#tokyo breakout method

[goldstrats]

How I Earned $18,500 Trading 2 Hours a Day — The Hidden Truth About Forex Session Timing - The Goldmine Strategy

Introduction

Why You Might Be Trading All Wrong

Most traders believe the only way to win in the forex markets is by staying glued to their charts during the London and New York sessions. I used to be one of them. I would wake up early, chase volatile moves, enter trades too soon, or get stopped out during massive fakeouts. My strategy? Honestly, it wasn’t really a strategy. It was chaos.

But everything changed when I stopped trying to outsmart the market and started to understand the rhythm of the market sessions. Instead of fighting during high-volatility hours, I discovered a calmer window of opportunity — the Asian session.

Within three months, by focusing only on a specific 2-hour window in the Asian session and refining my approach, I made $18,500. This article is not about signals or copy-paste trades. It’s about structure, timing, and discipline.

The Forgotten Window: Understanding the Asian Session

When people hear "Asian session," they immediately think of low volatility and boring charts. But here’s what they don’t know: The Asian session holds structure.

Markets like XAUUSD (Gold), USDJPY, and a few major JPY pairs form highly predictable patterns during these hours. There's reduced manipulation, fewer spikes, and cleaner movement. Most professional traders skip this time because it doesn't give them the thrill they crave. But for those of us focused on steady profits, it's a goldmine (literally).

Benefits of Trading the Asian Session:

Fewer fakeouts

Clean breakouts from overnight consolidations

Lower spreads for some pairs

High win-rate setups if you're patient

My Daily Routine: The $18,500 Case Study

Every day, I only spend about 2 hours on charts. Here’s how my routine looks:

Chart Review: I check price action from the previous New York session.

Asian Range Markup: I draw my Asian range using specific timing tools.

The Watch: I monitor for the secret in this course

👉 Get the full strategy pack and tools here

Entry Point: I wait. I enter only when the setup matches the framework.

Risk Plan: Each trade has a pre-defined risk and exit structure.

Log the Trade: I record the entry, logic, stop loss, and result in my trading journal.

It sounds simple — and that’s because it is. But simple doesn't mean easy.

How I Grew From Small Profits to $18,500

I started small. My first few trades gave me $20 here, $60 there. But over time, something interesting happened. I started recognizing the same pattern showing up again and again. I fine-tuned my execution, trusted my plan, and focused on risk-reward.

Before I knew it, my gains went from $100 a week to over $1,000. In just under 90 days, my balance grew past the $18,500 mark.

I wasn’t trading aggressively. I wasn’t trading London or New York. I was simply mastering one session, one setup, and one strategy.

Let’s Talk Results (Without the Hype)

I know you’re probably skeptical. And you should be. The forex industry is full of screenshots and fake success stories.

But what I offer here is this: a repeatable framework based on timing and structure.

My win rate is around 76%, with an average of 1:2 risk-reward ratio. My max drawdown in the past 3 months? Less than 6%. And yes, I’ve used this same method to pass prop firm challenges too.

No indicators. No bots. Just clear logic and market rhythm.

Forex Lifestyle: Freedom Over Frenzy

I now trade from my phone or laptop while sipping coffee. I don’t miss sleep. I don’t stress over missed moves. And most importantly, I no longer chase the markets.

This strategy has allowed me to:

Spend more time with family

Avoid screen fatigue

Focus on high-quality trades only

Achieve a scalable income from a simple routine

How to Trade XAUUSD Profitably (Without Indicators)

Gold, or XAUUSD, thrives in the Asian session. While most people wait for news spikes, I look for price structure and liquidity levels.

Here's what I can say:

Gold respects previous day highs/lows during this session.

Breakouts tend to be stronger when they align with structure.

Trading less = winning more, especially with gold.

This is where the Goldmine Strategy truly shines.

The Secret Sauce? It’s Not What You Think

You might be expecting me to now reveal the exact steps or give you an entry formula.

Nope.

That part is in my full training, and honestly, it's not about hiding things. It's about teaching with depth, not with shortcuts. Real traders understand that success is more than just copying.

What matters more is having a trading framework, trading plan, and risk model that you trust.

And yes, all of that is included in my full package — from my risk management plan to my live trade journal.

Final Thoughts: Best Forex Trading Strategy? This Is It.

If you’re asking yourself what the best forex trading strategy is, the answer might surprise you. It’s not the one with the most indicators or YouTube views. It’s the one that gives you:

Confidence

Consistency

Simplicity

Sustainability

And for me, it’s the one I use every day during the Asian session. The same one that helped me earn $18,500 in profit.

Want the Full Guide?

If this resonates with you, check out the full blueprint, video training, and live journal access:

👉 Read the full breakdown on Medium

👉 Get the full strategy pack and tools here

👉 Subscribe for Daily Session Trades

Keywords used throughout the article: best forex trading strategy, goldmine strategy, asian session profit, forex lifestyle, how to trade XAUUSD profitably

Let the London crowd chase noise. You? You’ll master calm profit.

[tokyoglam]

The Japanese Beauty Routine: 7 Daily Habits for Flawless Skin and Glamorous Nails

Japanese beauty culture is admired worldwide for its elegant simplicity, thoughtful rituals, and long-lasting results. From radiant, glass-like skin to perfectly manicured nails, Japan’s beauty philosophy focuses on consistency, mindfulness, and high-quality ingredients.

At Tokyo Glam, we draw inspiration from these time-honored practices to bring you the best in skincare, nail care, and overall beauty. In this blog, we’re uncovering seven daily habits that form the foundation of the Japanese beauty routine—habits you can incorporate into your life to achieve flawless skin and glamorous nails the Tokyo way.

1. Double Cleansing: A Ritual of Renewal

The first rule of Japanese skincare is this: never go to bed with makeup or sunscreen still on. Japanese women swear by double cleansing, a two-step process that starts with an oil-based cleanser to remove makeup and impurities, followed by a gentle foaming cleanser to cleanse the skin.

