Having been in the situation before, there's a reason for them to give you instructions on how to remove any other OS... The Microsoft Windows/DOS fdisk took is rather silly when it comes to removing non-fat partitions.
In fact, it's pretty well impossible to remove a Linux partition from within Windows, and it's really for no good reason.
There used to be a hidden switch: FDISK/X that would allow you to blast away partitions that weren't DOS, but I can't say for sure if this is still here.
After using the hidden/X option, you would normally have to tell FDISK to re-install the MBR, using another hidden option. FDISK/MBR will clean up the mess that/X leaves.
After all this, it's really clear why they felt the need to give instructions that don't rely on undocumented switches to their software.:)
You can find databases of City/State to ZIP databases easily. What's actually valuable are more detailed databases.
For those not in the US, our postal codes (called ZIP codes) are 5 digits long. Every city has at least one, and some have many many more. In the early 90's, the post office added 4 digits to it, to narrow down to at least the street level, making computer sorting possible.
For me to translate '60618' to being 'Chicago, IL' is something that's pretty easy. I believe that old BSD distro's even came with a text file with all the zip codes. To translate my address to '60618-1481' is much more difficult. Even being able to tell which chicago zipcode my address belongs in (60618 is one of many), requires a full address database.
It's not really plausable to put a database this size up on the net. Several companies also pay the USPS a licensing fee to sell the database. Many also do 'value-added' additions, such as time zones, and the such. The last time I checked, a compressed database for the entire US to give street level zip lookups was around 4 CD's worth. I don't believe the USPS can justify the bandwidth costs in letting people download it, especially when a database of this size has to be difficult to maintain. (It's somewhere around 40 million records)
This company sells a pretty comprehensive set of CD's. It's not too expensive considering what you get. Especially if you send large amounts of mail, being able to verify the address/zipcode before you pay the 33 cents is nice.
Basically, Downloading a database this size isn't plausable for them, so they pretty much have to sell it on physical media... Now, if their raw data (not data that OEM's have added) is copyrightable, who knows. Perhaps one person can buy the raw data and put it on their ftp server? Who knows.
I thought it was illegal for government agencies to apply for copyrights... or was it patents? (I know there's the loophole for patents that an outside company can apply for the patent, then transfer it to the government)
The AMC 30 theater in South Barrington, Illinois is testing the TI system in theater 17. (Bicentennial Man is playing 5 theaters now, but only 17 is Digital).
I saw it Friday night. Unless they had made a big deal about passing around survey cards about how what we thought of the picture quality, I *might* not have noticed the difference. Yes, it was brighter, and things were much clearer (especially while moving).
What bothered me were visable compression artifacts, especially in smooth gradients. One scene with a sunset in the background was particularly noisy. Anything with large amounts of bright blue also seemed full of digital noise. The people I was with didn't notice at all, but perhaps since my job is deeply involved in digital video, I can't help looking at it.:)
There were also some specks that appeared that *looked* like film specks. The intro TI had at the beginning of the movie said that it was pure digital, but perhaps some scenes were done on film?
The biggest thing I noticed was that bright objects didn't bleed all around them. Everything always stayed sharp. It wasn't an enormous change like I was expecting, though.
I agree with most people here that patents are becoming overly silly. But, I don't think a boycott is going to be effective at all, except as a PR tool.
Even if the subject matter sought to be patented is not exactly shown by the prior art, and involves one or more differences over the most nearly similar thing already known, a patent may still be refused if the differences would be obvious. The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. - US PTO
All it's going to take is one decent lawsuit to get this patent revoked. Not only would this be considered 'obvious', I'm certain if we all tried we could find a mountain of prior art. (If it can be proven that this was done before, their patent is no good)
I really see nothing in their patent that's even remotely unique or novel. Take a look yourself here
Calling for a boycott isn't going to affect Amazon's bottom line a bit. However, it may get some attention to how silly they're acting. This isn't going to change a single thing until a business or some kind of Web-Business-Association or someone actually tries to get this patent revoked.
