PHEEZY / Evan P. Cordes

Below, an analysis of the split-screen bug in the original Pac-Man.

What I love most about this is that the board is broken, unplayable, but “…through additional analysis, it has been revealed what happens should the 256th level be cleared.”

In this, you feel the sense of Pac-Man’s quasi-mystical power, a set of patterns and systems that can — with dedication and effort — be decoded, deciphered, used to arrive at some empirical truth. I think of kabbalah, conspiracy, the LHR, the human genome. And of course, The Truth.

Here in the 256th level of Pac-Man, that meaning lies, somehow, beyond the code (“if it were possible to do this, this is what would happen…”) If the code has bugs, then it’s not just reading code. It’s looking for some legible underlying intention underneath the code.

It’s not decompiling code. It’s deciphering the meaning that lives beyond it, even where the code falls. Believing in systems, seeking them out, and learning, in part, from where those systems fail.

—

“Pac-Man supposedly has no ending—as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to continue playing indefinitely. However, this is rendered impossible by a bug. Normally, no more than seven fruits are displayed on the side of the screen at any one time, but when the internal level counter (stored in a single byte) reaches 255, the subroutine erroneously causes this value to “roll over” to zero before drawing the fruit. This causes the routine to attempt to draw 256 fruits, which corrupts the bottom of the screen and the whole right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols, making the level unwinnable. However, through additional analysis, it has been revealed what happens should the 256th level be cleared - the fruits and intermissions would restart from level 1 conditions, but the enemies would retain their higher speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the higher stages.”

Don Hodges, excerpted in wikipedia.

"We have a saying: We'll go as fast as we can but slow as we must," he added.

O-Bow repurposes a mouse sensor for artificial bow tracking

By Paul Miller posted Nov 22nd 2010 10:51PM

Here at the Engadget HQ we're very serious about articulating the noise and action of a bow when it comes to our synthesized string instruments, and the O-Bow looks like it could be the low cost solution we were dreaming of. (No, Smule Magic Fiddle doesn't count, it's a devil "instrument" and it lies). Hacker / musician Dylan Menzies has devised a method using the optical sensor from a mouse for tracking anything with a grained surface, like a wooden stick, and using it to make a single sample synthesizer "sing" like a real bowed instrument. Unfortunately, that single sample sounds pretty terrible right now, but Dylan is working on a more sophisticated method of modeling the instrument. Until then, we'll just have to resort to giving Smule dirty looks and messing around with our Korg joystick. There's a video after the break, but don't say we didn't warn you about that sample.

Love how good this sounds. And it's just an upside-down mouse and a stick?!

“Opting out of Google Maps’ Street View in Germany will blur the image of your building on the photographic map, and make you hideously uncool. So says a group of vandals who egged homes in Essen that appear pixelated on the search engine’s map, leaving notes that say “Google’s cool” (in English) on the privacy-lovers’ doors and mailboxes.

The victims are part of the 3 percent of German residents, totaling almost 250,000 people, who chose to have images of their homes blurred from Google’s Street View map feature. Google uncharacteristically offered Germans the chance to opt out of the system before it launched after German government officials voiced concerns about privacy rights and Google’s data-collection method.”

(German Vandals Throw Eggs At Houses That Opt Out Of Google Street View | Popular Science)

I like to think that these buildings just look like this in real life.