Why it works:

Double cleansing ensures pores stay clear, preventing breakouts and buildup. It also allows other skincare products to absorb more effectively.

Tokyo Glam Tip:

Use a rice bran oil cleanser (a traditional Japanese favorite) followed by a pH-balanced foaming cleanser. Avoid harsh scrubbing—gentleness is key.

2. Toning with Essence: Hydration Is Everything

Unlike the alcohol-based toners commonly used in the West, Japanese toners (also known as “lotions” or essences) are designed to hydrate and soften the skin, prepping it for the next steps in your routine.

Why it works:

Hydrated skin absorbs serums and moisturizers better. Plus, it feels soft, plump, and fresh all day long.

Tokyo Glam Tip:

Apply toner using clean hands and press it gently into your skin. Look for ingredients like hyaluronic acid, green tea, and fermented rice extract—natural Japanese staples.

3. Layering Lightweight Products: Minimalism That Works

Rather than applying thick creams or heavy products, Japanese skincare favors the layering method. This involves applying several thin layers of hydrating and nourishing products—like serums, emulsions, and moisturizers—to gradually build a healthy moisture barrier.

Why it works:

This approach prevents clogged pores and creates a balanced, dewy complexion without feeling greasy.

Tokyo Glam Tip:

Apply each product with upward motions, allowing time between layers for absorption. This mindful routine not only benefits your skin but offers a moment of daily self-care.

4. Sun Protection Every Day, Rain or Shine

One of the secrets behind Japanese women’s youthful skin? Daily sun protection. SPF is non-negotiable in Japan, and it’s applied not just on sunny days, but every single morning—regardless of the weather.

Why it works:

UV rays are the number one cause of premature aging. Wearing sunscreen daily helps protect against fine lines, discoloration, and skin damage.

Tokyo Glam Tip:

Opt for lightweight, non-comedogenic sunscreens that blend easily and leave no white cast. Look for SPF 30 or higher with broad-spectrum protection.

5. Nail Care as an Extension of Self-Care

In Japan, nail grooming is treated with the same attention to detail as skincare. Well-manicured nails are a form of personal expression, often subtle yet artful. Instead of only focusing on bold designs, Japanese nail care prioritizes nail health, shape, and long-lasting polish.

Why it works:

Healthy, well-maintained nails enhance your overall look and reflect your personal style. Regular care also prevents brittleness and breakage.

Tokyo Glam Tip:

Moisturize your cuticles daily with nourishing oils like camellia or jojoba, gently file nails to maintain a consistent shape, and protect your nails with base coats to prevent staining. Our Tokyo Glam nail artists specialize in minimalist, chic Japanese gel designs that last for weeks without damage.

6. Green Tea and Collagen in Your Diet

True beauty in Japanese culture starts from the inside out. Daily consumption of antioxidant-rich teas like green tea and matcha helps reduce inflammation, detoxify the skin, and even slow signs of aging. Collagen supplements are also popular for supporting skin elasticity and hydration.

Why it works:

Your skin reflects your internal health. A nutrient-rich diet not only fuels your body but directly improves the condition of your skin and nails.

Tokyo Glam Tip:

Start your morning with a warm cup of matcha and consider adding a marine collagen supplement to your daily routine for visibly plumper skin and stronger nails.

7. Daily Massage and Lymphatic Drainage

Facial massage is more than a trend in Japan—it’s a staple of daily skincare. Tools like the Yamada facial roller or gua sha are used to stimulate circulation, tone facial muscles, and improve product absorption. The same goes for hand and nail massages, which promote healthy nail growth and keep hands looking youthful.

Why it works:

Lymphatic drainage reduces puffiness, boosts blood flow, and gives the skin a healthy, lifted appearance. Massage also helps relieve stress, which can negatively impact skin.

Tokyo Glam Tip:

Spend 3–5 minutes daily massaging your face with your moisturizer or facial oil using upward strokes. Don’t forget to give your cuticles and nail beds a little TLC with gentle massage during your nail care routine.

Why Japanese Beauty Works?

The brilliance of the Japanese beauty routine lies in its consistency and simplicity. There are no quick fixes or harsh treatments—instead, it’s about developing daily habits that are gentle, holistic, and sustainable. Over time, these small rituals yield big results: radiant skin, polished nails, and a sense of calm self-confidence.

At Tokyo Glam, we bring this philosophy to life. From skin-loving facials to luxurious gel manicures, every service we offer is designed to mirror the elegance, mindfulness, and quality of Japanese beauty culture.

The Tokyo Glam Experience: Where Ritual Meets Results

At Tokyo Glam, we don’t believe in rushing beauty. Our expert estheticians and nail artists take time to understand your skin and style preferences, curating each treatment with the same care and intention as a traditional Japanese beauty ritual.

What Sets Us Apart:

Authentic Japanese methods for skincare and nail design

Premium, skin-safe products imported from Japan Customized treatments based on your unique skin or nail condition A tranquil, spa-like atmosphere to make your experience relaxing and restorative

Whether you’re looking to revamp your skincare routine or treat yourself to a flawless manicure, Tokyo Glam is your destination for elevated beauty rituals rooted in tradition, quality, and modern glamour.

Ready to Glow the Japanese Way?

Start your journey toward flawless skin and beautiful nails with the experts at Tokyo Glam. We’re here to guide you through the art of Japanese beauty, one luxurious ritual at a time.

Book your facial or nail appointment today at tokyoglam.com

Call us at (insert number) to schedule your consultation

Visit our salon and discover Tokyo-inspired beauty in every detail

Follow us on Instagram @tokyoglamph for skincare tips, nail art ideas, and behind-the-scenes beauty rituals.