Why do you say it's impossible for most small ISP's to support? Granted, most don't, but multicast is NOT difficult to support.
Large ISP's don't support it EITHER.. try getting it on @home.
Multicast is one of those wonderful technologies that the commercialization of internet access has almost killed. It used to be you could simply call your upstream and ask them 'Hey.. I need on MBone...' and they would get workin on it.
I run a small ISP. I called our upstream, and asked. "Mbone isn't available."
"What if I really want it? What if my customers demand it?"
"You'll have to pay for all engineering expenses involved, as well as agree that we have no liability if it doesn't work."
If you have trouble getting a station, call your Internet Service Provider(ISP) about "multicasting." Multicasting will provide you with greatly increased reliability of reception and will provide you with greater potential clarity with DSL, ISDN, cable or satellite connections. Your ISP is the company that you pay to get access to the internet. Look at your monthly bill for their phone number and address. Call them now!
Wow. Multicast is pretty much impossible for most small ISP's to support. They almost make it sound like you're getting ripped off if you're not on a multicast compatible ISP.
Legal questions about rebroadcasting aside for a moment, that's a kinda scary precedent to set. Multicast has never really caught on, for several reasons. If people like this create an artifical demand for something that can be done other (perhaps better?) ways, this could have bigger effects on the net than just a lawsuit.
"We've had 5 people call in today asking us for multicast." "What do they want with it?" "They didn't know, they just knew that they needed it."
:)
Re:Plenty of games already do this, too, and why.
on
Another Software Spy
·
· Score: 1
While trying not to be argumentative, I'll try to respond to your points...
Your point about Starseige Tribes is completely irrelevent. When a person hosts a game, a person expects a certain amount of their personal information to be published in order for people to play the game they're hosting. It's part of playing the game. The information that Q3 is collecting has nothing to do with gameplay at all and the user does not expect it to happen, nor are they made aware that it is happening.
The first time I played Tribes, I was rather surpised to see that kind info available. They didn't tell me they were going to do it, and there's no way to turn it off, but it's still needed to play the game.
Furthermore, your argument that it isn't an invasion of privacy because they're not collecting your name and e-mail address is also invalid. They get your IP address, whether they actually record it or not. In most cases, having a person's IP address is just as personal as having a person's e-mail address or name.
Any IP based network game that has a 'master-server' requires you to give up your IP address. There's no way to ask a server to give you a list of games back without it knowing what IP to send the list to. The MOTD that John refers to works the same way. If you don't want it to get the MOTD, there's a way to turn it off. (I'm not saying that perhaps it couldn't be documented better, or given a simple choice like Winamp does)
Finally, your point about information included in SMTP headers is also irrelevent. It is commonly known that this information is being sent, and you control who this information is sent to. This information is voluntarily revealed, unlike the information in Q3.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect game software to send information related to the game to a server. It's possible that some day this will be used to customize how the game works for your hardware, or some other cool feature. Show me how you tell Outlook to stop putting it's banner in the headers of e-mail?:)
Face it, Toasty, if it was Microsoft Word that was doing this, you'd have a completely different opinion.
Well.... Word isn't a networked application. Yes, I'd wonder why Word was messing with sockets. Now, if I used something that had a built-in Auto-Update thingy, like Winamp, and it told the vendor what version I had, as well as what hardware I was using that the software package used, I'd be fine with it. I'd be suspicious if Quake told id what kind of printer I had, but as long as it's apparently related to the game, who really cares?:)
I'm not defending the 'right' of software companies to send themselves the entire contents of your hard drive. But, if it has a functional purpose within the application to send anonymous(or as anonymous as you get with IP's) information, I guess I just don't see the privacy concern.
John: Perhaps appease both sides? Put a checkbox somewhere saying 'Check for new versions at startup? This will send information about your video card to id to better support your system's configuration in the future.' in the setup?:)
-- Kevin
Plenty of games already do this, too, and why.
on
Another Software Spy
·
· Score: 5
Lots of other games send information out, with *no* way to stop it.
