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Games Entertainment

Perfect score in Pac-Man 237

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-gotta-be-kidding dept.
Christopher Sypal writes "It seems that nobody has ever been able to get a perfect score in Pac-Man (or at least with solid proof) until now. " Ya know I don't know if this is a hoax or not, but I don't care. Its just to strange.
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Perfect score in Pac-Man More

Perfect score in Pac-Man

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  • Pac-man is cool (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    which version?

  • Re:Argh (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What scares me about this guy is that he seemed obsessed with "beating the Canadians". Yep, the Americans not only beat the Russians to the Moon, but they beat the Canadians to a perfect score at Pac-Man! It's okay to be patriotic and all, but people like this make Canadians glad they aren't Americans.:)

    (As an OT aside, I really loathe how the news media tends to find the oddest traits of any "spokesman" for a special interest group. Sci-fi fans are always dressed like Klingons or Vulcans, Goths look straight out of a Bram Stoker novel, etc. Why don't they ever depict news reporters as fresh-carrion seeking heartless monsters?:)

  • Re:look at the missle command score. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    he played for 45 hours straight.
    That's just sick.



    I used to be able to do crap like that playing Joust - play for as long as I wanted.

    People would come up to the game right after I started and put their quarters on the machine, you know, saying they had next game.

    I wouldn't say a word, inside I was laughing so hard I wanted to cry. An hour or two later they'd pick up their quarter and leave.

    Zen arcade, man. Nothing else mattered. You and the machine were the same thing and nothing else existed. I wish I felt like that about something today.

  • If this feat was actually done, was there a programmer's easter egg at the end?

    Nahh, the programmers never think anybody's gonna get to the end.

    Also, how do we 'actually' know how many boards there were,
    Cause the game overflows after 255 screens (not 2 million points, it's screens.). 8 bit register.


    and how many points are _really_ possible??

    You take the number of dots and the bonus points and the points for getting every possible ghost for 255 screens and add it up. Take note: There are no points for eating ghosts on the higher levels because after the 5th key, the ghost don't turn color to let you eat them. (I don't know if they ever turn color again after the 5th key, if they do it's not for a while. I've never finished the damn game)

    I knew a girl who new how to do certain 'patterns' of eating the dots, and she could go on forever. She would get her fill of the game and leave it 'running' when she left.

    Forever always ends sometime.

    I always thought that there was only one pacman version - not any 'later' versions. Is this feat for the 'original' pacman???

    This is for the original. There were hundreds of versions. Remakes and copies and bootlegs and on and on. It was a wonderful time to be a kid, as long as you didn't mind doing your own cooking.

  • Re:what!?!?!?! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well there is no hope then because this is the best humans can do. Doing something just because it's never been done and you think you can do it and nobody else thinks you can.


    Everything good comes out of this.
  • Looks genuine ----

    http://lcweb.loc.gov/cgi-bin/browse.pl

    Search result follows: ---

    Title Search For: Official video game & pinball book of world record /
    Item 1 of 1


    ITEM 1 of 1.
    CALL NUMBER:
    GV1469.3 .T87 1998
    TITLE:
    Twin Galaxies' official video game & pinball book of world records / [edited] by Walter Day.
    PUBLISHED:
    Fairfield, Iowa : Sunstar Pub., c1998.
    DESCRIPTION:
    xxxii, 936 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
    SUBJECT:
    Video games--Records.
    SUBJECT:
    Pinball machines.
    OTHER NAME:
    Day, Walter.
    OTHER TITLE:
    Official video game & pinball book of world records
    NOTE:
    "The official book of records listing the high scores on arcade video games, pinball, home video games,
    and network games"--Cover. "Includes: How to get yourself in this book"--Cover.
    ISBN NUMBER:
    1887472258 (pbk.) : $19.95
    LCCN NUMBER:
    96-72617
  • Given the 'food chip mod' where the food was porportal to the number of players, it is nearly ipossible to get below 150th level int he game on one quarter.
    At 150th, the thief keeps showing up and taking all you extra's as a result of potions.

    at 256th level it keeps going. Although the screen anchors are LONG gone.

    My personal record 157th level on one quarter. 8 hours. at 125th it started to suck. At 150, it REALLY began to suck. The theif raped me.

    I never bothered to try to role the score above 9,999,999.....guess I get to try that next.

  • You don't get it. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nobody seems to get it. 13,072 is the _maximum_ number of points you can get on any one board. That's only if you get all four ghosts with each and every power pill, all the fruit, and all the dots. If you only manage to get three of the ghosts, you won't get 13,072 on that board, and hence you can't achieve the absolute maximum score possible in the game (3,333,360) before it crashes.

    Sure, lots of people have played up to board 255 where the game crashes, but none of them (on record anyway) made it without missing a single thing.