[good-high-vibe]

I'm about to reveal exactly how smartmoney are building their positions andhunt for liquidity by the end of thevideo you'll learn how to avoid being avictim of Market manipulation and youalso discover the sneaky traps set bybig players to hunt your orders you knowthe drill like subscribe and stickaround for the full videoimagine for a second that you are thebiggest player in the market what wouldyou need to do to trap Traders and makeyour profits at their expensewell you need to consider where is theliquidity what might determine retailtraders to take certain positions andthen consider the methods that need tobe applied to seduce the average Traderto actually enter a positionthis is a three-step processfirst you need to convince retailtraders to take positionsthis technique is done by using a rangeof price movements to trick Traders intotaking a position in a given Directionthis is basically setting up a trapwe'll talk about these traps laterthen you instigate traders to becomeemotional and think irrationallythis involves quick price moves spycandles were fast and random pricemovementsand after retail Traders are trapped youthen hunt their stops and reverse thepricethis is the simplest definition of amarket Maker's activitynow remember what happened the last timeyour stops were huntedyou were induced to take a positionthinking price is going to move in acertain direction or maybe you weretriggered by the speed of a pricemovementthen once the Trap has been set and youtook the bait price moved against youso how to avoid this let's discuss themost common traps used by smart moneythe Asian trading session is one of themain zones targeted by the smart moneyin this example we highlighted the Asiansessionswe see that the Asian session is not asliquid and volatile as other majortrading sessionsand one of the most common strategiesused by retail Traders is to identifythe trend and wait for the breakoutoutside of the Tokyo rangebut if we look closer we'll see thatthis is not a viable strategyif we analyze these three consecutiveTokyo sessionswe see an interesting patternrange traders who have taken shortpositions at the top of the Asian rangehad their stop losses hunted outside ofthe rangeeach time the market reversedaggressively in the opposite directionthe upward movement outside of the rangealso enticed traders to take longpositionshoping for a breakout tradeso there's a second batch of traders whowere trapped long breakout Traderswhen you have a cluster of orders in asimilar Price Zone this Zone will betargeted by Big Market playersso if range trading could lead to yourstops being hunted and breakout tradesare also risky how do you actually avoidthe Tokyo trap the good news is thatwhen you know how a stop Hunt works youcan employ strategies to prevent beinghunted in the first placeremember one of the key ingredients tostop hunting is a cluster of stop-lossorders near a similar pricestop loss orders might be clusteredtogether for two reasons the Market'spattern points people to place a stoploss near similar levelsor Traders Place orders hoping for aBreakoutthe safest way is to enter after youspot a liquidity clear out a moveoutside the range and a quickretracement back inside of itbuying at the top of the Tokyo range orselling at the bottom of the range isoutdated and should be avoided[Music]smart money also induce traders to takethe wrong direction by using sharp andaggress...

[awkwardanime]

Isao Takahata: Realism (1988/1991)

A career that spanned over 55 years, with 18 TV series and a staggering 21 feature length films associated with his name from 1961 to 2016 either as a Storyboard Artist, Producer, Writer or Director - there is no doubt that Isao Takahata was one of the most influential people in the history of Animation.

Sadly passing away on April 5 at the age of 82, this ordinary man left behind some very unordinary works which still to this day resonate and touch the hearts of millions around the world, proving that “cartoons” can be every bit as compelling as live-action cinema. A person’s art is always a reflection of their views and beliefs, and it was no different here. The film-maker’s success stemmed from one place: realism.

Takahata’s breakout story came funnily enough almost 20 years after he first began working in the industry, with the release of Grave of the Fireflies in 1988 - his debut within the retreat of Ghibli, the Studio he co-founded with a man he called both his “rival” and “friend” alongside producer Toshio Suzuki. These were the years where competition with Miyazaki brought out the best in his work, all the while making sure to never stray away from his methods of expressing his stories to the viewers.

This is the movie that has been described by most as: “the best movie you’ll never want to watch again” and can you argue with that? Grave of the Fireflies is the perfect example of Takahata’s realism that he showed in his movies. It was far from the fantastical world of Miyazaki, with nothing but truth hitting us viewers every single second. And with every second, frame and scene it grew harder to watch yet at the same time impossible to look away. I do this movie no justice.

“They think people back then were much more noble and that they wouldn’t be able to do such things themselves. But I think that’s not right. We make such stories to give people courage, but then the audience feels the story has nothing to do with them. So I wanted a common ground for the audience to relate to”

Takahata stated numerous times when promoting the film that history will always show the fighters and citizens of war to be noble and honest, but that is not the case. He showed what it was and still is like for young people battling through devastation, whether that be war or a natural disaster. Portraying this in animation and not live-action meant he and his staff had to get the facial features and expressions of the main characters (Seita and Setsuko) spot on. As he was in the production process, he felt that both characters would be challenging to animate in an expressive way showing their despair and sorrow:

“Just like today’s junior high students, a 14 year old looks unemotional or grumpy or unemotionally unbalanced. It’s reflected in their bodies and in their facial expressions. But animation is basically line-drawings and expressions are always exaggerated, so it’s hard to animate such expressions”

Takahata and the author of the original short story(based on true events) Akiyuki Nosaka told interviewers that as hard it may have been, this story is actually better suited for animation, and in my opinion they were definitely right. Could this have worked with two young people? I think no as the sight of a 4 year old girl suffering might have looked too over-sentimental, and it’s not easy to find a four year old actress who can nail every scene. It was clear that Takahata was not one to follow the norm, and he proved that here with the introduction of a new technique that up-to that point had not been seen in Japanese animation: the illustration outlines were done in brown and not the usual black. The then 52 year old did this I think to give a softer feeling to the screen, and by that I mean to not portray the illustrations in an even bolder way, as the drawings themselves gave that sense of dark reality already. This little attention to detail may not seem like much, but I feel it proves that the Director constantly wanted to challenge himself, and as time went on that never changed.

