A question about PacMan's very late stages

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I've noticed on a web page that if your score on the 254th screen shows anywhere a `255`, then you can get by the 255th screen without it breaking and you can continue playing. For example: 3,025,500 after 254th screen would let you keep playing. Can anyone verify this?

Thanks for your help :)

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@geocities.com), June 13, 1999

Answers

This is incorrect. There is no way to continue past the 256th board which is the split-screen. Allthough I have seen in person, Rick Fothergil actually play the split-screen board where if you know what your doing, you can find 9 more dots before you have no choice but to die because the board is useless at this point. So the way to get a perfect game is to eat all ghosts, pacmans, keys, and get to the split screen on your first man so you can utilize your remaining men to get 90 pts per man left over, thus giving you a score of 3,333,360pts and that's it! Rick died on his first man around 3M pts then he finished the game. Leave a window of "90" pts for a perfect game which there will be about a half a dozen "split-screen" players who will be battling it out for a perpect game at next years New Hampshire Classics tournement the first week of June.

Regards, Steve Krogman

-- stephen krogman (skrogman@concentric.net), June 13, 1999.


Steve is basically right, and the reason why you can't get past the split screen is because you can't eat enough dots to advance to the next board. If you set MAME pacman with infinite lives, you can actually clear the split screen because 9 dots reappear after you die, and eventually you eat enough of them to advance. Of course this is cheating, so there is no legal way you can do this.

In Dig Dug, you get to round 256 (it shows as zero) then that's it. Finito. You start the round with a pooka on your head and all your men die in succession.

There is a lot of misinformation on the internet about Dig Dug and Pacman (remember the books that said there was gold and silver bars in Pacman?) but now we know the rumours are just not true.

Mark

-- Mark Longridge (cubeman@iname.com), June 13, 1999.


Some interesting stuff. Does anyone know if Namco did this Stage 0 (256) stuff deliberately or not?!

I wonder about that definitive answer you gave. Remembering that if you play Galaga on anything other than the hardest setting it will lock up on Stage 0 (256) but if you have it set to the hardest setting then it still plays ok on Stage 0 (256). If that's a programming bug I'd be very interested to know why the bug doesn't occur just because the setting is on hardest !!!

Actually I like to think it was a deliberate feature the programmers slipped in..... ;-)

BeeJay.

-- BeeJay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), June 13, 1999.


The reason that round 256 problems happen in earlier made games is because they used the hexidecimal number system to save data space - aka the same memory saving technique that now makes the y2k problem, and 256 is one number too high as the highest number that can be done is 255. That's why Galaga, Pacman and the like have that problem. The hard reason is actually a suprise, but they used one additional memory space for round number on hard level only. Allows for 16*16*16 levels in that game.

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), June 13, 1999.

Ah yes, but not all 8 bit games lockup when they reach round FF + 1.

Gyruss and Juno First both clock back to the "real round 1" at FF+2 like Galaga does on the hard difficulty setting. Actually Juno First is incredibly difficult on Stage 0 but you've generally got enough stacked up lives by this time to survive it anyway.

So I guess the question is why did Namco do it with so many of their games ?! That's why I was suggesting that perhaps it was done deliberately - either that or every one of their games crapped out due to divide by zero errors.

How did you find out they used an extra "stage-holder-place" only when the hardest difficulty is set? It still says "Stage 0" when playing and it still goes back to Stage 1 proper as far as speed, firing rates etc goes?

Also, anyone know why on Galaga they allowed the extra digit(s) for player 2's score...... another feature perhaps.... ;-))

BeeJay.

-- BeeJay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), June 13, 1999.



Hmmm... I wasn't expecting THIS long of a thread :) .... Well I'll make it longer! :)

I read your response BeeJay, and a few days ago I watched several galaga games - is this thing you're talking about the reason most of you play two player games and kill the first person?

Thanks again :)

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@geocities.com), June 13, 1999.


