Slashdot Mirror
Pacman for Excel 97 and 2000
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.
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 ...
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Orppf urp mf y.ppcxn. yflcbi otcnnov C am yflcbi yr n.apb Ekrpatv (Dvorak -> Qwerty)
http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/pacell.lzh
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.
... Good Man!"
"I see Johnson's still working in the Pacell account
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.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Considering more /.ers speak English than Japanese, the English version might be more useful.
I've actually found that Excel is a really quick and easy environment to program cellular automata.
.xls file, or just the code if you'd rather.
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
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
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.
All things in moderation; including moderation