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Perfect score in Pac-Man
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.
Can't tell you tho!
Who says you have to tilt? ;)
Bah... Pacman is wus game, Try and play 30 mins on crazy climber.. Now that would be impressive.
heh ;) that it would.
as i recall when you passed the 3mill+ mark the game went haywire. i used to have a pacman book of patterns that described how random ghosts appeared and disappeared -- it sounded like an overflow of some kind. i passed a million in 1982. i'm sure he's not the first to do it.
I've done it before several times. It's not nearly as hard as Pac Man, cause there are lots of critters you can shoot for 10 points each.
Back when I was a teen, I used to get perfect scores on every character (except sometimes the Valkyrie, it's just too frustrating to play) to leave my 'mark' at a new arcade, usually on the same day.
Getting a perfect score on Gauntlet II... now, that's challenging.
Didn't the guy who got his picture on the front cover of Time magazine (for getting the world record on Defender) play for something like 36 hours straight?
And I remember some guys teaming up and playing Robotron for TWO WEEKS straight. (I've played it for 12 hours straight before...)
My personal favorite is Zookeeper. I wonder if they still have that? Anyway, I concur. Funspot is the Fun Spot.
I laughed myself silly at this one... South Park: The Movie definitely had its moments.
I can't help but wondering how he went potty, especially since he was on video tape the whole time.
There's a place on the screen where you can leave the pac-man and the ghosts will never find you. It's just underneath and to the right of where the
bonus thingies appear. When I was a kid spending my lunch money on video games, I used to leave the man there and then go across the park to my house to go to the bathroom and then come back, and the game would still be going, unless someone else came in and messed it up.....
My life was so much fucking better back then........
Wasn't this thematic and presented in "Absence of Malice" with Paul Newman and Sally Field? There are some pretty rare examples of the media being portrayed as the vultures they are.
Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura skewered the pop media circus on "Tim Russert" on CNBC yesterday (presented in 24-bit digital video on my Sun Ultra 10 at the office).
> Why don't they ever depict news reporters as
> fresh-carrion seeking heartless monsters?:)
I wonder what the high score of pong was....
:o)
.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......
The people talking about later versions are probably thinking of Ms. Pacman (a new game in its own right) which had monsters with randomized movement. Much harder than Pacman, but also more fun.
There were lots of spinoffs. There was a Pacman pinball game, a 3D "pacmania" game from Atari, and probably lots more that I can't remember right now.
wooden shoe?
Wow, what a lovely steaming pile of dog crap. Actually, I think this guy is an insult to America. I personally feel insulted now. If I was a citizen of another country I would be thinking to myself, "God, Americans are pretty damn stupid! Glad I don't live in that country...." oh but wait, I do.. time to move. Do most "Americans" know how to do anything but waste time? Who the hell cares about this? Did this make anyones day? The very fact that this made it onto the web, wasting time and energy of people in its accomplishment (albeit of questionable value).. I feel as if I am wasting my time and energy simply posting this response. There is too much damn media, too many charlatans.. I must leave this country. Must escape................
I live in Laconia (a superset of the Weirs, as the Weirs is not a seperate city) and I don't know as I consider Funspot to be as famous as the article claims. And let me say as someone who knows, that place gets damn boring after about 5 hours. On the plus side, knowing the employees when I was in high school kicked...
= 3366000. That perfect score is definitely attainable.
uhhhhh, actually that was thomas jefferson.
ben franklin was famous for the quote "that motherfucking lightning damn near fried my ass!".
It's ok, you were close.
And I have to agree, the guy did it, and that's exactly one step better than not having done it.
Nope. If you want proof positive watch an entire baseball game on television...
Read the article. They didn't say they looked at the old high scores, they said they looked at the number of times the games was played. Then you multiply the average times each machine was played by the total number of original machines manufactured. A little reading, some basic math skills, you'll figure it out eventually.
Hmm... nothing like trolling AC's attempting to start a nationality flame war...
Uhhm, you suck.
You are absolutely correct. I have seen the 255 screens behavior myself. Dale Peterson in Madison Wisconsin was our local Pac-Man expert at Voyager Arcade. He could play for hours and hours and caused the machine to display half a screen of good maze and half a screen of garbage several times in the course of his "career". If I remember correctly, you could move Pac-Man wherever you wanted on the garbage side of the screen, there were no boundaries. The story reads more like a promotional piece than a hoax to me. Idiots.