“I’m not saying fantasy is bad. I myself enjoy the genre from time to time. However, I don’t agree with getting an audience excited by seeing a character do something incredible that defies logic”

That sense of realism continued with the ‘slice of life’ story which follows the woman Taeko trying to figure out her life in 1980′s Tokyo. 1991′s Only Yesterday is where we saw Isao Takahata in a more earnest mood, but still with that same observance. Here, the plot may differ greatly, but that reflective style is still used, as Takahata was so good at taking us into the minds of his characters and observing their imaginations set off.

“For many years I have wanted to improve on the simplistic flat-pane image of cel animation. But I didn’t want to solve this by going into the 3D-CG method of three-dimensionality and substantiality”

The realism may be the same to his previous work, but the animation style greatly differs as the frames are drawn in a style that I have never seen before, with colours and details at the edges of the screen fading away to suggest that incompleteness of memory. It almost seems like sketches that were taken right from a children’s book, with the watercolours beautifully adding that light-tone to the scenes.

“I wanted to solve this by a method of reduction of not drawing everything on the screen, in order to stimulate people’s imagination and raise the level of artistry”

The thing is, I was deeply moved when watching Grave of the Fireflies. With Only Yesterday, I felt exactly the same, and that’s what is so staggering about this filmmaker. The man never once failed to achieve that feat in all of his works, the ability to make me feel more connected to these uniquely drawn characters than I have with most others in Animation. Fireflies has its poetic tragedy, this film rather takes me aback with is beauty and grace, all the while keeping its realism.  Only Yesterday is a movie that every scene ebbs and flows with Taeko, and we see Takahata produce these moments that are so fleeting in life. A perfectly good-feel feature that proved to Japan in 1991 that Isao Takahata can not only create another blockbuster, he can do it his way.

“I see infinite potential for animation. I don’t know if that is a wonderful thing or not. All of the arts, whether they be music, drama, or painting, have infinite potential. But no one knows whether this unlimited potential can be a force for creating many works that can offer delight to people”

Beautiful, personal animated films that are some of the genre’s greatest, the soft-spoken man was always alert observing the world around him, the people around him and their “ordinary human qualities”. Touching the hearts of millions around the world like a cool welcoming breeze (apart from Fireflies which hit me like a brick), his influence is never in question as hundreds of animators live action filmmakers cite him as one of their teachers, without ever meeting in person. One of these people is Screenwriter Michael Arndt who, after seeing ‘My Neighbours the Yamadas’, was inspired to finally sit down and write ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ after years of procrastination.

He rarely ever put a pencil or pen to paper during any animation process, a huge contrast to the design-based approach of his colleague. The stories he wrote and released are what made his sophisticated, character-driven films a huge success, exploring a diverse range of themes and aesthetic styles while keeping within the realm of reality.

Mr. Isao Takahata, we say goodbye to a true poetic master, but through your absolutely stunning films that you kindly left us, your name will forever live in our hearts.

RIP Isao Takahata

29 October 1935 - 5 April 2018

[matinjapan]

A treatise on markets

Back when I lived in Vancouver, I was living the unemployed dream. Not quite right: I was working at a driving range a few days a week, and during winter I was one of the ‘Mountain Safety’ crew up at Whistler one day a week. So, the employed dream?

Even though I had a job, it felt like I was unemployed. The golf range gig was very cruisy. Involved hanging out in a booth/shed selling ball tokens, hitting a whole heap of balls, and then driving a tractor to pick up said balls every so often. Was probably the best job I’ve ever had, all for CAD 10 an hour. The volunteer gig with Whistler was similarly cruisy. We got to head up to the top of the mountain about an hour before the mountain opened, and then make our way down, setting-up go slow signs as we went. We then just cruised around the mountain for the rest of the day with walkie talkie‘s, attending to collisions, injuries (including occasional heli-evacs!), lost kids, or whatever other problems or mishaps occurred.

The Whistler gig was actually home to one of my many shameful moments: I fell asleep on the job. Super cold, bluster’y day and I lingered on a couch in a breakout area for a bit longer than I should have, after coming in for a bite to eat. I woke dazed and confused to one of the lead dudes accosting me. He wasn’t too impressed. Woops!

I was pretty lucky to not get fired. A few of the regulars I normally boarded with, put in a good word for me, rightly or wrongly.

Anyway, the main point of this ramble is that I wasn’t particularly obligated in terms of having to turn up at a workplace. And while it’d be easy to think that that would mean I’d settle into a life of midday TV, and naps (substantiated by me falling asleep while working!), that didn’t really happen. Instead, I ended up delving pretty deeply into trading (I also had quite a lot of naps).

Like most people, I’m generally pretty keen to acquire currency. And especially so, when it requires as little time tied to an employer as possible. At that time, I was still making money playing poker (that’s another venture that I was spending considerable time on), but it was becoming increasingly difficult. The supply of new (read: bad) players was waning, and the online poker houses were squeezing more and more of a cut from the diminishing player pool.

I knew that poker wasn’t something that I’d do forever. Trading seemed like a worthwhile pivot, with quite a few similarities related to bank roll management and psychology.

Over the course of about 6 months, I spent a lot of time at the Downtown library reading books about the history of markets, biographies of famous traders, trading strategies, the psychology of trading; whatever I could find, really.

A lot of the stuff I was reading was great context. And certain books were great at explaining the technical aspects of different things you could trade, such as options or futures. But once you learn all that stuff (which I never fully mastered), you were really only at the level of knowing the rules of the game. Kind of like knowing that a flush beats a straight; or the probability of hitting an inside straight draw is 8%, etc. It’s the framework that you need to know inside out before even beginning to develop a strategy.

