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Is this a known Ms. Pac-Man bug?


Dauber

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So....recently I was playing the "turbo" version of Ms. Pac-Man at my favorite arcade, and I noticed something odd...

 

It took me unusually long to gobble up a prize (yeah, I know, they're officially known as "fruit," but a pretzel is NOT a fruit!) in one maze -- but because the appearance of the prize is triggered by the number of dots you eat, I must have ended up eating just the right number of dots while the first prize was still on the screen, and I noticed that a strawberry appeared in a tunnel on the right for a split-second and disappeared...and there were no further prizes on that particular level...just the first one...

 

Did I discover a bug? I have my doubts that in 33 years nobody else would have seen this!

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Doesn't need to be the turbo version. Sometimes the fruit comes out and disappears near instantly.. although you hear a few of it's "steps". This is a common thing in all Ms. Pacs since the earliest days I can recall playing it. I guess it is a bug. Never thought about it as such though until you mentioned it lol.

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Ms. Pac-Man was, quite literally, a hack of Pac-Man put together by a group more experienced at hacking than at creating code from scratch. The game has a whole lot of bugs. Fortunately most of them don't matter until later in the game, and some are masked by others. Here is a write-up on the various bugs that create the game's "many" kill screens...

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  • 1 month later...

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but this weekend I made it to 760,000 on the same machine, and....as soon as the score turned to 760k, the machine rebooted! Don't know if it was a hardware failure or yet another bug...didn't see it documented on that site though...

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Pretty hard to reach 760K in Ms. Pac since the fruits aren't consistent.. i.e. you can just as easily get a 100pt cherry vs. a 5000 pt banana in the upper stages. Not to mention the ghosts don't turn blue anymore.. so you end up hitting a "points wall" around 300k where the points don't add up as quickly anymore where your only score is the 10 pt dots and scrounging for the spare banana or pear or so.

 

Whether you hit a bug or the kill screen etc, I have no idea. I say just enjoy the score because it's really good :lol:

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  • 3 weeks later...

But the screen didn't render upside-down -- the machine actually fully rebooted, right in the middle of a level. I'm thinking it was probably just a glitch in the machine; it had been glitching out on me during the game, like a very, very quick and subtle video flicker...

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If I recall correctly, the 'upside down' screen is something that only happens in MAME, not on the actual game (I believe I read that somewhere, so I'm not 100% sure)

 

But if you do make it to 142, the game does reset itself:

According to the word on the Net, the bug has a chance of occurring on level 134, 135, 136, 137, and 138. 139, 140, and 141, all seem to always play properly if/when they are reached, and level 142 always causes the game to reset itself.

 

It's the Watchdog (a section of code that does sanity-checking) that resets the game if it sees something amiss... :)

 

 

I should have put some of that in the Ms. Pac-Man game selection in PMC :D

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  • 6 years later...

Does anyone have or can provide a small video showing the temporary fruit coming in that then disappear after 2-3 seconds ?

I remember having this bug in the original arcade machine in the 80's and on MAME too I think...

I wonder if this bug has been located/explained/fixed ?

 

Did it happened on the original Pac-Man too ? (I don't think so since no bouncing fruit, but maybe a bonus item might appear for a few seconds

then disappear like it does on Ms Pacman.

 

I never really played PacMan, so I can't really tell...

 

And is there any way to play Ms PacMan Twin on PC ? I just discovered this game tonight after many years ! 

 

Shame on me !

;-)

 

Edited by Eric Rousseau
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  • 3 weeks later...
On 5/24/2021 at 6:08 AM, Eric Rousseau said:

Does anyone have or can provide a small video showing the temporary fruit coming in that then disappear after 2-3 seconds ?

I remember having this bug in the original arcade machine in the 80's and on MAME too I think...

I wonder if this bug has been located/explained/fixed ?

 

Did it happened on the original Pac-Man too ? (I don't think so since no bouncing fruit, but maybe a bonus item might appear for a few seconds

then disappear like it does on Ms Pacman.

 

I never really played PacMan, so I can't really tell...

 

And is there any way to play Ms PacMan Twin on PC ? I just discovered this game tonight after many years ! 

 

Shame on me !

;-)

 

no, the disappearing fruit bug does not appear in pac-man.

 

what is ms pac man twin? i know about a rare rom that came up in MAME recently,

which is a bootleg game where 2 people can play ms pac man simultaneously.

the ghost ai is different too.

 

later

-1

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  • 1 month later...
On 6/9/2021 at 6:32 PM, negative1 said:

what is ms pac man twin? i know about a rare rom that came up in MAME recently,

which is a bootleg game where 2 people can play ms pac man simultaneously.

the ghost ai is different too.

That pretty much describes Ms. Pac-Man Twin to a T.  It also loses the fruit and intermissions, and the title screen is static.

 

One of my all-time favourite bootleg / oddity finds, and a fantastic glimpse into what was happening in the Argentinian arcade scene at the time.

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On 7/9/2021 at 11:49 PM, x=usr(1536) said:

That pretty much describes Ms. Pac-Man Twin to a T.  It also loses the fruit and intermissions, and the title screen is static.

 

One of my all-time favourite bootleg / oddity finds, and a fantastic glimpse into what was happening in the Argentinian arcade scene at the time.

It's been added to MAME several months ago:

 

later

-1

 

 

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  • 3 months later...

If you eat the required number of dots (170 in Pac-Man) for the 2nd prize to appear in Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man before the 1st prize time has expired, you miss out on the 2nd prize.  In Pac-Man, it just never appears at all.  (In Pac-Man at least, it isn't enough to just eat the 1st prize before the 170th dot.  You have to wait for the full duration of the 1st prize time to expire, or you don't get the 2nd prize.)

I would not call this a bug because the game was designed for a certain speed in which it would be impossible to eat the 170th dot before the 1st prize is cleared.  When the program is altered to allow the faster speed, it is no longer the original game and unpredictable results may occur.


 

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