Patriotism really annoys me. It reminds me of religions since the people under it (in this case, the nation which is the US) seem to thank and praise the "higher" being as if it's some part of the "good"/right side. If he was aware of the atrocities the great US has committed (mainly for the good of the rich and fascist corporations), I doubt he'd be so patriotic.
eeekk ... don't be such an id*ot ... the point was it was the 1st recorded perfect score ...
and a perfect score is impossible because you think its hard to eat all the ghosts ? HAHA !! get a life
Nice to see an article about these legendary and still great games. A few friends and I were playing some Pac-Man and other games on my Atari 2600 and 5200's over the 4th.... Great fun. No killing, just little squares that move around. Doesn't get any better then that!
entropy is a law.
all that matters is the next game.
As the original poster, I would like to point out that I didn't post flamebait.
I would also like to point out that I'm an American, trace my IP address if you don't believe me. Some people are just so ludicrously touchy.
He really likes video games so he's an insult to America. Uh, yeah. Somebody runs really fast for a hundred metres, and they are treated like a god by the country they represent. Someone takes the time to master Pac-Man and they are (generally) considered childish, a loser, the scum of the earth, whatever.
Very strange indeed!
All patriotism is "I was born here, therefore it must be the best fucking place in the world and my country can do no wrong!"
To America: where we have a memorial to the Holocaust, but we don't mention the 2 million Indians we wiped out or that little mistake called 'slavery'.
The principles on which the country were found are dandy, but it would be a better place if we actually followed them.
"Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race."
- Albert Einstein
We may have gone to the moon for all the wrong reasons, but I still feel that it was the greatest human achievement ever. Think about it: we actually left the planet of our origins. We defied nature completely, it's utterly amazing.
Now if we actually setup a working colony that was self sustaining (and we never will) that will be absolutely incredible. Too bad capitalism rules the world and not wonder. The age of enlightenment is over, we'll simulate it all on computers anyhow.
This is the end. The end, my friend... Oh well, it's better to be at a peak than a valley, ask any rock climber.
Ahem, maybe you mean foreigners of countries w/ access to these things. Anyways, I bet there are people who've accomplished many of these feats but history books haven't recorded them (circumnavigation? I think some earlier civilization(s) may have done this). Also, the desire of achieving these records comes from pride and such (if you're religious you'd know the warning given in regards to pride) and not all countries share in our sense of what to be proud of, leading to the lack of desire to hold records for stuff like the largest hotdog.
For god's fucking sake, lighten up you dimwits. I only posted it because it's extremely wierd that some lunatic decided to do something so utterly irrelevant. It's embarassing for my country, you know, the United States.
I mean, can you imagine the state of mind this guy has got to be in? The Japanese (who invented Pac Man by the way) must be laughing their collective asses off. The guy takes "loser" to new heights.
Let me put it this way, I'm from California, land of fruits and nuts, and I still think it's damn strange, and I know a lot of damn strange people. This is just downright odd, no other way to describe it. Imagine how long this guy worked to do this, hello? Ever play a video game for that long? I played Vanguard until I could play for hours, that took probably 100 hours to do. This guy has been working at it since Pac Man was invented. How else can you describe this person? Exciting? Mentally Stable?
Oh, now I get it, this guy sucks because he spent a lot of time doing something he enjoyed and did something no one else had ever done before, but you're really cool because you took a couple seconds to make fun of him on a geek bulletin board.
I wish I could be as cool as you.
I emigrated to the US thinking it to be great and all until I met the xenophobia here. Before attending school (I came when I was 5 or 6 and am 20 now) I never heard of any of the atrocities the US has committed (seems to be a taboo) and even in grade school, the info was pretty watered down. I was bombarded w/ all the "proud to be an American" crap and was unfortunately brainwashed for some time (I see this in my younger cousin these days) until I literally "grew up." It's almost as if no one cared what happened "as long as it didn't happened to me" and that to feel good/pride is more important. About the "higher being," incidentally, most European countries had attributed their successes to "HIM" and believed that "HE" supported only one of them (themselves). It's funny but the idea of patriotism seems to conflict w/ the American belief that individuality is "good" since patriotism requires "patriots" to behave in a group-mindset to further the goals of the country. Yeah, as an American, I've been constantly haunted by the knowledge that what my adopted nation has done as well as my former homeland and *EVERYTIME* I hear all this patriotic BS makes me cringe thinking that we're going to head toward some unspeakable end.
He didn't enjoy it.
:) Rock climbing is a good start, that's one sport I haven't gotten into yet. Of course, that's useless too, but you'll be in great condition so it's not entirely useless. It's a good way to pick up chicks too which is also useless, but hell, I cannot deny it's fun. Selfish genes are bizarre that way.
Trust me. As somebody that has mastered many a task for the sole sake of mastering it, he didn't enjoy it. Try it sometime. It's 99.99999% persistence. The enjoyment is gone after the 200th game, all of it.