Gameboy,

You've got it in one. Because it makes it easier to verify the final score when you've got all the digits visible most people who can clock Galaga over 1 million use player 2 and waste player 1 - or in the Krogman's case it shows both extra digits !!!!!!!! ;-)

One day Steve I hope to get that 10 million'th digit to show up. ;-)

BeeJay.

-- BeeJay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), June 13, 1999.


I'll cue you in on that one. According to the schmetics for the game, the data space wasn't designed to allow the program to kick to 0 and back to 1, but in actually that's what it did. The extra space was designed to prevent, according to the sheet, the 1's digit of the score to not display anything other than 0. Note: Some Namco games with a little persuation can have the ones digit not be zero, or even display a hexidecimal score, aka. 3A429E in Pac-Man Jr. I had got once.... (Won't tell you how it did it!) Namco cut many corners in their programming, and that's why most of their old machines crap out at FF+1... Why other games are awfully hard at FF+1, also known as 0, is because of the computations that are done with the level determining how hard the level is, is that the computer would get the divide by 0 answer, and then by default, auto-sticks in the toughest number programmed for difficulty, and it would only appear, by the schematics, only if that error occurs... Hope that clears things up... From someone who had an utter fasnication of the inside workings of the blasted contraptions, and tried to keep them working. Chris

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), June 14, 1999.

Gaming companies that allowed this extra memory space to continue after 255 was more then just Namco. Williams also allowed a game to continue after this stage of 255. For instance, in Robotron, even know you had to keep track of the stages because they rolled over at 99, if you did that twice and then got to stage 55 (255) the next stage after that so called last stage (happens to be a brain board) it resets to stage 1 and the game is exactly the same as if you just put a quarter in it from the beginning. This will cont. as long as you stay alive and play. One question I do have is why doesn't Ms Pacman end at stage 255 when Pac man does? There both Namco? Ms Pacman only has 136 stages! what happened to the rest?

Regards, Steve Krogman

-- stephen krogman (skrogman@concentric.net), June 16, 1999.


Hey all I'm just browsing and came across this Q&A site. I play Pacman, but I'm not a hack at it. I wonder, though, what does happen at the end of Pacman? Can anybody tell me? I mean, you get 255 screens, and then what? Is it impossible to finish this game?

-- Jasmin Bodmer (jasmin.bodmer@gmx.ch), July 29, 2003.


you get to level 256, and the left of the board looks normal, and the right side is screwed

-- rob (rob@subfused.com), August 08, 2003.

you can now buy a 256 level of pacman Tshirt ! its a black tshirt with a screenshot of the 256 level and a perfect score of 3333360. go to www.errorwear.com and look under the retro error section . I own one of these shirts and get asked all the time

-- zziks (Zziks@zziks.com), January 18, 2004.

How do you get so far? I'm not the "hacker" or "programmer" most of you are, but I'd like to know how to get that far so I can experience this myself.

-- Rick Houtteman (Hootie2485@aol.com), January 24, 2004.

OKay, I got this buddy who has one of these NAMCO joystick games for his t.v. He's got a Pacman fever that most people had like 24 years ago. Anyway, he's up to the 5th key stage and says when he eats the big dot, the ghosts don't turn blue and remain in pursuit. Is this proper and is there any other "treasure" past the keys. Please respond- thanks.

-- Brian Howard (Bearklaw21@AOL.COM), February 28, 2004.

Regarding the tv games joystick, the Jakks port of Pac-man did not emulate the split screen bug when you reach level 255, so it just loops back to the start (unlike the arcade/MAME). On higher levels, the ghosts/monsters move fast and do not turn blue (although they do reverse when you eat a power pellet), and keys are the highest "fruit".

The Ms. Pac-man final level bug is a separate issue (probably due to the maximum level minus the number of non-repeating levels being 128 which can be thought of as being a negative number). It looks kind of cool too though.

-- Carl (nospam@example.com), March 14, 2004.



YOU ARE ALL NUTS, go on with your live...

-- pacwoman (jip@jap.com), August 29, 2004.

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