Any of you played Starseige Tribes? If you host a game it sends your CPU speed, amount of RAM, IP address(duh), version number, and a few other tidbits to their server, and even POSTS it on their master game list.
Sending this kind of information has many uses. It lets them know how many people are still using some ancient version, so they can decide how long to keep support for it in their servers.
His comment about being able to compare the number of people using one video card to the number of complaints received is a good one. From a support standpoint, if you get lots of calls saying that my FooBar Monster 512 board doesn't work, you have no idea if it's a really popular card or if the driver/board just sucks. Being able to tell the two apart is really important for delegating how much time is spent, and where to point the blame.
I'm also a video game programmer(the arcade kind, not home games) and could see also lots of uses for this in a client-server game model. Being able to tailor the stream of data sent to a user if you can tell they can't handle it all, or being able to say 'Their card will only handle 16 bit textures at the resolution they've chosen, save them the download time by not giving them 32 bit textures' is one really nice feature that could be used in some games.
I really don't buy the 'This is an invasion of privacy' argument. If any of this included your name, e-mail address, postal address or anything, I'd be concerned. Knowing what video card and which version of software you're using(which is probably important to the server anyway) is about as trivial as you can get.
Also, all of you running Windows have probably given nearly the same info to the authors of GLSetup, if you used the web-install option, because they're able to log who downloaded which drivers, with the same justification as above.
Lots of information is being sent every time you do anything. Send me an e-mail and I can probably tell you what E-mail client you're using, what version of it, and probably what OS you're using. Until it becomes *personal* or *unique* information about myself, I don't see the problem.
I believe there's a small glitch going on right now on slashdot giving lots of people 1 point of moderation every so often, instead of the usual 5 you get when the system selects you as a moderator.
(I've had two points randomly appear for me in the past few hours, apparently so have others)
This may explain the high amount of moderation happening right now. Either it's a burp in the system, or Rob's experimenting on us.:)
While they went to great lengths to say that one of the differences was how code was added to the base, they didn't really say why that matters that much.
Before, when I did a lot of custom drivers for Linux, I was continually annoyed with kernel interfaces changing, and code that was 'current' a week ago, suddenly becoming legacy.
With FreeBSD, I've had amazing longevity with my code. Not because they're slow to change, but because, in my opinion, (flame proof clothes ready) it was designed 'right' the first time.
The works of people like Kirk McKusick and David Greenman are quite possibly some of the best designs I've ever seen. Even if you don't plan on using FreeBSD, I think all developers should at least take a look at how it works, and I promise you'll learn a thing or two.
I also hold 'good design' as the reasons for why I've had systems with 400+ day uptimes, that were sometimes under nearly constant attack and/or intrusion attempts.
Finally, the BSD license. My 'day job' is designing an embedded product, which is using FreeBSD for it's OS. Why? The license. Many companies are hesitant, or even contractually prohibited, from giving out changes made to the system, which the GPL rather insists on. The BSD license is very open, which I think may become more important in the near future.
Go download a boot floppy, or buy a CD from Walnut Creek or even Cheap Bytes and give it a try. Even if you don't end up keeping it, if you're a hacker, you'll learn something.:)
I have a FreeBSD system here with multiple BrookTree cards in it, and it works pretty well. Amancio Hasty and Randall Hopper did a lot of good work on making the Bt848 and 878 boards work for nearly anything you want. (Nearly any Hauppauge board, or most mainstream PCI 'TV' boards)
There are a few applications out there in the FreeBSD Ports collection for taking the output of one of these cards and doing useful things with it. One in particular is fxtv.
I wrote a tiny little program based on how fxtv grabs the frames to just update a.jpg every 30 seconds, and keep a history of the last 10 frames, and it works great for a webcam of this nature. There's really no reason you can't have as many of them as you have PCI slots.
Another option is to grab one of these from the Walmart Online site, that was mentioned in a story a few days ago on here. A sequencer like this will take 8 inputs, and cycle through all of them. Somehow time your webcam grabs to the cycle speed, and you could get by with only one digitizer card.
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...)