It's stupid to do stuff like that. It's equivalent to hacking a computer system, sure it seems fun when you get root after spending 1,000 hours and skipping classes to do it, but a year later you're amazed at just how much time you wasted doing something so utterly useless!
I wish I could be as cool as you.
Instead of wishing do something about it.
Not you, the owners of the site. I would be very surprised if they didn't log it - especially since it's been hacked a few times.
And what's with the comment on "AC"? You couldn't trace me if I had logged in any better or worse. As if pointing out that I'm anonymous is some sort of deragatory remark or something.
Gee, I'm really sorry that I didn't make a hotmail account named "SDAF2345" and sign on so that I could be "TRACED"! That's MUCH then simply not signing in!! Blargh.
The hard part is getting the roms.
BTW Anyone know how to convert the roms for the windows version of mame to the linux version(xmame)?
I think that US has a strong need for patriotism since it is (or has been) a country of immigrants. All that flag waving and stuff is (or has been) necessary to create a country.
I live in Sweden and if I say I'm proud to be Swedish it's seen as being un-Swedish. To complain about Sweden is a national caracteristic... (unless someone attacks it of course, something like your attitude to your parents as a teen perhaps ?)
If I go around waving the Swedish flag I would probably be targeted as a racist or something like that. If I said stuff like "This is the greatest country on earth, god bless Sweden" it would be seen as an American parody sketch.
If I said stuff like "This is the greatest country on earth, god bless Sweden" it would be seen as an American parody sketch.
Actually as an American, whenever I see that here, I tend to laugh myself, but quietly.
And he's a pot-smoking
That's why I like him, but I cannot get over the fact that he was a stupid "pro" wrestler. I cannot think of a more stupid job in the world, except maybe president of the United States of America, or a congressman..
Navy SEAL
I don't see the link there either other than some macho bullshit parody of a man. As if taking a job where your sole purpose is to kill other people just like you but on the "other side" is something that is respectable. I guess some people never grow up, certainly few do before 18, which is recruiting age by complete coincidence of course.
I have tried it. And I have enjoyed it. 200th game? More like 20,000th. And I know what the guy means when he said now I'll never have to play that game again. But I wouldn't trade the time I killed on video games for anything else.
So now you've found a new obsession, and your old one seems silly. Well, recursive functions can be a drag.
Log what? So you you know what ISP I came from so what? You think they all keep records? The one I work at doesn't. You could trace it back to us, and we could say 'well, it was one of a couple thousand people, unless it was someone breaking in again......'
It's a very difficult thing to do (max points in Pac-Man) simply because there are levels where the ghosts are "eatable" for a very short amount of time and in order to eat 'em all, you have to use another technique which abandons the currently well-known patterns--which allows one to complete the level but don't account for max points.
None of us had parents. None of my friends anyway.
It was like growing up in a Peanuts comic strip.
But I wouldn't trade the time I killed on video games for anything else.
Christ I would.
The only reason I played video games is that I grew up in a Jerkwater town in northern NY where the nearest MOVIE the-ater was 45 miles away. I can never ever go back to that again.. I just got invited to a class reunion, I'd rather drill a hole through my head while performing a vasectomy on myself. Of course, the skiing was good, but it only lasted 3 months of the year, and it was COLD.
Anyhow, skiing is more fun, hang gliding is more fun, sky-diving is more fun, bar hopping is more fun, just going into the city is more fun (I'm now making up for my lost childhood, with a vengeance). There's a lot more fun things to do than play video games, that's all I'm saying. Wait, I'm also saying that getting in a book for some stupid ahievement like that to get your 15 milliseconds of fame is kind of trite. It's not quite Darwin awards, but it's just about as close - I'm having difficulty believing this guy will reproduce anyhow if not because of the obsession then the radiation that he's been exposed to from those cheap-ass electron accelerators.
There are better things to do and I pity you if you don't know it, but I suspect that you do.
Christ I would.
No you wouldn't.
Not for the options you had at the time. You're just like me, it was the best choice you had at the time.
And I wish I could be as focused today as I was when was 11 years old and I knew exactly what I wanted and I knew exactly how to get it, 25 cents at a time.
HTTP is a protocol implemented on top of TCP/IP to make it's connection. Every packet I send has the source IP address (this machine) and the destination machine (slashdot). Furthermore, there is an ACK/NAK protocol built into it, so the IP address is verified; spoofing will only work if it's on the same subnet unless I break into one of the main routers, and that's not easy to do - so you can still trace it to my general vicinity.