And strategy is where things get difficult. It’s compounded by the overwhelming amount of chaff to wade through when you’re trying to figure out an approach. There’s no shortage of people trying to sell you their expertise and insight, but unfortunately, almost all is crap. Those who can, do. And those who can’t, teach, sums it up pretty nicely.

Anyway, the more I looked into it, the more daunting the prospect of trading became. On a surface level, it was clear that a select (yet diverse) group of people were able to be incredibly successful. But that assessment is like finding out that top basketball players get paid millions of dollars, and so deciding to start working on your free throw for the upcoming draft. Easy money.

There’s also the idea that those that are successful, are successful because they’ve superior intellectual fire power. They’re just better than the competition and naturally rise to the top. Many successful traders and the hedge funds they found, or are attached to, have this quality. But that’s not necessarily true for a substantial portion of them. Success is often tied to unscrupulous methods to extract surplus returns.

What’s more, to trade from home, both facilitated by, and against, the might of large financial institutions, banks, hedge funds, etc., you’re at a distinct disadvantage. Investing for the long-term is one thing. But to actively trade on a more short-term basis with a slower connection, less competitive spreads, less information, less computing power is not a great starting point, to put it mildly.

From when I was playing poker, people used to throw around stats that about 90% of online poker player accounts lost money. And then the next few percent were break even or modest winners at best. It was really only the top few percent that made all the money. I’m not sure what it is for retail trader’s, but I suspect the statistics are even more extreme.

So that’s essentially where I got to with trading. Super fascinating, but ultimately something I didn’t pursue. The reason why it’s come to the fore of my thinking in the last little while is that I’m still a sucker for the promise of ‘easy’ (read: not easy) money. Surplus time at home from the state of emergency and the GameStop saga of the last few months has fuelled my interest again. But I’ve quickly arrived at a similar conclusion to what I did a decade ago. If anything, it seems the playing field has only skewed more. And that’s despite the introduction of platforms such as Robinhood.

I’ve actually just finished reading the book about Enron: Smartest guys in the room. The book paints an amazing picture of just how corrupt the financial system was, and still is. Until I read the book, I always thought it was about the fraudulent misdeeds of a few people in one company. But it’s instead an indictment of capital markets in general, as facilitated by Wall Street.

And yet still I’m drawn to trading. Ha!

No, probably not trading. But investing, which has a longer time frame, is something I’m keen to get into more. For the last few years, I’ve been cash heavy (with my limited supply). While there’s not much inflation to speak of, the runaway appreciation in asset prices (damn you, Australian property) has left me in the dust. A flat white might still be $3.50. But a median house in Sydney of about 4 billion dollars kind of stings when you don’t own one.

Though now that I’m thinking about it more, rest assured that the point at which I do put my money in, that will be the top. For housing, I reckon I’ll be keen to buy a place end of 2022. So, Australian property bubble to burst beginning of 2023.

And I’ll just add, beyond property, investing for the long-term has been severely warped over the last few decades. So the game is far from fair, no matter what you do (property, stocks, bonds, commodities, or beanie babies). Thank you, elites (facilitated by political class and central bankers).

Anyway, here’s some pictures from the last little while in Tokyo and surrounds. The weather is starting to turn just about perfect. Some of the Sakura are already blooming, with more to occur over the next month or so. Magical time for all the hayfever sufferers.  

Some quick running updates following an earlier blog: my running has severely stalled from about early December. Slight injury that I think is only now coming good. Good enough to start up’ing my mile’age again, but I’m definitely a ways away from being fit; it’ll be a while before I break any of those goal times, if ever.

But absent running, I’ve finally been climbing again. About 5 times outdoors this year, which has been great. Have lost a lot of strength from when I was climbing in 2019, but I’m keen to also up the climbing efforts too, to change that. Will see if I can simultaneously improve running and climbing at the same time.

Sayonara

[goldstrats]

How I Quietly Earned $18,500 Trading Just 2 Hours a Day — The Goldmine Strategy That’s Changing Lives

ChatGPT said:

Here's a ready-to-paste Tumblr blog article tailored for goldstrats.tumblr.com — designed for SEO traffic, link placement, and video integration (just paste your video link in the placeholder section).

���️ Tumblr Blog Post for goldstrats.tumblr.com

📝 Title: How I Quietly Earned $18,500 Trading Just 2 Hours a Day — The Goldmine Strategy That’s Changing Lives

📖 Body: Most traders think the only way to win in the forex market is to chase the London or New York sessions.

I used to believe the same — until I started trading during the Asian session using what I now call the Goldmine Strategy.

This little-known method helped me turn quiet Tokyo mornings into consistent profits. No hype. No stress. Just structure and execution.

Over time, this method helped me make $18,500 in quiet profits, without sitting on charts all day or blowing accounts.

I now use this exact method on:

XAUUSD (Gold)

BTCUSD (Bitcoin)

USDJPY, EURJPY, GBPJPY, AUDJPY

If you’ve ever wondered:

What’s the best forex trading strategy right now?

How can I trade Gold or BTC with precision?

What do prop firm passers really use?

👉 Then read this medium article on the goldmine strategy

📦 Get the Strategy Pack (Includes Video, Trading Journal, Plan, Risk Management) 🔗 Get the Goldmine Strategy Book Here

📩 Join the Signal & Strategy Group I share live setups during the Asian session every morning. 🔗 Subscribe to Weekly/Monthly Signals

📈 Tags #goldmine strategy #best forex trading strategy #asian session profit #xauusd scalping #btc trading setup #tokyo breakout method #forex lifestyle #smart money strategy #passive forex income #prop firm challenge strategy

🧠 Final Thoughts: You don’t need 12 hours on charts. You don’t need 50 indicators. All you need is structure, timing, and a system that actually works.

Start small. Be consistent. And trust the system.

Let the London hype crowd burn themselves out while you quietly grow your account in peace.