Slashdot Mirror
Having been in the situation before, there's a reason for them to give you instructions on how to remove any other OS... The Microsoft Windows/DOS fdisk took is rather silly when it comes to removing non-fat partitions.
/X that would allow you to blast away partitions that weren't DOS, but I can't say for sure if this is still here.
/X option, you would normally have to tell FDISK to re-install the MBR, using another hidden option. FDISK /MBR will clean up the mess that /X leaves.
:)
In fact, it's pretty well impossible to remove a Linux partition from within Windows, and it's really for no good reason.
There used to be a hidden switch: FDISK
After using the hidden
After all this, it's really clear why they felt the need to give instructions that don't rely on undocumented switches to their software.
You can find databases of City/State to ZIP databases easily. What's actually valuable are more detailed databases.
For those not in the US, our postal codes (called ZIP codes) are 5 digits long. Every city has at least one, and some have many many more. In the early 90's, the post office added 4 digits to it, to narrow down to at least the street level, making computer sorting possible.
For me to translate '60618' to being 'Chicago, IL' is something that's pretty easy. I believe that old BSD distro's even came with a text file with all the zip codes. To translate my address to '60618-1481' is much more difficult. Even being able to tell which chicago zipcode my address belongs in (60618 is one of many), requires a full address database.
It's not really plausable to put a database this size up on the net. Several companies also pay the USPS a licensing fee to sell the database. Many also do 'value-added' additions, such as time zones, and the such. The last time I checked, a compressed database for the entire US to give street level zip lookups was around 4 CD's worth. I don't believe the USPS can justify the bandwidth costs in letting people download it, especially when a database of this size has to be difficult to maintain. (It's somewhere around 40 million records)
This company sells a pretty comprehensive set of CD's. It's not too expensive considering what you get. Especially if you send large amounts of mail, being able to verify the address/zipcode before you pay the 33 cents is nice.
Basically, Downloading a database this size isn't plausable for them, so they pretty much have to sell it on physical media... Now, if their raw data (not data that OEM's have added) is copyrightable, who knows. Perhaps one person can buy the raw data and put it on their ftp server? Who knows.
I thought it was illegal for government agencies to apply for copyrights... or was it patents? (I know there's the loophole for patents that an outside company can apply for the patent, then transfer it to the government)
Kevin
The AMC 30 theater in South Barrington, Illinois is testing the TI system in theater 17. (Bicentennial Man is playing 5 theaters now, but only 17 is Digital).
:)
I saw it Friday night. Unless they had made a big deal about passing around survey cards about how what we thought of the picture quality, I *might* not have noticed the difference. Yes, it was brighter, and things were much clearer (especially while moving).
What bothered me were visable compression artifacts, especially in smooth gradients. One scene with a sunset in the background was particularly noisy. Anything with large amounts of bright blue also seemed full of digital noise. The people I was with didn't notice at all, but perhaps since my job is deeply involved in digital video, I can't help looking at it.
There were also some specks that appeared that *looked* like film specks. The intro TI had at the beginning of the movie said that it was pure digital, but perhaps some scenes were done on film?
The biggest thing I noticed was that bright objects didn't bleed all around them. Everything always stayed sharp. It wasn't an enormous change like I was expecting, though.
Kevin
I agree with most people here that patents are becoming overly silly. But, I don't think a boycott is going to be effective at all, except as a PR tool.
Even if the subject matter sought to be patented is not exactly shown by the prior art, and involves one or more differences over the most nearly similar thing already known, a patent may still be refused if the differences would be obvious. The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. - US PTO
All it's going to take is one decent lawsuit to get this patent revoked. Not only would this be considered 'obvious', I'm certain if we all tried we could find a mountain of prior art. (If it can be proven that this was done before, their patent is no good)
I really see nothing in their patent that's even remotely unique or novel. Take a look yourself here
Calling for a boycott isn't going to affect Amazon's bottom line a bit. However, it may get some attention to how silly they're acting. This isn't going to change a single thing until a business or some kind of Web-Business-Association or someone actually tries to get this patent revoked.
Thoughts?