    Getting 'about 13,000 per level' just isn't good enough. They're talking about a perfect board, 255 times in a row, no mistakes. None. Miss a single piece of fruit on board 67 and that's it, you can't get the absolute high score.

    That's pretty impressive (and/or moronic, depending on how you look at it).

  • There's a good reason (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 05, 1999 @05:55PM (#1817790)
    Back in those days, a game was designed and implemented by a single wizardly programmer. The code of the game was less than 64K bytes - mind you, that's a LOT of game logic on an 8-bit processor if you know how to write tight code.

    Because it was designed and implemented by a single person, the arcade game of that era was very tight, very cohesive. Every feature, every pixel, every movement, was there because a programmer - THE programmer behind the game - thought of it. In some sense you were exploring the soul of the programmer when you played the game.

    Today's games are far too complex for a single person to create. So you license a 3D engine here, grab some AI routines from a previous project and tweak them til they work, license some animation from XYZcorp, get some music company to write tunes, etc. Games designed by committee are just not the same; a game today doesn't represent the overarching vision of a single artist.

  • Fruit? (Score:1)

    by Erich ( 151 )
    What about fruit? How many levels does the fruit go for?
  • Funspot kicks major butt.. It's like walking into a videogame preservation society.. In the same room, you can play 'the greats', like PacMan, Missle Command, Asteroids, Tempest, etc., but they also have some more esoteric stuff like a cocktail version of Atari football, complete with black and white display of Xs and Os and trackballs...
  • You cant tilt a Pac Man, silly!

    Yes, you can (on some). If you ever looked inside an early Midway game cabinet, there's a tilt sensor that would shut down the machine (if the sensor was connected, and the BIOS setting was activated...a lot of operators I know would de-activate one or both).

    /me speaks from 3 years of experience working for an arcade chain..this thread is bringing back memories :)

  • Who holds the rights to Pac-Man? For a long time, I thought Midway was the original copyright owner, but now it appears (or at least I just noticed) that Namco owns them (and sold the US rights to Midway). Any resource where I could look this up?

    (Side note: looks like Midway owns Atari now...that kinda rocks)

  • Imagine the ramifications!


    ...phil
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    This is no different than any other achievement. Land speed record, boating record, circumnavigation, it's all about who has the ability to do it first. If this is not a hoax, I say great! If you don't like it, tough! None of you fuckers could do it and apparantly neither can anyone else in your respective countries.

    LK
  • Posted by gamesgod:

    Don't get me wrong, I pretty much suck at Pacman. But what to so damn long for someone to get this record!
  • Posted by planders:

    Anyone remember Hard Hat Mack?

    Hard Hat Mack was great. My #1 favorite Apple II game had to be Elite, followed closely by all most of the Infocom games [god, I wish I had A Mind Forever Voyaging still] and Castle Wolfenstein.

    Aside from the Infocom text adventures, Elite was far and away the most rich and engrossing game I ever saw on the Apple II(c). My friend Ed and I played that for days at a time. We were feared throughout the galaxy.

    The Infocom game you're thinking of is called Witness. It was probably my first (of many) Infocom games purchased at an early age. I'll never forget it. Though I didnt' really realize it at the time, it was paying homage to the Raymond Chandler style 1930's hardboiled-L.A.-detective novels. Witness pulled off the atmosphere quite well. The butler was actually named Phong. One of my favorite things to type was:

    PHONG, SPILL THE BEANS

    I don't remember precicely who the murderer was in that game. I think it was probably the character Stiles, though I could be remembering wrong (it's been a while) or it may be one of those where the murderer changes with every new game.

    My all-time favorite Infocom game was Zork Zero. I know a lot of people didn't like it, but I thought it was great. I felt such a sense of accomplishment when I finally collected all the Flathead artifacts. But everything Zork-related really came full circle when I saw the end-game for Zork Zero and connected that with the end of Zork III... some pretty amazing stuff.

    Thanks for bringing back the memories.

    You know, the Apple II emulation scene is alive and well (so I hear) and there are several emulators for Linux.

  • Posted by Faithless the Wonder Boy:

    Yes, I am seething with 'jelousy' that none of my fellow Britons had that much time to waste, or even the inclination to do so. I'm ashamed that instead of playing Pac-man for six hours, I was actually earning my wage...
    --------------------------------------
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    >The UK hold the land speed record at the moment, BTW.

    Fine, that's something for them to be proud of.

    My point still stands.

    LK
  • Posted by _DogShu_:

    Alot of games DO just rely on graphics and sound... but that's all games are anyway (even old ones).
    But I know what you mean though about gameplay. You should try Aliens vs. Predator. That game is better than all of the Alien and Predator movies combined!
    As for gauntlet, pong, pacman, etc... I never liked moving little blobs into other little blobs vrey much. Its entertaining, for a short while, but nothing I would want to spend more than 10 minutes on. I think new games definately have better gameplay. Don't confuse good memories of your youth with good memories of cheesy video games.
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    This type of arguement can be made for any achievement. Of course you Brits were too busy rebuilding after the war to waste your time on space exploration either, and this is why you don't care that only an American flag flies over the moon.