[thevanitychariot]

The Chariot: Issue V

Original Publication: 16 March 2018

MC-Wylde Soars Despite Miranda Cosgrove Resigning By: Aramis Giordano

Earlier in the year, Davis Wylde and Miranda Cosgrove announced the MC-Wylde, a fusion of the MC Company and Wylde Studios, to continue providing platform for the underrepresented groups of people. As the current entertainment industry is becoming more prolific, coupled with the birth of Donovan and Mallory, Miranda Cosgrove decides to step down from her position as co-president. She cites her resignation as to focus on taking care of her two children, away from the spotlight and the attention from the current Asian Age. The announcement followed after the end of the production of While You Were Sleeping, and Miranda notes that even though it had been a worthwhile experience, both Donovan and Mallory should not be growing up without their parents most of the day, or having the production stages be their playground. “It robs them the life that children should be having, and I don’t want them to grow up in the industry and society with a silver spoon already feeding them”.

With this conundrum facing the MC-Wylde, Davis ends the production of the Asian Saga, claiming that they have “reached an absolute milestone with the first generation” and expresses his excitement on the future of the second generation, presumably after the promotion of a new co-president or vice president. “The nine movies we have finished for the Asian Saga have been nothing but progression and excitement, and I am looking forward to working with the new vice president in producing a record-breaking second generation of Asian Saga movies”.

The announcement of another set of Asian Saga films came alongside the declaration of MC-Wylde’s new vice president, Miyurina Hamasaki. As MC-Wylde’s former Chief of Staff, Miyurina was responsible for team meetings, staffing, casting, and coordination of events and film productions. Davis idolizes Miyurina’s hard work and her dedication on further improving the studio’s public image and equal and fair treatment within the workplace, that making the decision of who to fill up Miranda’s position was “a no-brainer”. Miyurina was responsible on pitching ideas on the creation of what is now known the Asian Saga, and continued to pursue better and more complex storylines as the saga continued until the final movie, Jang Minho’s While You Were Sleeping, who also helmed the box office hit W. As an Asian-American, Miyurina hopes to address more issues regarding historical and current maltreatment against Asian-Americans and more representation of Asian histories and cultures, providing more platforms for other Asian populations, instead of Japanese and Korean. She has currently proposed another set of 6-10 movies for the second generation of the Asian Saga, in which she currently refers to as the Tales from the East. “Even though it is called the Asian Saga, I still believed that we underrepresented the other Asian minorities; my responsibility as the new vice president of the company leading the forefront for progression is to make sure other Asian cultures and histories are valued and represented. The heroes and heroines who non-East Asians look up to will find a place in the spotlight with the Tales from the East, a spotlight that was robbed from them in our current history books and cinematic works”.

A Surveillance: Reel 3 is due to air this December for non-Korean and non-Japanese candidates to participate in. “This is not a form of discrimination against the Koreans or the Japanese”, Miyurina promotes. “I want the Thais, and the Pakistanis, and the Indonesians to star in the same blockbuster films that the Koreans and the Japanese are raking glory in. She promises to take part on the casting process for the third reel to make sure that the positions are open for everybody and not just biased towards one race. “I can’t promise the results of who fills in the positions, but be assured that the spotlight can shine at everyone”. Miyurina closes her speech wishing the Ross Award nominees much luck and looks forward to working with Davis and Lawrence closely for the next years to come.

Ross and Racism: How River Johnson is the Catalyst for Something Greater By: Aramis Giordano Original Publication Date: 12 December 2017

This year's Ross Awards is the most anticipated show in the entire history of the industry, mostly because of the interest in the movies nominated from the Asian Age and the drive to witness an historical awards ceremony. The Ross Awards did not disappoint and awarded the first Muslim and Asian winners that day. Sophia Osman won the title Best Supporting Actress for her role as Sughra "Leafa" Daher in ALFheim Online and Park Jungmin was awarded Best Actor for his breakout role as Arima Kousei in Your Lie in April. The most anticipated award of the season, Best Actress, did not fail to create conversations even days after the Ross Awards. Retrospectively, the Best Actress Award has always been the most talked about award with the viewers and has created the most controversial moments in the industry. This year's contenders were nothing but diverse: Keira Kuyama (Your Lie in April), Joanna Park (W), Caterina Sultana (Boys Over Flowers), Vanessa Harding (1872), and River Johnson (Omelas). Three of the five candidates are newcomers and are racial minorities, which sets the expectation that one of them would go home with the award.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. The award was given to River Johnson for her role as Ursula Le Guin, who willfully saved a child being emotionally and physically neglected in exchange for eternal happiness of the entire city of Omelas. Recent polls from various news sites and channels showed that Keira Kuyama and Vanessa Harding were supposed to be head-to-head for the award, and all of the polls have chosen River Johnson as the least likely winner. This begs the question: is this an award for the art of film or just another method to maintain white dominance in the industry? Since compared to Vanessa and Keira's performances, River's was clearly subpar. Which leads to the conclusion that this is not an award for performances. So, what happened? How did River Johnson win?

White. She is white. That's the case for Vanessa Harding also, although her role as the first woman to run for president in an era where women did not have the rights to vote yet, warranted the recognition of being the best actress. Her role as Victoria Woodhull was arguably one of her best and most memorable role as it showcased the drive to achieve an impossible goal. Another big award, Best Director, was handed to Mercer Leigh Stanley for her work in Boys Over Flowers. Together with River Johnson, two of the trifecta awards (Director, Actress, and Actor) were awarded to white artists. Another discussion whether or not Mercer deserved the award continues claiming it was her weakest movie with only two acting nominees.

The Vanity Chariot asked for a statement from the chairman of Hollywood Studios who is also responsible for the Ross Awards, Omar Vanderkoff, but none was given. Looking at the history with how Omar Vanderkoff handled the race issue from X Factor Season 8, an internal investigation should be warranted to prove that Omar had no influence in depriving the Asian nominees of the biggest award at the height of the Asian Age.

