malmo wrote:
Snowbear wrote:My personal high on pacman is about a million and a quarter. In 1984 I bought a video game magazine. In it was a story about Randy Tufts of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He claimed to have run a perfect score on pacman twice. And he submitted a photo to prove it. So a perfect score on pacman was achieved long before 1999.
A perfect game (one puck), not a perfect score. It's well known that wasn't achieved until 1999.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_%28Pac-Man%29http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/content.cfm?ArticleID=58What's your verdict on score registration? Yay, nay, indifferent. Table or arcade?
Question, when was the last time you played? How'd it go?
Pacman did not have score registration. There was not even a list of top 5 or 10. It simply showed the high score in the middle of the view screen at the top. Table version and arcade were the same.
The photo Randy Tufts submitted showed the game after the last board that the monsters turned color. I think there were 5 keys and 2 fruits showing along the bottom. From there the game just has the one board and the monsters never flash. The score showing on the machine showed a theoretical perfect score. He had gotten every monster every time and all bonus fruit/keys. It was just a matter of running the last pattern to the end.
When the machine hit board 256 ( 00000000 in machine language) the program breaks down (it understands board 1 thru board 255, that is 00000001 to 11111111 in machine language, it doesn't understand 00000000) you get the split screen. I don't know if you get the same split screen everytime or not. If you do then a pattern can be developed. If not then you have to freehand it. I am sure Tufts could have run a perfect split screen since he freehanded (no pattern) his games anyway.
I haven't played pacman seriously since 1984. I probably still have the patterns around somewhere. Found one set in a magazine, another in a book. It seemed like everybody had their own pattern.
There were several famous players back in the early 80s. Eric Ginner, Matthew Brass, Roger Mangum, Mark Robichek. Some of them were multiple "world record" holders, but there was no standards. The machines had several difficulty settings and scores were relative. Usually a machine had been out for 6 months before I even saw it. Some of the scores that were claimed as world records were early after release and not very impressive.
My goal was to try and break a million points on as many games as I could. I was somewhere above 30 when life got too busy and I lost interest. Some games were hard and took hours (pacman, frenzy, battlezone, digdug, joust), others were easy, especially if the machine was set easy, (foodfight and robotron comes to mind), and for Major Havoc all you had to do was enter the first three codes and you were given a million points.
Since I was taking computer classes I understood the game programs well. A couple of games I found flaws in the program that could be exploited. I have personal scores from the 80s that are higher than the current world record on at least 3 games (front line, eyes, solar warrior?) I am the only person in the world that can tell you that you can't get 1,000,000 points on Frontline (current world record 727,500 - circa 1983), because when you get to 999,900 the scoring function freezes. You can keep playing the game, but your score will not change. I got to 999,900 several times and couldn't find a way to turn the score over.
But another flaw I found was where I could play the game for infinity. Pacman has a hiding spot that works on the first five boards. Ms Pacman has a couple that work on different boards. Tutenkham, eyes, and front line, and galaga also had tricks where you could not be killed. Though it is real boring since there is nothing to do and moving starts the game again.
Dig Dug had a real good one. You would kill the last monster twice (once by popping it, and then by dropping a rock on its head right away). The machine was programmed to advance to the next board when the number of monsters killed equalled the number of monsters that started the board. By killing the last one twice the machine didn't realize the board was over. You would be left in the board, with no monsters, able to run around. I found one board where I could carve my name in the dirt. I would carve "XXXX is cool" in the dirt, then park digdug up in the upper right hand corner in the flowers. People would walk up and think the game was broken.
One time I was in the arcade and rigged 5 different machines into there no kill mode. I was sitting at the table eating pizza while playing 5 games simultaniously.
Today the Twin Galaxies has rigid standards for record recognition. Basically you have to video tape your game. No "tricks" are allowed. For example you cannot turn off the enemy missiles in Galaga, and you can't use the 2nd player extra man reset in Donkey King. And point mongering is frowned upon. But patterns are ok.
Here is the Twin Galaxies home site
http://www.twingalaxies.comOn the front page (right now) is an interview with Donald Hayes, who holds 54 world records, some of them standing for 6 years.
I set my Frontline record 24 years ago.