Why do you say it's impossible for most small ISP's to support? Granted, most don't, but multicast is NOT difficult to support.
:)
Large ISP's don't support it EITHER.. try getting it on @home.
Multicast is one of those wonderful technologies that the commercialization of internet access has almost killed. It used to be you could simply call your upstream and ask them 'Hey.. I need on MBone...' and they would get workin on it.
I run a small ISP. I called our upstream, and asked. "Mbone isn't available."
"What if I really want it? What if my customers demand it?"
"You'll have to pay for all engineering expenses involved, as well as agree that we have no liability if it doesn't work."
But, we're getting far off topic here.
According to their website:
If you have trouble getting a station, call your Internet Service Provider(ISP) about "multicasting." Multicasting will provide you with greatly increased reliability of reception and will provide you with greater potential clarity with DSL, ISDN, cable or satellite connections. Your ISP is the company that you pay to get access to the internet. Look at your monthly bill for their phone number and address. Call them now!
Wow. Multicast is pretty much impossible for most small ISP's to support. They almost make it sound like you're getting ripped off if you're not on a multicast compatible ISP.
Legal questions about rebroadcasting aside for a moment, that's a kinda scary precedent to set. Multicast has never really caught on, for several reasons. If people like this create an artifical demand for something that can be done other (perhaps better?) ways, this could have bigger effects on the net than just a lawsuit.
"We've had 5 people call in today asking us for multicast."
"What do they want with it?"
"They didn't know, they just knew that they needed it."
:)
While trying not to be argumentative, I'll try to respond to your points...
:)
:)
:)
Your point about Starseige Tribes is completely irrelevent. When a person hosts a game, a person expects a certain amount of their personal information to be published in order for people to play the game they're hosting. It's part of playing the game. The information that Q3 is collecting has nothing to do with gameplay at all and the user does not expect it to happen, nor are they made aware that it is happening.
The first time I played Tribes, I was rather surpised to see that kind info available. They didn't tell me they were going to do it, and there's no way to turn it off, but it's still needed to play the game.
Furthermore, your argument that it isn't an invasion of privacy because they're not collecting your name and e-mail address is also invalid. They get your IP address, whether they actually record it or not. In most cases, having a person's IP address is just as personal as having a person's e-mail address or name.
Any IP based network game that has a 'master-server' requires you to give up your IP address. There's no way to ask a server to give you a list of games back without it knowing what IP to send the list to. The MOTD that John refers to works the same way. If you don't want it to get the MOTD, there's a way to turn it off. (I'm not saying that perhaps it couldn't be documented better, or given a simple choice like Winamp does)
Finally, your point about information included in SMTP headers is also irrelevent. It is commonly known that this information is being sent, and you control who this information is sent to. This information is voluntarily revealed, unlike the information in Q3.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect game software to send information related to the game to a server. It's possible that some day this will be used to customize how the game works for your hardware, or some other cool feature. Show me how you tell Outlook to stop putting it's banner in the headers of e-mail?
Face it, Toasty, if it was Microsoft Word that was doing this, you'd have a completely different opinion.
Well.... Word isn't a networked application. Yes, I'd wonder why Word was messing with sockets. Now, if I used something that had a built-in Auto-Update thingy, like Winamp, and it told the vendor what version I had, as well as what hardware I was using that the software package used, I'd be fine with it. I'd be suspicious if Quake told id what kind of printer I had, but as long as it's apparently related to the game, who really cares?
I'm not defending the 'right' of software companies to send themselves the entire contents of your hard drive. But, if it has a functional purpose within the application to send anonymous(or as anonymous as you get with IP's) information, I guess I just don't see the privacy concern.
John: Perhaps appease both sides? Put a checkbox somewhere saying 'Check for new versions at startup? This will send information about your video card to id to better support your system's configuration in the future.' in the setup?
-- Kevin
Lots of other games send information out, with *no* way to stop it.
Any of you played Starseige Tribes? If you host a game it sends your CPU speed, amount of RAM, IP address(duh), version number, and a few other tidbits to their server, and even POSTS it on their master game list.