And for the record, I'm not going through an ISP, I'm at work - I have a direct connection to the net. Also, if I was using an ISP it would be odd if I was using a foreign one wouldn't it? Especially considering those long distance charges and all.
And yes, I do think they keep all records, at least for a few days until they become irrelevant. I would if I were running the site. It would be stupid not to. Well, perhaps not stupid, but very careless. It's so trivial to do I don't see why they wouldn't.
If this is ever traced, you'll find me in Mountain View California screwing off instead of doing work like I should be. Ah hell with it, it's late, I need to go to bed.
The number is 2^8. Screens not points. The number of points is an artificial product of the number of points you can get on those 255 screens. So yeah, it's a power of two that's important here. If they would have made the bonus cherry on the first level worth 200 instead of 100, the max possible score would have been different. But the number of screens you would have to clear to get those points would be the same. For someone who hasn't played the game in 15 years, I know way too much about this stuff..........
No you wouldn't.
Not for the options you had at the time. You're just like me, it was the best choice you had at the time.
Ok, I admit that is true, but only because I had no options. It wasn't a choice, well maybe a choice between absolute insanity from cabin fevor or wasting hours upon hours to get through it, it wasn't much of a choice. Anyhow, all those hours sitting in front of the screen paid off, at least in terms of money. I have no complaints about that. Money may not buy happiness but it increases the chances of it I think; this is true - I'm not even trying to be glib.
Do yourself a favor and investigate contracting. I'm deadly serious. You may have notions that it is wrong to make a lot of money, but keep in mind that there are a lot of people working at Microsoft that think the same thing, and that's why Bill Gates is a billionaire. You do the work, you should get a piece of the pie, and be generous with it, no reason to be greedy after a point - you can do a lot of good. Oh, and save money, this boom isn't going to go on forever, I recommend the mutual fund SWPIX or VFINX - they are funds that have the same companies that makes up the S&P 500 which typically outperforms most mutual funds - just shows you how competent fund managers are, well, aren't. Also, once you put money in one of these funds, be disciplined and don't touch it (no matter what the @#$ market does!!) until you retire or you will regret it when you hit 55. It will crash and it will recover - do dollar cost averaging. Also, keep cash in a bank account just in case the market crashes at the same time you loose your job, since people are often laid off when the market crashes. I recommend at least 6 months of the money that you need to live on - at minimum. It's not as hard to save up as you think.
This is sage advice. Your company only wants to exploit you, you have to plan for your own retirement. The earlier you start, the easier it is. I wish I started at 25, but I started at 28. It makes a huge difference over time, believe me. If you don't believe me now, you will believe me later. I got it relatively early.
And I wish I could be as focused today as I was when was 11 years old and I knew exactly what I wanted and I knew exactly how to get it, 25 cents at a time.
Yeah, none of us are as focused as we used to be. It's called burnout. Make money while you can, you'll be washed up before you're 40.
I can do just about anything with a computer, but now I hate it. I'd rather go hiking, biking, or anything. I've gone from a pasty fleshed geek to superman health nut, I can't stand to be inside. Hey, and I feel great. I fact, this must be a little bit like a god must feel like. I need to get 3 hours of sleep before work tomorrow, I'm outta here.
a 2 bit-number would be 0,1,2 or 3. You mean a power of 2.
KDE Snakes rules, it's much better than packman! I've gotten a high score of 2800+ (don't remember the exact value) points with the standard 1 snake and 1 ball.
Did anyone play Dragons Lair for 45 Hours? In fact did anyone one play Dragons Lair for 45 second without being bored shitless!
Those lovely memories...
"Halt bleiben Sie stehen!" :-)
"Schwein'hund!"
A grenade!
(Grenade) ffffrrr (BOOOM)
Schnaps!
"Achtung!"
"SS!" scary, scary
Bulletproof Vest
The Bomb!
You escaped! Tadaaaaaaaaaaa
Hmm well im english, and if an english guy ended up being world champion of a video game id keep my gob shut and wouldn't associate with him.
heh heh.
Wasn't there a Repton for the BBC Micro all those years ago..?
I got 3.4M on Galaga, 256 levels. The (highly) theoretical max? Much higher. There's all the aliens that fly off the side of the screen at the beginning of each wave; and then there's getting 1600 for each Gaplus (or whatever it's called) in a trio formation. Basically you can't get anywhere near that number without utilizing the no-fire cheat. And even then, you would have to have awesome timing on that fire button, so as to (a) kill all the surplus aliens and (b) not hit any of the escorts that would add to the value of a Gaplus in formation.
Yes, I spent entirely too much time playing in the arcades as a kid.
