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Classic Games (Games) Emulation (Games) Entertainment Games

Pacman for Excel 97 and 2000 43

Bob Gortician writes "From Usenet: A Japanese geek programmed a complete Pacman game running on Excel. It can approach the SNES in the future, and currently can run at least MSX (Colecovision) games completely." The page is mostly in Japanese, but there's enough English to get one started. After careful consideration, I'm prepared to call this even cooler than the Flight Simulator in Excel. Excel might not be anyone's first choice for gaming platform, but it's helpful for anyone stuck in an office environment.
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Pacman for Excel 97 and 2000

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  • Security (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JM Apocalypse ( 630055 ) * on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:39PM (#7339127)
    If you go and set macro security to low, I was able to play it in Office 2003 (beta). It is actually a really nice duplication of the actual game, complete with sound effects. The hard part is finding the .zip archive on the site that has some sort of language that I have never heard of before on it before (must be Spanish). Just make sure to revert those settings back, or else there's going to be a "Slashdot Macro" virus. Oh! And that gives me and idea ...
  • by Gr33nNight ( 679837 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @01:42PM (#7339168)
    http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/pacell.lzh
  • Quite possibly (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    the coolest waste of time I've seen in awhile. Can't imagine why you'd do it but someone did it. Kind of ingenious using cells as pixels and storing all of the images on the sheet (scroll down)
  • with those http servers written in bash, awk, or sed (browse freshmeat while you're bored). While this may be proof that we have too many CPU cycles to spare these days, or that people have too much time on their hands, I heartily support the "because I can" justification for things like this.

    It's cool just because it is, usefulness be damned.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    These damn agents that corporations put on workstations and laptops record every app you run. By using Excel to browse the internet and play games I can appear to be productive and goof off at the same time.

    "I see Johnson's still working in the Pacell account ... Good Man!"
  • Nobel? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by August_zero ( 654282 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @02:16PM (#7339549)
    Sweet Zombie Jesus! give this man a Nobel prize. Finding ways to goof off with things that were not meant to be goofed off with is IMHO one of the most nobel and pure of all human endeavors.

    This reminds me of my highschool days, when a group of us used to program videogames on our TI-85 graphing calculators. I created this entire boxing RPG game that was very popular amongst the group. As it got passed around people added new features and such until in its last version it took up almost all the operating memory of the calculator.
    • I put Tie Fighter on mine.
    • Sweet Zombie Jesus! give this man a Nobel prize. Finding ways to goof off with things that were not meant to be goofed off with is IMHO one of the most nobel and pure of all human endeavors.

      Just a nit to pick. Nobel is the family which started the prize of the same name. Noble is what you are if you have nobility.
    • I had a bunch of games on my Casio CFX-9850G graphics calculator including tic-tac-toe and I think a slot machine.
      Plus Tetris.
  • by tiled_rainbows ( 686195 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @02:33PM (#7339739) Homepage Journal
    I've actually found that Excel is a really quick and easy environment to program cellular automata.

    The implementation of Conway's Life is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader - or let met know and I'll email the .xls file, or just the code if you'd rather.
  • by Yohahn ( 8680 )
    Now the trick is to get these to work in Gnumeric! :)

    hehe
  • Wow. (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Asprin ( 545477 )

    I hereby award thee 50 geek points for this amazing and unbelievably faithful reproduction. Knowing how it works just makes it more incredible.

    When is Defender [klov.com] coming out?
  • That's nothing... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by floydigus ( 415917 ) on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @03:26PM (#7340203)
    Where I work they've let someone develop an entire enterprise scale distributed and replicated database system using Excel.
    Amazingly enough, this was done because the policy makers had imposed a ban on using Access.
    • LOL :) A fimiliar problem :) Users haven't a clue about normalisation, data modelling but they press buttons in Access to create god-awful non scaleable, flaky, slow and toally vulnerable "systems" that rely on masses of bandwidth and computing power to make them go. Admins ban Access, users use something worse :) hehe I love it.

      Here, at some point in the past, someone issued them with a weapons grade mess creator in the form of SAS, which is very powerful in the hands of a skilled developer, but of c
  • Stunned.

    Hats off to the guy for the game. I should pass it around the office... Or not and keep my job!
  • I guess Geocities isn't any better in Japan than it is in the US... anybody got a mirror?
  • "For all I know, It must be meaningful that makes the program works on Excel!!"

    Couldn't have said it better myself!
  • So what does a reprogrammed version of Pacman have to do with the SNES? And why does the submitter think MSX and Colecovision are the same thing (they are not, despite some similarities in the hardware)?
    • > So what does a reprogrammed version of Pacman have to do with the SNES?

      I suspect the idea is that the same technique could be used to produce graphics for VBA emulators for these systems.

      Which it probably could, but you'd have to be mad to try.
  • games running under Office. With chips getting faster, how about a MAME emulator in VBA?

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