    LK
  • Anyone have the source for Lemonade Stand around somewhere?

    Yeah, I actually do have it around still, on the original floppy it came on (The Apple ][c still works as well!). Lemonade Stand was written in AppleBASIC, so you could get the source just by LOADing it and typing LIST.

    I also have a 1200 baud modem for the ][c, so it is possible for me to send the file over the modem to my current PC.. The transfer program uses Xmodem (yay), but hey, I could still pull it off that way.

    It might be easier to just rewrite the thing.. :^)

    -- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?
  • uhhhhh, actually that was thomas jefferson.

    I hope you're joking...

    -- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?
  • I got a perfect score in Golden Axe, but of course a couple of thousand other people have probably done the same, it's pretty easy. I can also play Q*Bert on my C64 indefinately, after a while, it stops getting harder, and never stops giving you extra lives. The Pac-Man thing is quite an acomplishment, I never had the patience for that game!

  • Repton (Score:1)

    by jonr ( 1130 )
    Gawd, there is a game I played until the morning. I got Repton2 for BBC Micro, and played and played and played it. It never got boring, always a new way of playing it. (I better dig up some BBC emulators and try to find a usable copy of it) ...

    Jón
  • All were grand, mystical, things that captured the imagination. Feats of man over nature, with cleverness taking the prize.

    The more efficient diesl locomotive replaced the steam engine, but without the grandeur. A modern fuel-injected engine is more efficient and reliable than an older engine, but is incomprehensible.

    The 8 bit machines had the same beauty; building a working computer out of parts meant to control traffic lights and microwaves was an act of genius. And the contortions made by programmers to maximize performance were similar acts, marvelous as much for having been done as for what they actually been accomplished.

    But those days are gone. *sniff*
  • It was NOT a hoax.. I live here.. It happened.. 'Nough said..
  • Score does NOT = levels.. ;-P
  • It's due to max points per screen * max screens..

  • On the subject of old classics (although this from the world of micros, AFAIK)... anyone recognise my nick? :-)

    I think so. Repton (Mania?) was a game that was very popular on the BBC B, IIRC. It had a lizard type thing as the main character. Never played it personally, cos I had a Speccy :-)

    dylan_-


    --

  • I did. I think it was the only Crazy Climber machine in Jamaica but We got the pose together to go "on strike" at the arcade.

    They had just raised the cost of playing from 20c to 40c and the best players took each of the games and ran it into the ground all day. I played a total of 5 games of Crazy Climber in ~6 hours. I also ran a 4+ hour stint on a pinball machine with 3 other players. The Packman, Galaxian and Donkey Kong hackers each did amazing things too.

    It was especially cool how Galaxian lets you earn spare flags and after 10 you get a large flag and after 10 of those you get a cup. That day I saw what 10 cups give you ... but I don't recall. For Galaxian we used a tag team though. Switching between rounds.

    PS : The protest was futile. The prices stayed. The Management bargained with us and a few concessions were won. Ohh to be young and carefree again.

  • How many boards total did this guy accomplish? It must be very high.
  • The UK hold the land speed record at the moment, BTW.

    Regards, Ralph.
  • There are lots of resources into developing patterns that will let you beat each screen flawlessly. My most winning example was the insert from Buckner & Garcia's Pac Man Fever album. I picked up the album at a record convention awhile ago, and tried it out using MAME.
    However, most resources simply show how to clear the board w/ getting all the bonus fruit. Most of them would be too complex to explain how to eat all blue/flashing ghosts. ((200+400+800+1600)*4) per screen...
    Then again, after a certain key (nice fruit. heh.) level, the ghosts don't turn blue again, much like Ms Pacman right before the 3rd babyPac intermission.
    It's a bitch, and will leave you sweaty, but I prefer to clear boards than gobble all the ghosts in higher levels...
  • The roms are the same. If you check out emux.com, you'll notice that there are roms for MAME, not different versions of MAME. The only difference is that you may have to manually unzip the roms as the last time I tried xmame (an older version for sure), it wouldn't detect roms in their zip format.
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • Does the fact that this happened over a holiday weekend have any credence? Not to mention the guy runs a company; he is his own boss and if he can find time to do this over a *holiday* and still run a company, then more power to him.
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • Libertarian Socialism (Anarchism) is the ultimate in personal freedom, expression, and every aspect of the collective is democracy.


    Unfortunately, a trully free individual is free to oppress others.


    A person also has no power to dominate another since no hierachal institutions exist.


    Since when does a person need a hierarchal institution to dominate? All a person needs is superior body strength, weaponry or charisma. Hierarchal institutions are necessary (and evolve perfectly naturally as part of civilization) to channel and control the human tendancy to seek dominance over his peers.