So what if someone breaks the record on Pac-Man ? This is not news for nerds that I appreciate. I lost my kicks for playing games after 6 years of elementary school, I got on m68k assembler.
yep, thirty seconds is impos. unless you were to have them compressed.
"I was waiting for someone to vomit," said Stacey Simcox, as she ate her own hot dog -- just one -- after the winner was announced.
go NEW YORK
A lot of companys do, you know.
So would I, especially after having a gander at the source.
As for "U st00p1d 4.C." comments, these never come from people with legal-name usernames, only from the leet (in my day we said k-rad).
See, though, that DOES have practical value. I think I could trick myself into falling in love with damn near anyone (boy or girl) who could swallow an entire hot dog, whole, once per second. Uh, assuming they'd be willing to go on the occasional nocturnal proficiency run. Heh heh.
But did anyone ever get it to work properly?
Skitz
This event reminds me of when Donovan Bailey (Can.) and Michael Johnson (U.S.) had that "fastest man in the world" match in Toronto during the summer of 1997. Johnson had some sort of accident midway through and couldn't finish the race. Bailey won and started slagging off Johnson, saying it would "shut him up," etc. I couldn't believe Bailey's arrogance and unsportsmanlike conduct! The American reporters at the event were, understandably, very angry. It made me ashamed of being a Canadian!
Yep, that looks a lot like one I saw in a book "How to Win at Video Games". It's an extremely old book (I bought it for $1), but it has some interesting stuff like patterns for games, a list of the DIP switches that can be set by the arcade owner to change the difficulty of the game, and one really interesting article at the back about how to really mess up games with these weird tricks. It even describes the whole byte rollover thing for non-computer types so they can understand what causes this weird Pac-Man board. If you've got MAME on your PC, go get this book.:)
Speaking of patterns - I wonder if this new Pac-Man machine suffered from any pattern problems?
i remember throwing my money into those machines day in day out (usually 'Defender-stargate' and of course the almighty 'galaga')...i am just wondering how many credits(and money) this guy has gone through to get that perfect score! ..usually by moving at an unbelievably fast rate by the 15th or so board and by downright cheating!! * admit it..you all at one point have accused the infernal machines of cheating ;)
of course back then video gaming machines first came out they were rigged to swallow yer money any way they could
After spending many summers (and this weekend) in Meredith (next door to weirs) and Centre Harbor, I have to agree. It's nice to have an arcade in the area, but hardly world famous. Good arcade but I find it hard to believe it is the second largest in the world. It's just not that big.
It's "One Microsoft Way" on a macro scale. The quest to dominate via cold hard cash has overtaken the quest to simply be the BEST.
Oh come on.
It's like working for a children's show with an audience of adult cretin's instead. There is no redeeming quality in pro wrestling. What I find most disturbing about it is that anybody actually watches it.
I just think it's a tad pathetic that people would rather watch a pseudo-sport rather than a real sport. I think it's odd that somebody waste their weekend or even an hour, watching some fruit in spandax perform choreography without grace and read lines from a script. It's just wierd.
Of course the money is good I admit, and yes I would do it for that kind of money, but still. It's just so rediculous. What dumfounds me is that there is an audience for this type of thing. I find it incredibly boring to watch, I don't see how people can be revved up over it. It's bizarre.
Let's say I do use a proxy.
If you trace that, you still trace me back to my general vicinity. You can still find me.
Classic games are a rapidly growing hobby... I can get games for my PlayStation for less than I'd have to pay to buy many of the Vectrex games on eBay. Check out classic-games.com and the pages linked there if you want more info. There are a lot of us out there :)
I love Canada actually. I used to bike up to Niagra Falls on the American side from Buffalo (old 72 Vernon, loved that appartment) and took the canadian side back to the Peace Bridge. Of course, those Canadians charged me 50 cents to cross with my bike - it was worth it. It's free to get back into the US.
Canada is a really cool place. Hang out and see what the American's are doing to piss them off. Sure they have high taxes, but they do have health care and people just seem hapier there.
I'm in California now, but I have nothing but fond memories of Buffalo even if it's a run down blue collar town with a racial divide. The people there were wonderful.
I forgot to point out that you really don't believe that life is unfair do you? It's very difficult to accept it, but it is true. It's one thing to believe and accept it intellectually which I'm sure you do, but it's quite another to actually know that life really is unfair.
:).
