Response to A question about PacMan's very late stages

I'll cue you in on that one. According to the schmetics for the game, the data space wasn't designed to allow the program to kick to 0 and back to 1, but in actually that's what it did. The extra space was designed to prevent, according to the sheet, the 1's digit of the score to not display anything other than 0. Note: Some Namco games with a little persuation can have the ones digit not be zero, or even display a hexidecimal score, aka. 3A429E in Pac-Man Jr. I had got once.... (Won't tell you how it did it!) Namco cut many corners in their programming, and that's why most of their old machines crap out at FF+1... Why other games are awfully hard at FF+1, also known as 0, is because of the computations that are done with the level determining how hard the level is, is that the computer would get the divide by 0 answer, and then by default, auto-sticks in the toughest number programmed for difficulty, and it would only appear, by the schematics, only if that error occurs... Hope that clears things up... From someone who had an utter fasnication of the inside workings of the blasted contraptions, and tried to keep them working. Chris

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