Page 1 of [VIDEO] Obsessed by Pac Man

There were a few arcade games as a kid I wish I had unlimited 10 pences to get good at, but usually I just had enough for a few goes. So far I've ticked off Scramble (it's actually very easy to get to the city at the end and crash into it), and Kung Fu Master (no sooner do you rescue your girlfriend than she gets captured again by the same people, sigh).

I have a long term flirtation with R-Type (only ever got past the level 4 a couple of times, and rarely consistently) and Dragon's Lair (one annoying screen I can never complete).

But right now I'm totally obsessed with Pac Man, and I'm so close to being not too bad at it. I can usually get up to the galaxian levels, sometimes without losing a single life, and then I'll miss a turn and screw up a pattern and suddenly I can lose 2 lives on one screen.

So much is known about the game and how the logic works, through reverse engineering the source code:
http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html

The CPU the arcade machine used is none other than the humble Z80 chip, yes the one used in the ZX Spectrum. In fact someone actually took the original roms from the arcade machine and patched them to work on the Speccy (though it needs a +3 that can map the RAM over the ROM address space):

Even armed with all this information I still struggle to get over 100k score.

Anyway...

It's interesting what you come across when obsessed by something. (or maybe not interesting at all if you aren't:))

There is this site, which lets you play custom mazes (and even add your own if you can bear to use Facehandyourprivacyinatthedoorbook) that amused me until I ran out of lives:
http://worldsbiggestpacman.com

It's kind of cool how it remembers the positions of the ghosts when you exit a maze.

Then there is the Pac Man Fever single that was released during the original craze. You know, back when novelty records could make it to number one. :)



Seems I'm not alone in my obsession though, Budweiser are shooting a life sized Pac Man machine for the Super Bowl:
http://gizmodo.com/budweiser-is-building-a-life-size-pacman-arena-for-the-1678726201


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