    Of course the automatic responses of crime and acts of hatred are brough up, but it expected that collectively elected constables will exist to deal with major annoyances to society.



    Yes, these institutions are the police, the law and the government. Or would you have one institution for the formation, execution and practice of the law? Perhaps you'd like to see vigilante groups running around lynching suspected criminals in true Old West style?

    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • Give me the names of these places. Were they entire countries? And if Anarchism cannot defend itself from other powers (imperial or otherwise), then does it require that the entire world convert to anarchism for it to remain protected? In that case, you're talking a little more than seven million people. There's over 7 million people in New York alone.

    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • Strange that you choose an example of ~7million people during a time of war who lived under anarchism for roughly 3 years during a civil war. Not to dispute any tenets of anarchism itself, you can barely call that a success or a failure. Societies in war times operate significantly different from those in peace times, and although war places undue stress on a society (especially total war), it also grants to the society unusual benefits, the least of which is a coherent idealogical support base. Further, unusual conditions or no, 3 years is no significant amount of time, and 7 million people is no significant amount of people, relatively speaking, especially considering that many of the people fighting in the Spanish Civil War, whether they be anarchists, socialist or communists, were not from Spain and it is debatable whether they would have remained in Spain upon a Republican victory. The Soviet Union had millions of inhabitants, expansive territory and, eventually, significant industrial and military power. It took the Soviet Union 75 years to collapse, no doubt quickened under the stress of the Cold War (which showed capitalism's inherent superiority in production over soviet communism), but the Cold War certainly cannot be blamed for everything. I don't think most people would call the system the Soviet Union operated under (which they labeled unfairly "communism") a success, despite the fact that it survived 75 years. In fact, you are willing to call republican-capitalism a failure even though it has survived in various forms within the United States for over 220 years. Yet 3 years is a success?

    Again, I am not saying that the eventual failure in Spain proves anarchy a failure; merely that it's short-lived success does not prove anarchism a success and perhaps you should find a better example if you are going to use examples to prove your point.
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • This reads like something out of the Onion... I can't tell whether it's real or not :)
  • I just laugh out loud. Any man who follows such things blindly deserves to be laughed at. This makes me few friends and many enemies however.
  • That's clearly Infocom's _WITNESS_ (1983) a great Raymond Chandler-style game set in 1940's L.A. And the butler was named Phong.

  • Stupid? How is it stupid?

    He got paid. Near the end of his career he got paid a LOT.

    It also gave him exposure which helped him land jobs in film (remember Predator?).

    Yeah, I'll admit the job was silly, but if he made a living at it, do I really have a bitch about it? It's like garbage men. You know how much they get paid?


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • I think I was 13 or 14 at the time and my Scout troop spent a day at a small arcade supplier's warehouse. No, I didn't get through the game on one credit. Heck, I didn't get through the game on ONE HUNDRED credits, but finally, I DID get through the game! Amazing what unlimited credits will do.

    Okay, you can start calling me a lamer and a munchkin. I'll acknowledge it.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • I never said anything about pro wrestling being intelligent or redeeming. I merely stated that it was a JOB. One that put food on the table for his family. What's the problem with that? That's all, nothing more

    And FYI, no I DO NOT watch it. It's gotten way too melodramatic and overblown. But if it keeps Joe-Bob and his brood out of mischief?


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!


  • Well, I'll be. Someone who had more time to spare than I did!

  • Perfect Score in Gauntlet? Probably not possible. Tho' I tried... Eight hours on one quarter, once. Ah, to be 11 during the summer again...
  • Blame Canada!

  • The technical explanation is the "stage" byte keeps getting incremented until it hits 0. When the game goes to look up settings for stage 0, it reads garbage and goes haywire. Nice table. ;)

    Just like FDIV on an original Pentium, only it looks prettier. :)

  • I remember playing Pac-Man, and being amazed at the level of effort required to make it to level four. Two Hundred levels! That guy must be a god of achievement.

    I can't help but wondering how he went potty, especially since he was on video tape the whole time.

    I wonder if it's possible to make the perfect game in Gauntlet?

    Elf... your life force is running out

  • I did three hours of joust once... I thought my hand was going to fall off. I guess I need to train more...
  • Ahh, I remember the two first adventure games I played on my little Mac Plus:

    "Deja Vú" and "Uninvited"

    They were both unbelievably cool. E.g in Uninvited you had to say "Instantum Illuminaris Abraxas" (wasn't it?) to scare off two rotweilers guarding a doorway.

    The fun of computer games.
    -
    Jesus saves - Gretzky gets the rebound and scores!
  • What I hate most is when the owners of arcade machines (at local pizza places, etc.) unplug or turn off the power at night! I set the high scores on Space Invaders, Pac Man and Asteroids everytime I go to our local movie theatre. I might feel like I'd accomplished more if it meant I'd beaten someone any better than the high school kid who put in a quarter and said "this sucks" then walked away. There should UPS systems built into every arcade machine, or at least the arcade equivalent of a CMOS battery to keep the scores!
  • You cant tilt a Pac Man, silly!