A friend of mine pointed out to me that although I might feel that the world is a terrible place, I really hadn't done anything to change it. Have you? Be honest with yourself. What have you really done? What, gone to a couple of soup kitchens during the holidays? Donated a few thousand bucks to miscellaneous charities that ate it all up in administration costs anyhow? Woopie. Do you really think the world is a better place? I'm a vegetarian too, but how many lives have I saved? Probably 0. And if all of humanity went vegan (technically I'm lacto-vegetarian as you are), I bet the cow would go extinct anyhow - is this better or worse? It's a tough call.
I feel the only thing you can do is examine your life and go through this world with the least amount of negative impact that you can. When you get a rare chance to make a truly positive and lasting impact, take it - but the opprotunities are farther apart than you think. Giving a bum $5 isn't going to make any difference, even if you feel better for doing it. Got to love that "I'm a good person, really" high from all those endorphins being released
Trust me, I understand where you're comming from. Or at least I think I do. You tell me. I'd love to exhange information upon the subject so I can again understand how you think and I will present a logical defense of how I think. In other words, I want have a debate if you are up for it. I need to see if my position is logically defensible, if you would like to see if your position is as well.
I also believe in absolute truth, even if I don't believe in free will. Let's see who is right.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/193 1/ is the url. I am not sure why the one that was put up linked to slashdot.
I'm sure or at least i hope that someone video taped this event for proof or propespirty (cant spell) if so wheres the video, i would love to see how it was played. does any know where i can get ???
Look, do me a personal favor.
Nothing and nobody here challenges me. I'm in California, and still people are uptight. They don't understand why they do what they do. I can't very well go up to them and state
"I think it's stupid to eat meat, how can you possibly defend the practice of killing something that is by mere coincidence a different species than you are? You're an animal too, don't you realize that?"
because the answer would be
"Gee, I'm a moron, I've never given it any thought whatsoever and I just try to copy other people. I'm a complete non-individual that tries to be 'different' by wearing the same different clothing that all the other different people are wearing"
Look, if you ever wanted to talk to somebody that gave up trying to fit a peg, it's me. I'm not trying to sell myself as the perfect human being, but damnit, I want to talk. If you do.
I'm not trying to change you, or make you see a particular point of view, I just need fresh idea's. I'm a glutton for different experiences. I seek out and look for unique people, if you actually are unique I would simply like to see what I don't and you do. I only have met 3 other people that have changed how I think in any significant way. You have something I would like to have and hopefully I have something that I can give to you because I've done this before, at least with fundamentalist christians but it was shallow because a fundamentalist christian is a stereotype, not a real human being, they are all clones. I want to see the liberal side now and especially if you aren't a clone. Too many people are too alike and I AM BORED WITH THEM. Many dogs have more personality than a typical person of today does, ever read Beatrix Potter? How about AA Milne? Muir? All the people worth talking to are DEAD. Today is a wasteland. NOBODY THINKS.
Please, do me a favor. I realize I sound absolutely pathetic, but I'm not. I'm just bored becuase I've experienced more at 28 (at least intellecutually) than most people will for their entire lives. I want to go further. I'm no genius or anything, I just want to see more than a two dimensional view of life. Don't you?
Look, do me a personal favor.
Nothing and nobody here challenges me. I'm in California, and still people are uptight. They don't understand why they do what they do. I can't very well go up to them and state
"I think it's stupid to eat meat, how can you possibly defend the practice of killing something that is by mere coincidence a different species than you are? You're an animal too, don't you realize that?"
because the answer would be
"Gee, I'm a moron, I've never given it any thought whatsoever and I just try to copy other people. I'm a complete non-individual that tries to be 'different' by wearing the same different clothing that all the other different people are wearing"
Look, if you ever wanted to talk to somebody that gave up trying to fit a peg, it's me. I'm not trying to sell myself as the perfect human being, but damnit, I want to talk. If you do.
I'm not trying to change you, or make you see a particular point of view, I just need fresh idea's. I'm a glutton for different experiences. I seek out and look for unique people, if you actually are unique I would simply like to see what I don't and you do. I only have met 3 other people that have changed how I think in any significant way. You have something I would like to have and hopefully I have something that I can give to you because I've done this before, at least with fundamentalist christians but it was shallow because a fundamentalist christian is a stereotype, not a real human being, they are all clones. I want to see the liberal side now and especially if you aren't a clone. Too many people are too alike and I AM BORED WITH THEM. Many dogs have more personality than a typical person of today does, ever read Beatrix Potter? How about AA Milne? Muir? All the people worth talking to are DEAD. Today is a wasteland. NOBODY THINKS.
Please, do me a favor. I realize I sound absolutely pathetic, but I'm not. I'm just bored becuase I've experienced more at 28 (at least intellecutually) than most people will for their entire lives. I want to go further. I'm no genius or anything, I just want to see more than a two dimensional view of life. Don't you?
