Tagged: Pac-Man

“The Infamous Pac-Man Level 256 Glitch…”

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July 2nd, 2019 Permalink

View this post on Instagram The infamous Pac-Man level 256 glitch. The reason for the glitch is that the level counter in the original Pac-Man is stored as an 8-bit integer, meaning the highest value it can hold is 255. The level counter starts with 0 internally, but for calculating the fruit counter it adds […]

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The infamous Pac-Man level 256 glitch. The reason for the glitch is that the level counter in the original Pac-Man is stored as an 8-bit integer, meaning the highest value it can hold is 255. The level counter starts with 0 internally, but for calculating the fruit counter it adds 1; however, because of overflow, adding 1 to 255 would result in 0, and the game tries to count fruits from 1, causing the game to attempt to draw 256 fruit to the screen until it overflows to 0. The result is the garbled mess on the right side of the maze, because the screen memory starts with the bottom, followed by the columns from the right side.-Nick- . . #pacman #puckman #8bit #blinky #nintendo #namco #atari #80s #maze #ghost #blipblip #eatingfruit #glitch #basementwizards

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“The infamous Pac-Man level 256 glitch.

The reason for the glitch is that the level counter in the original Pac-Man is stored as an 8-bit integer, meaning the highest value it can hold is 255.

The level counter starts with 0 internally, but for calculating the fruit counter it adds 1; however, because of overflow, adding 1 to 255 would result in 0, and the game tries to count fruits from 1, causing the game to attempt to draw 256 fruit to the screen until it overflows to 0.

The result is the garbled mess on the right side of the maze, because the screen memory starts with the bottom, followed by the columns from the right side.”

– Nick –