  • To knock loose a pixel of wall to eat... I requires a realy big tilt though :)
  • ...doesn't matter. I want to see the video tape so I can see the game and be able to figure out if pac-man has any ai built in or if it is truly patterns throughout the total group of boards.
  • The ghosts didn't run patterns, they moved according to where you were (and each ghost had it's own personality), but there was no randomness to their movements, so if you did exactly the same thing on a certain level, the ghosts did exactly the same thing.

    On later versions, they added in some randomness as well as the ai, it made the games harder......


    Well then the question is begged: Which type of machine was he on? Was it a first edition that had little to no AI, or was it a newer machine that would have made his 6 hours living hell? Albeit playing Pac-Man for 6 hours (new or old version) would seem a little extreme (and close to hellish) to most.
  • So some guy spent a couple of days doing something that he loves and has a passion for, who cares? There's more to life than just work and getting things done. How many people lie on their death bed and say "I wish I worked more"? (can't really say I wished I played more video games - but to each his own) By your argument, all world records are a waste of time - so really, Americans are the guilty ones, its the human race (the Olimpics anyone?)
  • Hmmm.... you hate America, you hate Americans, you think we're all stupid, lazy, and ignorant, yet you are exactly like the rest of us because nothing sets you apart. You hate us without reason!

    Maybe you should move to Canada, though. You'd fit in pretty good there.
    ----- if ($anyone_cares) {print "Just Another Perl Newbie"}
  • ... and their attitudes, are the reason I found out what Canada was all about. Spent the first part of my life thinking Canada was just a really nice place, just like America, only farther north and a little colder. With nice people just like here.

    Then, I found out about the "No, I'm not an American," attitude... Any national pride I've seen exhibited by a Canadian is not so much concerned with being proud of anything Canada or Canadians have done, but simply degrading America and proudly stating, "At least I'm not American!" Anyone else notice this attitude? It really turned me off to Canada, which is a pity since that's where my fiancee lives (but not for long!)

    ps. Regardless of the bad attitude towards American tourists, Banff, AB is a really nice place to visit, and I reccomend visiting it for the Sulphur Mountain Gondola to my US brethren! But don't let them find out you're one of those cursed Americans! hahahah... amazing.
    ----- if ($anyone_cares) {print "Just Another Perl Newbie"}
  • Conan only worked if you had the Original disks or some times you could get buy with makeing shure your drives speed was exact. I can remember my first apple ][ games were mad ball and blister bomber :)
  • There's a reason classic games were so much better:

    Graphics Sucked.

    Since graphics of the day sucked, you couldn't take the same game you had before, slap new pixels around it, and say, "Come buy our new game! Aren't these graphics _cool_?"

    If you wanted to sell a new game, you pretty much had to come up with a new game. Not new packaging for the same old game again...

    -F

  • http://www.classicgaming.com/pac-ma n/split00.gif [classicgaming.com]

    No, I don't know why a blank space appears in the text of that link, but it shouldn't be there. It still works if you just click on it, though.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Yes, do us proud (Score:3)

    by Arkahn ( 14759 ) on Monday July 05, 1999 @04:43PM (#1817847)
    "Mitchell purposefully arrived on July 1st -- Canada's Day -- and won the title in time for the Fourth of July. He even wore a red, white and blue, Star-Star Spangled Banner tie to emphasize the patriotic sentiments behind his efforts."

    I'm working on finishing up a web (pseudo-)programming project this evening to meet a deadline, getting all stressed out knowing I'm not going to make it, and when I read that, I just laughed my ass off!

    Right on, fellow American! Do us Proud!

    *cackle*
  • Speaking of amusing patriotic nonsense, http://www.namco.com has been touting the 20th anniversary of "an American icon".

    How amusing that Namco's PR department thinks it can push more units by prevailing on nationalistic sentiment. But I'm a little insulted that Namco's PR department thinks we're simple-minded enough to accept the quintessential Japanese video game icon as one of our own.

    Then again... Pac-Man is a creature that lives only to consume, and wins by consuming more than anyone else. Very Japanese, but very American too.
  • Ok, here's some info that I collected about Gauntlet (the original, not II) back from when it was in the Purdue Student Union (circa 1987-1988) and I used to play it all the time.

    The player score will store 8 digits but only displays the rightmost 7 digits. Someone at Purdue ran the Elf score up to 11 million; it had the #1 spot, with my 4.5 million in #2.

    Player health will store (at least) 6 digits but only displays the rightmost 5. I've personally ran my health up over 100,000 and had no problems at all when it came back below 100K.

    I didn't observe this personally, but the person that scored the 11M score claims that after level 999, it goes back to level 8 (as you know, the first 7 levels are static). My best was a 10-hour game where I scored 4.5 million and completed 450 levels, getting my health up to around 110K or so.