I guess I will have to be content with the french woman that I'll be meeting this weekend and seeing a friend from college again.
:)
Nobody wants to take a chance. Never forget:
everybody dies, but few people live, desperately few people do.
My offer for communication still lies open and you have the account. I will check it periodically. I think I can offer something just in terms of thought that would enhance the way you think about life, I was hoping that your point of view could do the same for me.
I'm an interesting person, or at least I thought I was
slashdot@my-deja.com was an account I created yesterday. It's not affiliated with this site at all.
Last gasp.
Argh. People are so willing to shoot off their mouths but so rarely willing to back it up with a full discussion.
Never has anybody risen to this challenge with me to actually defend their belief system ever.
You're all a bunch of pussies.
which version?
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?:)
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.
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 ----
.T87 1998
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
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.
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).
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.
What about fruit? How many levels does the fruit go for?
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I just got over 1,100 points in KDE's Snake Race. Is that worth anything???
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...
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).
(Side note: looks like Midway owns Atari now...that kinda rocks)
Imagine the ramifications!
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
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!
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 _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.
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?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
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!
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
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..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Score does NOT = levels.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
It's due to max points per screen * max screens..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
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_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
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.
... but I don't recall. For Galaxian we used a tag team though. Switching between rounds.
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
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.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
How many boards total did this guy accomplish? It must be very high.
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...
That "press-release" is anything but believable, however, the score is not that far-fetched at all.
After about 10 levels, there are very few chances to score points on anything but pills, and the odd fruit. (power pills stop working) I know that past this point, I will usually average between 10,000 and 20,00 per level, until my will breaks, then I die. (That's on Ms Pac)
On the original PacMan, there was no randomness to the ghosts'(monsters for the purests) movments. There was a fairly widely know pattern ( here and here) that could beat the ghosts on every level(43 seconds per level). Later, Namco released a mod-chip that would randomize the ghosts movements to give the "wiz-kidz" something new to do.
So... on an original Pac Man, if you apply the pattern flawlessly on every level until the game dies at level 255, you would obtain the theoretical maximum Pac Man score.
3,333,360 / 255 is 13,720.000 pts per level, which is a very reasonable average.
but...
I seems apparent that quite a few people have witnessed the game roll-over at L255, and I can't see how the score would vary too much from 3,333,360 after 255 levels of about 13,000 per level. So I don't see this as such a great feat.
-astrosmashNot to mention that the artical is clearly fake. It's written like a crappy tabloid.
Live fast, diarrhea - vandals
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
This reads like something out of the Onion... I can't tell whether it's real or not :)
-- K
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.
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
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!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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 miss Meept.
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
-- If you met me, you probably wouldn't remember me. I'm pretty hard to remember.
I did three hours of joust once... I thought my hand was going to fall off. I guess I need to train more...
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
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!
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
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.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
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?)
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
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"}
warn "Just Another Perl User" if $anyone_cares;
... and their attitudes, are the reason I found out what Canada was all about. Spent the first part of my life thinking Canada was just a really nice place, just like America, only farther north and a little colder. With nice people just like here.
Then, I found out about the "No, I'm not an American," attitude... Any national pride I've seen exhibited by a Canadian is not so much concerned with being proud of anything Canada or Canadians have done, but simply degrading America and proudly stating, "At least I'm not American!" Anyone else notice this attitude? It really turned me off to Canada, which is a pity since that's where my fiancee lives (but not for long!)
ps. Regardless of the bad attitude towards American tourists, Banff, AB is a really nice place to visit, and I reccomend visiting it for the Sulphur Mountain Gondola to my US brethren! But don't let them find out you're one of those cursed Americans! hahahah... amazing.
----- if ($anyone_cares) {print "Just Another Perl Newbie"}
warn "Just Another Perl User" if $anyone_cares;
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
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
"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.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Whats next? Fender rusting? :)
__// `Thinking is an exercise to which all too few brains
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
try Adom, 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!
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.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Oh, you must mean "Choose Your Own Damn Serial Murder"!
Actually, this might not be what you were talking about
-NooM
Did anyone else watch Seinfeld? ;)
Repton and Repton 2 were both ported to the Spectrum. I don't know what the ports were like.
We had a BBC Micro in my form room at secondary school for a couple of years. We used to play Repton during lunch hour. I didn't rate it all that highly; I was never really into Boulderdash-type games. We had the BBC port of Arkanoid as well. That was cool.
My secondard school days were my "golden age" for gaming. What with the BBC Micro at school, and my Spectrum at home, I got a lot of games played. I don't play nearly as many games these days. My time gets soaked up posting stupid messages to Web forums :-)
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.