Sending this kind of information has many uses. It lets them know how many people are still using some ancient version, so they can decide how long to keep support for it in their servers.
His comment about being able to compare the number of people using one video card to the number of complaints received is a good one. From a support standpoint, if you get lots of calls saying that my FooBar Monster 512 board doesn't work, you have no idea if it's a really popular card or if the driver/board just sucks. Being able to tell the two apart is really important for delegating how much time is spent, and where to point the blame.
I'm also a video game programmer(the arcade kind, not home games) and could see also lots of uses for this in a client-server game model. Being able to tailor the stream of data sent to a user if you can tell they can't handle it all, or being able to say 'Their card will only handle 16 bit textures at the resolution they've chosen, save them the download time by not giving them 32 bit textures' is one really nice feature that could be used in some games.
I really don't buy the 'This is an invasion of privacy' argument. If any of this included your name, e-mail address, postal address or anything, I'd be concerned. Knowing what video card and which version of software you're using(which is probably important to the server anyway) is about as trivial as you can get.
Also, all of you running Windows have probably given nearly the same info to the authors of GLSetup, if you used the web-install option, because they're able to log who downloaded which drivers, with the same justification as above.
Lots of information is being sent every time you do anything. Send me an e-mail and I can probably tell you what E-mail client you're using, what version of it, and probably what OS you're using. Until it becomes *personal* or *unique* information about myself, I don't see the problem.
-- Kevin
I couldn't find mention of this in any other comment, but.... UserFriendly has responded in a kinda funny manner:
http://www.userfr iendly.org/cartoons/archives/99nov/19991128.html
I believe there's a small glitch going on right now on slashdot giving lots of people 1 point of moderation every so often, instead of the usual 5 you get when the system selects you as a moderator.
:)
(I've had two points randomly appear for me in the past few hours, apparently so have others)
This may explain the high amount of moderation happening right now. Either it's a burp in the system, or Rob's experimenting on us.
While they went to great lengths to say that one of the differences was how code was added to the base, they didn't really say why that matters that much.
:)
Before, when I did a lot of custom drivers for Linux, I was continually annoyed with kernel interfaces changing, and code that was 'current' a week ago, suddenly becoming legacy.
With FreeBSD, I've had amazing longevity with my code. Not because they're slow to change, but because, in my opinion, (flame proof clothes ready) it was designed 'right' the first time.
The works of people like Kirk McKusick and David Greenman are quite possibly some of the best designs I've ever seen. Even if you don't plan on using FreeBSD, I think all developers should at least take a look at how it works, and I promise you'll learn a thing or two.
I also hold 'good design' as the reasons for why I've had systems with 400+ day uptimes, that were sometimes under nearly constant attack and/or intrusion attempts.
Finally, the BSD license. My 'day job' is designing an embedded product, which is using FreeBSD for it's OS. Why? The license. Many companies are hesitant, or even contractually prohibited, from giving out changes made to the system, which the GPL rather insists on. The BSD license is very open, which I think may become more important in the near future.
Go download a boot floppy, or buy a CD from Walnut Creek or even Cheap Bytes and give it a try. Even if you don't end up keeping it, if you're a hacker, you'll learn something.
I have a FreeBSD system here with multiple BrookTree cards in it, and it works pretty well. Amancio Hasty and Randall Hopper did a lot of good work on making the Bt848 and 878 boards work for nearly anything you want. (Nearly any Hauppauge board, or most mainstream PCI 'TV' boards)
.jpg every 30 seconds, and keep a history of the last 10 frames, and it works great for a webcam of this nature. There's really no reason you can't have as many of them as you have PCI slots.
There are a few applications out there in the FreeBSD Ports collection for taking the output of one of these cards and doing useful things with it. One in particular is fxtv.
I wrote a tiny little program based on how fxtv grabs the frames to just update a
Another option is to grab one of these from the Walmart Online site, that was mentioned in a story a few days ago on here. A sequencer like this will take 8 inputs, and cycle through all of them. Somehow time your webcam grabs to the cycle speed, and you could get by with only one digitizer card.
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)