Not only River Johnson winning spurred conversations after the awards show, the talk about 1872 and W being snubbed from receiving any awards also flourished. The two movies were considered the golden movies of the year, displaying plotlines and themes that the industry has never experimented with before. 1872 was nominated for all categories yet came home with no awards; that has also been the case with the first Ross Awards which saw an historical seven nominations for Vanessa Harding's The Regnancy, but the movie fell short with no awards won. Although being her fourth Best Actress nomination, the most anybody has ever had, she never had the chance to go up the stage for a victory speech yet. A controversial win in 2015 with Chrystia Allwright put into the spotlight Vanessa's drive to have her movies recognized, and even though she released another historical movie, A Woman's Crusade, the following year, the Ross still did not hand the award to her.

River expected all of this to happen. The moment Taelyn Robins announced her name as the winner, the auditorium echoed with sounds of disapproval, followed by a unified chant with Keira's name prior to River starting her speech. She mentioned how the media "loves to pit women against each other for entertainment" and the viewers everywhere should realize they're falling into their trap. After the show, a rally outside the Stanley Auditorium ensued calling for a boycott for the future Ross Awards and calling out Hollywood Studios for the continuous unacceptance of other races into the industry. River acted as the ignition for the racial protests that will continue throughout 2018 and will be amplified by Tokyo Ghoul in April 14.

Next year's Ross Awards will also be an historical one, since it will include all of the Asian Saga movies. It will also be the fifth awards ceremony and the Chariot will be doing a segment on all the winners from the past five shows. In addition, the Ross Awards also announced Crew Matthew Barton as the permanent host of the ceremony.

Despite the chaos, Davis Wylde remains victorious for taking home all the awards, but Best Actress – an amazing feat for this year’s Ross Awards being his first. It is an exciting year ahead in diversity and history, and we just hope the president of Hollywood Studios, Lawrence Harland, will do everything to clear the studio's image following River's win and Tokyo Ghoul's release.

Asian Age Strengthens in the Face of a Crumbling Harland Empire By: Aramis Giordano Original Publication Date: 16 March 2018

Three months have passed since the most controversial Ross Awards Ceremony that saw cultural and racial minorities as nominees and winners. An anti-racism propaganda also emerged following River Johnson’s win as Best Actress against first-time nominees Keira Kuyama for her work in Your Lie in April and Joanna Park for her role in the blockbuster hit, W. Despite the chaos that ensued three months ago, the tension within the entertainment industry remained. An internal investigation is being conducted in Hollywood Studios with its chairman, Omar Vanderkoff, for possible influence with the Best Actress win. Hollywood Studios president, Lawrence Harland, declined to have an interview while the investigation is taking place.

Unlike Hollywood Studios, which had remained stagnant since last year’s Ross Awards, releasing no movies as of March, MC-Wylde’s The Asian Saga is in full-swing, with a release of one movie every weekend. Its most recent released film, The Pinocchio Syndrome, saw unprecedented success, almost on par with its predecessors, W and Descendants of the Sun. MC-Wylde’s Vice President, Miyurina Hamasaki also updates The Vanity Chariot about the Tales from the East being a very strong contender for a diverse and solid pathway for the future generations of racial minorities to follow. Miyurina mentioned movies, such as Fight My Way, Suspicious Partner, and Missing Nine, having main cast of non-Japanese or non-Korean descents. She acknowledges the talents brought in by the new cast members, such as Samar Chopra, Rio Tran, Kiet Aromdee, Aishah Khan, and Anika Sunisa. She also follows up that most of the movies in the Tales from the East are directed by Hadian Kusuma, an Indonesian-American female director. “I pride on diversity, and not just a homogenous form of diversity away from the typical White European standards that the industry thrived on before MC-Wylde. South and Southeast Asians will both thrive alongside the East Asians who carried The Asian Saga”.

Following Miyurina’s updates on the Tales from the East, she also announces MC-Wylde’s new Chief of Staff, taking her previous position before Davis Wylde promoted her as vice president. Dr. McCormick Hawthorne, an adjunct film history professor at Lawrence Harland University, steps in as Chief of Staff after a three-month discussion with Davis and Miyurina. “Davis and I think that with his knowledge on film backing him, Dr. Hawthorne will deliver new and raw ideas into the table that will mold the film industry that we want – an industry that shares our values and represents us a nation. We are very glad to have him on board”.

As the year progresses, the Asian Saga and Tales from the East will continue to take over the film industry, setting aside the movies released by Hollywood Studios; and with the upcoming release of its most controversial whitewashed film, Tokyo Ghoul, consisting of an all-white cast set in Tokyo, Japan, it is only a matter of time until Lawrence Harland’s empire crumbles down. The industry is changing rapidly, and anybody who does not accept this change will be left behind.

[theteenagetrickster]

Meet Cera Khin, The Tunisian-Born DJ Bringing Sulky Hardcore Atmospheres To The Techno Flooring-- Telekom Electronic Hammers

"This year has been ridiculous," claims Tunisian-born Cera Khin coming from her home in Berlin. "I started the year in Tokyo. Then I mosted likely to Shanghai, New Delhi, Bombay. Then to Mexico and New York. Tasmania!" There have actually been 2 Boiler Area day trips, a launching at KHIDI in Tbilisi and also a lot of International receive between.

Khin has only been betting the minimum three years, but her transmittable rave-heavy collections as well as nonconforming mindset have actually created her among this year's breakout techno stars.

Currently she's typically playing techno groups along with a harder, quicker MO. If you backtrack her music progression (as mapped out on her monthly Noods Broadcast presents), you'll see that she's right into a big series of styles-- and also isn't scared to mash all of them together in a DJ collection.

