I've seen a number of articles on the strategy of Pac-Man, but never one as detailed as this:
- Learn to do "head fakes", quick jerks of the joystick which fake the ghosts into changing direction or anticipating your movement incorrectly.- Read the ghosts eyes: The ghosts eyes give away which direction they are going to turn next, they always look which way they'll go slightly before turning.
- You are faster on a clear road: If on the run, chose paths which have been cleared already to gain more speed advantage over your pursuers.
- The Escape Routes: The two exits above the ghost house and above the Pac-Man start position can only be travelled downwards by the ghosts, never upwards unless they are blue and on the run. Good to know this when you are being chased! (Thanks to Simon for this tip :))
- The hiding place: There is one safe spot in the maze. Reach it when none of the ghosts are looking at you and you can stay there safely for as long as you like. The ghosts will not find you.
Learn these lessons well, gwashoppah, and you, too, will someday be rewarded with the scene at the left, showing Pac-Man when the program breaks, at the 255th level. Assuming you've got five or six free hours to devote to the attempt.
You are no doubt champing at the bit to try out these new tactics. These online versions (Warning: sfx in both), one in Flash and the other in Java, seem to be pretty accurate renditions (though I haven't played the game for some time now, so I might be mistaken).
To get a perfect copy of the original, you'll have to install an emulator, of which the best known is MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). This duplicates as closely as possible thousands of arcade (and console -- Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, etc.) games.
However, MAME, because of copyright reasons, doesn't distribute the ROM image files that are necessary to play the games.
Being a law-abiding citizen, you of course wouldn't think of doing a search for "ROM images" or "ROM sets." Nor would you dream of clicking on a link such as this, which might contain Pac-Man (and Ms. Pac-Man) ROMs.