    Player health ticks down at the rate of 53 per minute; the person with the 11M game let the game sit overnight (while the arcade was closed), and ran off 60K health overnight.

    All this was done on an original Gauntlet machine, one which didn't have the food chip modification (the one that randomly deletes some food). The game was set on the toughest difficulty; of course the standard difficulty setting only affects how fast the generators generate monsters.

    As far as a perfect Gauntlet game goes, it's possible to go quite a ways without being hit by a monster. There was a certain nasty corner on level 4 where it was difficult to clear w/o getting hit by at least 1 ghost; it was doable though. I myself have made it through level 5 (the demon level) without taking any demon hits, and since our standard way of doing level 6 (the sorcerer level) was to wait ~200 health for the walls to turn to exits and kill them shooting over the exits (it was easy to regain the health with the 3 foods on that level and make a small health profit).

    By the way, in case you're wondering, the version of Gauntlet that's on the Playstation is the one WITH the food chip modification; IMHO it makes the game much less fun, because there are many places in the game where a food is holding back monsters or whatever and having that food not be there makes the game much tougher than the loss of 100 health. I don't know about the MAME rom, I haven't played it.

    If anyone else wants more Gauntlet info, just ask.
  • Whats next? Fender rusting? :)


    __// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains
  • try Adom [www.adom.de], a free rogue-like game that kicks major ass. It has a real steep curve (which I have yet to surmount... tho I haven't really tried) but once you do it has a whole world to explore. You'll freak at the sight of a few measly ASCII characters!
  • A Mind Forever Voyaging is on Activision's "Classics of Infocom" CD. I can't offhand remember the official title of the compilation, but i have it. It includes the data files for 30 or so old infocom games. all you need is a z-machine emulator. Various versions of one called frotz are available here [geocities.com].
  • It was funny to read, it sounds like some Canadians have been working on this feat for some time and this pacman genius decides to just show up and do it, for the motherland. There was an air of seriousness to it all, planning was involved.

    "I usually like to do a few marathon gaming sessions building up before the big day, then I don't play any games for two days and on the first day off I take some herbal body clensing supplement to clean the pipes and get the bad mojo out of my system then I carbo load all day the day before. The morning before, I go to a special place out doors that only I know about and sit on a rock on top of a mountain where I meditate (primordial sound) and ask for enlightenment and guidance on the tough levels once my meditation is done I lock my self in a dark room and listen to Rage Against the Machine cranked up to 11 to get a little pumped. I play a few quick speed rounds of super mario brothers to loosen up and then I go to the arcade...sure it's a lot of preparation but this is for America..."

  • There is a way to do this.

    If you go into a particular spot on the board (the corner about an inch up and to the right of Pacman's starting position) without the ghosts "seeing" you, the ghosts' movements will revert to a fixed pattern and they won't find you.

    The person who originally figured this out had way too much time on his hands.

  • Anyone remember a text-based adventure game (a la Zork), where you played a detective and had to find a killer. There was a butler named Fong, and it took place in a mansion... I never solved it, but I'd kill to know who the killer was. Me and my best friend spent like an entire summer playing that game, never being able to win it.


    Oh, you must mean "Choose Your Own Damn Serial Murder" [brunching.com]!

    Actually, this might not be what you were talking about :(

    -NooM
  • Did anyone else watch Seinfeld? ;)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • My first roomate right after high school would go down to the store and play Gauntlet for about 7-8 hours a shot (He always started with 2 quarters) and would regularly turn the machine over. It was pretty impressive. On other nostalgia notes, the first program I wrote from scratch was "Vic-Gauntlet" on the Vic-20 in basic in under 5k of ram. It actually worked ok, albeit slowly.
  • After asking a couple of people here, and a quick chat with Walter Day from Twin Galaxies, this makes a bit more sense. :)
    While I still remember the score overflowing, nobody else does, so feel free to ignore me on that respect. The score mentioned on the site is the exact score possible if you complete each level perfectly(every dot, blue ghost, etc) before the game crashes at the final level. Some slashdot readers here with a good memory also brought up the point about some levels having differing scoring potential. Quickly figuring things out myself, the score they have listed seems correct.
    So, it seems this all is quite possible, although definately more work than I have patience for anymore. :)
    Kevin Day
    Midway Games
    (speaking strictly for myself, not my employer)
    (and incidentally, someone here at work still has a box of a certain PacMan pasta dinner in his office...)
  • It's been a while since I've played PacMan, i don't think this is possible.

    After you pass 250 levels, an overflow existed, which would make the game essentially unplayable. A screenshot of what happens at this point is here [classicgaming.com].

    Assuming at best 20,000 points per level, 5,000,000 is about the peak. However, if I remember right, the score would overflow at 2 million.