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.
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
i sincerely hope that's a joke... if this is the greatest thing humans are capable of... there is no hope.
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' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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*
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"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
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.
+&x
Playing pac-man as a little kid .. I sucked, I still suck. But I loved it... and that's the whole point.
... na!
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
I would think that the max score would be some 2-bit number like 2,4,8,16..256..65536...etc. 3,333,360 doesn't seem to make any sense as a max score since it isn't a base2 number. Am I missing something or just crazy.
Half the people in comments are talking about how hard it would be to accomplish this feat (i.e. "You'd have to get every dot and cherry and bonus") and the other half are talking about how easy it would be (i.e. "I reached a million in 1984") . . . I still think it might be a hoax, but this made me thing about it a little more. . .
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
Nope, the murderer in Witness was Linder's daughter (sorry, forgot the first name...)
Quite a good game it was, even though i never managed to figure it out for myself.
Ever since I downloaded a 2600 emulator (our 2600 shorted out sometime around...gee...1993! Not bad, it outlasted a toaster or two!) I've been in heaven. I never thought I would get to play these old games again, esp Joust and Swordquest. What memories, late nights, popcorn, endless fights for the good joystick (the original broke too about a year before the console, we took the top off and punched the contacts...I've never found any other game/system to be so interesting nor FUN! Forget the blood and guts, just let me kill my brother's purple bird in Joust once more...!
It's not sick, it' hardcore.
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.
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
Wait..i think i know what text-based game that was. when i was 10 i used to play a game called McMurphy's mansion. which if not the game yr talking about, still a very similar one...though there was money involved too..
the solution to McMurphy's mansion can be found here, along with others...
chimchim
Out of this World was the work of one guy, who scripted, programmed and did the artwork. Another guy did the music, but that's it.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Crystal Quest (I think) was one game for the Mac
that still ranks among my all time favorites.
You had to maneuver a spaceship around a screen with the mouse (not as easy as it sounds), picking up crystals, shooting at sprites that made really cool sound effects.
Anyone know if that game is still available anywhere? I think it was shareware. Ahh, for a Linux version.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Jesus, you thought that we had no lives...
while perusing the rest of the site, (noticed that the Founder of Electronic Gaming Monthly - Steve Harris - has a record in there), I found something just plain sick and wrong. In 1982, some guy scored 90+ million points in missle command.... that's not the sick part tho.
he played for 45 hours straight.
That's just sick.
Kupoppo!
-- Truth suffers from too much analysis.
We used to play insanely long games of Asteroids at uni.
:)
Mind you, there was no limit to the score you could get, except your own endurance. You would get a free ship every 30,000 points, so you could effectively live forever. No problem about toilet breaks when you have 100 spare ships... The only problem was when they turned the machine off at the end of the day. Oh, and the occasional lecture
You *could* make the game more challenging however. We would compete over who got the highest score with one of the turn buttons taped down...
those were the days.
I do not believe this to be a hoax for a variety of reasons.
;)
E XT=931240958.1977679960&hitnum=13 . (I'm not sure how to get a more specific ref from deja, forgiveness if that breaks.)
b le-monsters).
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&CONT
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-bluea
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)
Last I checked, the source for ADOM wasn't available, so you're out of luck if you run a UN*X other than GNU/Linux, I guess. (although the author has stated he will release the source when he reaches version 1)
Roguelike News has a good set of links for Nethack, Angband, Omega, and the rest of the crew.
On the subject of old classics (although this from the world of micros, AFAIK)... anyone recognise my nick? :-)
--
Repton.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
You mean when I beat this in 4th grade I shoulda *told* somebody? Doh!
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
No, its proof that we Americans are better then those Canadians in every way ;)
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?
gutterface
Too bad the date was the 4th of July instead of the 1st of April. Then it would be obvious how fake it is. The only thing that makes me hesitate about it being parody is the fact that it isn't that funny.
(Canadian jokes are inherently funny too, so it's hard to make something involving that not be funny.)
Anyway, to play a so called perfect game, you'd have to eat every bonus cherry and t-bird and you'd have to eat every ghost each time you had the power-pill. Sounds pretty hard to do. To get the highest score possible, you wouldn't have to play perfectly, though. There is a difference.
The part where it said all the old machines were looked at was BS. Most of the bodies got replaced with other games (hence many games, like Vs. Super Mario Bros had the Pac-Man maze etched in the screen). The high scores would certainly not be preserved in either case, all it takes is one brown-out, or a reorganization.
Waste of news links, if you ask me.
-Macneil
Just Tell Us :>
To kick the machine really hard ?
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 :)