Rolled the score in Atari Pacman.

[bradhig1]

I was playing game 3 and when it reached 99999 points the score rolled back to zero. No kill screen.

[Brian O]

Well, they didn’t include anything else from the arcade game. No kill screen doesn’t surprise me.

[cvga]

Congrats on rolling the screen though.

[Nukey Shay]

Well, they didn’t include anything else from the arcade game

 

There's a few things, but you gotta look really close. The ghosts do have independent colors, for example.

 

The basic score table is the same as the arcade, as well. If you account for the trailing zero not present here. The interesting thing about this is that the sprites are set up to display 6 digits, so even that might have been on the table at one stage of development (the routine just draws a blank for the 6th sprite to hide it).

[Raiu]

I wonder if they changed it because it would have made the now-1000-point Vitamin seem really high-valued in comparison to the early fruits, but that's only random speculation.

 

The kill screen happens in the arcade because there's a bug in the fruit-drawing routine that only occurs on stage 0, not due to reaching any particular score. The home versions are all coded from scratch rather than just using the arcade code, so they don't have this particular bug. (Even the bootleg Pac-Man arcade game that runs on Galaxian hardware doesn't have this bug, because it uses a completely different fruit-drawing routine)

[Nukey Shay]

Pretty sure that Opcodes' Pac-Man Collection (CV) has it.

I just simulated the splitscreen glitch for Hack'Em and Ms.Hack.

 

I wonder if they changed it because it would have made the now-1000-point Vitamin seem really high-valued in comparison to the early fruits, but that's only random speculation.

Out of space for 4k...that's why there's things that are half-finished (4-note startup jingle and a horizontally-facing Pac-man only) or poorly-implemented (ghosts all appear to be the same color and not much personality between them). There's a LOT of -easy- code/data optimizations which could have been done to reclaim some resources to fix these shortcomings, but I imagine that there was no time left before production.

 

'Course, none of us code like those guys did (where 90%+ of a game is written on paper completely away from a computer workstation). These days, virtually ALL of it is written/assembled/tested on-the-fly.

Edited April 1, 2019 by Nukey Shay