level due to a glitch in the software?

[darkpuppet]

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.

[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

[darkpuppet]

(05-29-2010, 07:44 AM)paolo Wrote:

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

Oh, I'm aware of what the internet says. But from a development perspective, the software worked exactly how it was programmed to work and fulfilled the technical requirements based on assumptions made by business.

Quote:Games from this era were often written with the assumption that the player would stop playing long before the numerical limits of the game code were reached; most games from this period were intended to continue until the players lost all of their lives. Additionally, the limited hardware of these early machines often meant that programmers could not spend memory on logical checks of the state of the game