    In any case, some of us bored people in school played long enough to crash the game at level 250 years ago, and it's nothing new.

    If anyone really wants, i could try to ask around at work about what score the overflow happened.

    Kevin Day
    Game Programmer
    Midway Games
    (no, I had nothing to do with PacMan.. before my time)

  • Man, I can't believe someone posted something about that old game.
    It was one of the first things I ever saw running on a computer - a Commodore PET at my elementary school (at the time we had three PETs on carts and that was it).
    They showed us that and a tic-tac-toe game and a few other simple programs like that and the BASIC code behind the scenes.
    The first non-"hello world" program I ever coded was my own version of Lemonade Stand on my C64 back at home, just to see if I could do it. What a load of spaghetti code! But it worked and it had more "features" too. :-)
  • There are bonus things for all the levels but it's not always fruit. After about the 13th or 15th level, its keys. They're worth 5000 points, and its keys all the way to the last screen.
  • i sincerely hope that's a joke... if this is the greatest thing humans are capable of... there is no hope.
  • 3,333,360 points, as reported by the article, divided by 255 = 13072 points/level. Can anyone verify this as the maximum number of points you can score on a level?
  • Wow. Proof positive that ACs are the most obnoxious /. posters in the world.
  • how the hell are we suppoesed to "trace the IP" of an AC?
    _
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • you know, if you look hard enough, you can find a lot of those games for teh PC.
    I know of emulators for the appleII, atari2600, NES, and others. plus Mame. it shouldn't be to hard to play your favorite games, and many others if you look :)
    _
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • t was a wonderful time to be a kid, as long as you didn't mind doing your own cooking.

    WTF???
    _
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • the 2600 didn't have enough power to do pac man right... how sad. NES pac man was cool

    the NES was the greatest video game system ever created... *sigh*
    _
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • well, they *should* have...

    I think the best would have been flashram, seeing how it won't die in 5 years or so... I don't know what I'm going to do when my Zelda NES game dies (maybe I should try and beat the game).
    but it really dosn't matter now. No arcade games can be played for more then a few minutes without stuffing another quarter in. In the quake arcade game, your helth was constantly going down, as to make it imposible to live for a long time.

    consquently, I'd be willing to be that a high score in any game could be acomplished with enough quarters, witch is sad

    arcades just arn't fun anymore. With the graphical capabilitys of home computers and consoles, they just don't matter anymore.
    _
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • If this feat was actually done, was there a programmer's easter egg at the end? Also, how do we 'actually' know how many boards there were, and how many points are _really_ possible?? I knew a girl who new how to do certain 'patterns' of eating the dots, and she could go on forever. She would get her fill of the game and leave it 'running' when she left. I always thought that there was only one pacman version - not any 'later' versions. Is this feat for the 'original' pacman???

    These are important questions that need answering.
  • You know, I've been looking for Hard Hat mack for 2 months, but I couldn't remember the name! You've made my day! THANKS!
  • Does leaving your 'mark' at a new arcade refer to how the Pac-Man guy used the restroom while standing at the Pac-Man machine all day? Gross.
  • oh wow! I'd forgotten about that game .. it used to crash ... hmmm .. what point was that .. I can picture the screen in my head ... you'd go into the room on the left and try to grab something or other and that was it. My fav game on the apple ][e was Minute Man .. flyin a helicopter to build a bride so a train could go over it ... but the evil russians (I think) kept stealing the parts. Weee! memories!
  • I haven't heard much from him that I don't like. And he's a pot-smoking, ho-loving, Navy SEAL, Venura for Pres. 2004.



  • Playing pac-man as a little kid .. I sucked, I still suck. But I loved it... and that's the whole point.

    I still remember programming pong or some derevation of pong on my vic-20 late at night. As games today progress from what they used to be to a total submersion into a new reality we often forget that sometimes it's the simple things in life/computer games that are the most *fun*.

    *sniff* it's almost enough to make me want to boot up that old apple IIe ... na!
  • It's not sick, it' hardcore.

  • Interesting, but in the OLD Pac-Man... (Score:4)

    by CJ Hooknose ( 51258 ) on Monday July 05, 1999 @04:44PM (#1817883) Homepage
    ...it was impossible to complete more than 255 boards. The 8-bit "board register" in the old game started out at 1, naturally, and when you got past board 255, it tried to access board 0. Then, the game basically gave you a "Seg Fault" and displayed random graphical garbage over half the screen. No, I don't have a screenshot; wish I did.

    Max score per board in Pac-Man is something like 20,000 points. (That's eating each ghost 4 times on each power pill and chomping 1 5000-point bonus fruit.) 12,000/board is a little more realistic for an awesome player. But anyway... it's an awesome achievement, kind of like eating 28 hot dogs in 30 seconds.

  • I do not believe this to be a hoax for a variety of reasons.

