Also, what about the flashing sprites in Adventure and the ghosts in Zelda? Are these caused by similar issues to pac man?
In: Technology
Memory was limited in old computer systems, so most applications would use as little storage as possible for storing numbers. The minimum value is a byte, 8-bits, which can store 0-255. If you add +1 to 255 it wraps back again to zero. But the original starting level was level 1. So it doesn’t know what to do with a zero. Or more specifically it’s looping 255 times instead of 1.
About the flashing sprites: some old systems had a graphics chip that could only draw a fixed amount of sprites (e.g. 4). If you wanted more than 4 sprites you could rapidly switch between them, leading to the flickering effect.
Edit: so no, not the same issue
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