    First of all, I know the book exists. I saw it in a bookstore once and was amused to see scores of mine from recent pinball tournaments in it. ;)

    Secondly, there was much hoopla, at least in rec.games.pinball about this event (probably in other groups like rec.games.video.arcade* too). One such message from one of the organizers is hopefully at http://x21.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=472947745.1&CONTE XT=931240958.1977679960&hitnum=13 . (I'm not sure how to get a more specific ref from deja, forgiveness if that breaks.)

    Thirdly, there most certainly is a maximum score to Pac-Man. The game crashes at Stage 256 (if you didn't know that by now, what kind of nerd are you??), so there is a finite end. I don't know the exact numbers involved offhand, but with a little knowledge (dots*10 + 4*50 for energizers) * 255, that's the basic eating score. Add to that 2 cherries * 100, 2 strawberries * 200, 4 oranges * 400, etc. for all of the fruits. For all boards where the energizers actually turn the monsters blue (they stop after awhile), add (200+400+800+1600)*4*(number-of-boards-with-blueab le-monsters).

    The only hard part after awhile would be setting up the monsters for the perfect kill every time. Clearing the boards is simple rote, as has been demonstrated years ago, as the first Pac-Man ROMs didn't have randomness or anything. So after the last working-energizer board, the game is essentially DONE except for the sheer work involved.

    There is one muddy point, and that is the settings or ROMs of the games. The original game, for example, had long blue periods for the first 3 boards, whereas the newer ones were long-medium-short-longish. The first game would obviously have a higher top score, as there would be more available blue boards.

    Anyway, hopefully this mostly debunkified this as being a hoax. I for one am pretty convinced it is legit.
  • I probably should've elaborated more in my previous posting (see first thread), but there are a couple of factors here.

    The technical explanation is the "stage" byte keeps getting incremented until it hits 0. When the game goes to look up settings for stage 0, it reads garbage and goes haywire. Nice table. ;)

    (For those that aren't aware, a similar thing happens in Galaga. After Stage 255, comes Stage 0. Except in Galaga, you can still move and shoot, the starfield still moves, but Stage 0 never disappears and no enemies ever show up. This is a feat I personally actually managed to accomplish on a "fast-fire" Galaga. I believe I wound up with something in the 3M range. It would be a significant exercise, but you can compute the theoretical maximum of Galaga, too.)

    Anyhoo, the score will in fact wrap at 1M. There's not really any way to know, except that someone witnesses the fact that it did, each time. If they have it on tape, I'm sure you can see each time it rolled. The high score stops counting, since your score is now "below" the new high score. I rolled a Pac-Man once using patterns found in video game books back then, but I was never good enough or cared enough to play to the "end." I assume the scores were kept in BCD, but I don't know for sure. I am aware of similar circumstances in solid-state pinball games (it's pretty obvious what it takes to roll an electro-mechanical game).

    As far as scores/level, it will tend towards 13000 or so. Say ~200 dots (2000) 4 energizers (200), 2 keys (10,000) for 12,200/level. Figure out how many dots there are, and you can figure it out for sure. I think keys start at about the 20th level or so, and ghosts won't turn blue after 25-30, so at least 200 levels will be as I described above. On levels you can eat monsters, there are 12000 points there (200+400+800+1600)*4. So the scores will vary early on from 12000-14000/level up to 25000/level, but most levels will be 12000-13000 or whatever the number is.

    Keith Johnson
    Game Programmer
    Williams Electronics Games, Inc. ;)
    (I played Pac-Man when I was 8-9 or so)
  • You mean when I beat this in 4th grade I shoulda *told* somebody? Doh!

  • The Golden Age (Score:3)

    by gutterface ( 61662 ) on Monday July 05, 1999 @05:34PM (#1817900)
    Maybe it's because I'm an adult now, but I've always felt the classic video games were superior to today's games. So many of the modern games seem to rely on graphics and sound, with little else to enjoy.

    I consider Gauntlet to be the all time arcade game myself... nothing I've seen since, compares.

    Castle Wolfenstein and Castle Wolfenstein II rocked. Nothing like playing it for the first time, and suddenly you see Hitler. It scared the shit out of me.

    The Apple II rocked for games. Anyone remember Hard Hat Mack? I still think Wizardry I is the all time great RPG game.

    Maybe Linux will bring a renaissance to classic games. With it's growing popularity, and minimalist feel, we could see a resurgence. Maybe a Wizardry type game...

    Anyone remember a text-based adventure game (a la Zork), where you played a detective and had to find a killer. There was a butler named Fong, and it took place in a mansion... I never solved it, but I'd kill to know who the killer was. Me and my best friend spent like an entire summer playing that game, never being able to win it.

    Anyone have the source for Lemonade Stand around somewhere?
  • after digging through their website looking at tournament schedules, i noticed there was some videogame/pinball competition held in littleton, CO on April 26, 1999. so that's what those kids have been doing with their days off from school :)

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