There's also her label, Careless Strips, which Khin released a year after she began DJing as a means to launch her very own speculative developments, causing the plaguing three-track tape, Guided Mind-calming exercise, along with Young Echo affiliate Ossia. She's because discharged songs from Christoph De Babalon and also Peder Mannerfelt as well as promoted a set of tag evenings at Paloma Bar as well as OHM in Berlin.

"I am actually the kind of person who ases if to test on their own as well as make difficult choices," she points out about the technique to Berlin in 2013, which she discovered culturally and actually challenging at initially. Six developmental years later on, nevertheless, Khin considers the metropolitan area home, along with its own generous values a lot better satisfied to her very own. "You may do whatever you yearn for listed below, and also nobody will judge you. That's inspiring to me. In Tunisia I constantly really feel limited, as well as people are actually combating to do traits there certainly. It's various below. It's thus free of charge."

Holly Dicker fulfilled as well as talked to the musician identified to carry out as well as play whatever the fuck she yearns for.

How performed you acquire in to DJing!. ?.!? I grew in Tunisia. I analyzed advertising at college. I was listening to songs, yet I certainly never believed, "I am actually going to be actually a DJ." I relocated to Berlin. I was actually going out-- like every person who moves to Berlin-- however I realized I yearned for moreover. I didn't desire to be actually only a raver. I preferred to play popular music. I saved up some funds as well as bought turntables. I had actually been accumulating documents and also finding out exactly how to play. I finished up doing a broadcast program on Noods-- one of the very first programs on the terminal.

Can you tell me about your Noods programs? In the beginning I was attempting to create a story. I didn't believe concerning the combining or the techniques. The very first Noods reveal I carried out alone. Afterwards I regularly welcomed visitors-- individuals whose songs I just like, or even pals. I didn't know Peder Mannerfelt at the opportunity; I only asked him on Twitter. Christoph De Babalon coincided: I merely inquired him online, and he noded. It ended up being like cleaning my teeth: Every month I had to record a radio show. It merely developed naturally.

Why is actually radio exclusive to you? I created on my own via radio, and also I feel unusual if I do not record a series now. It is actually been actually such a significant part of my lifestyle. Currently whenever I journey, I will certainly do a broadcast show. It is actually a nice method to found music and also your own self and to sustain your good friends and the songs you enjoy.

How does your Rave Armageddon show on Rinse FM contrast coming from your Noods post degree residency? In all of my programs, I am actually playing great deals of various stuff, relying on my mood. I like blending genres and different tempos. For Rinse FM I wished to be actually even more specific.Now I am actually listening closely to euphoric as well as emo stuff. I decided to carry out next with attendees for Rinse, and also it is actually additional dancefloor-oriented, along with every person revealing their hardcore side. Now I am actually continuing the "Rave Armageddon" motif on Noods, going back-to-back for my following series along with Gabber Eleganza.

This content was originally published here.

[sciencespies]

These 9 'moonshot' innovations will remind you how ingenious humans can truly be

https://sciencespies.com/tech/these-9-moonshot-innovations-will-remind-you-how-ingenious-humans-can-truly-be/

These 9 'moonshot' innovations will remind you how ingenious humans can truly be

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the Moon in 1969, they helped to cement the idea of a “moonshot” – a goal or achievement that challenges what we thought was possible.

While few moonshots measure up to the Apollo program, many of the world’s greatest inventions were once thought of as similarly out-of-reach.

Virtual reality, for example, was the province of science fiction before it came to life. And the concept of DNA fingerprinting even boggled its inventor until he saw it work for the first time.

Here are some of the world’s biggest moonshot ideas that became real-life innovations.

A floating housing complex in Amsterdam. (zoetnet/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

Floating cities are still theoretical, but floating housing complexes are already standing in the Netherlands.

About 13 centuries ago, Homer envisioned a mythical floating city surrounded by “unbreakable bronze.” That idea hasn’t come to life, but the concept of floating structures is very much a reality.

The Netherlands is home to floating apartment complexes and dairy farms that bob on the water, making them more resistant to floods. The United Nations is also entertaining a concept for a floating city that could address issues such as rising sea levels and overcrowding in urban areas.

Travelling through space was once thought to be impossible. Now, astronauts live there for months at a time.

American inventor Lee de Forest once predicted that space travel would be next to impossible. “Man is inherently an earthly creature and only his scientific imagination will make him a planetary emigrant,” he told Voice of America in 1957.

Less than 50 years later, the International Space Station made it possible for humans to live on an artificial satellite that would weigh 1 million pounds on Earth.

Driverless cars have been slow to get off the ground, but they’re operating in Phoenix.

Car companies have experimented with self-driving vehicles since the 1920s, but the concept has became more actualized over the last five years.

In December 2018, the driverless car company Waymo deployed an autonomous taxi fleet in Phoenix, Arizona. Waymo is a breakout of X Development, an Alphabet subsidiary dedicated to bringing moonshot ideas to life.

Passengers can use an app to book one of the Waymo’s self-driving cabs, which operate across four suburbs. As of May, the company had reached 1,000 customers.

A Loon internet balloon over Winnemucca, Nevada, on June 27, 2019. (Loon)

Alphabet’s latest moonshot company delivers internet access via solar-powered balloons.

One of the other moonshot ideas to come out of X Development is a company called Loon, which sends 39-foot-tall (12 metre tall) balloons equipped with wireless routers into the stratosphere to provide wireless internet access to rural areas.

The company’s name is a reference to the word “balloon,” but it’s also a nod to the fact that Alphabet once found the idea “loony.”

High-speed rail is still a moonshot in the US, but Japan has been using the technology for years.

Following World War II, Japan wanted a way to cut back on congestion while transporting residents to and from major cities. In 1964, the nation built the world’s first high-speed rail system in time for that year’s Olympic games.

The trains travelled at 130 miles per hour (210 kilometers per hour), cutting the seven-hour trip between Tokyo and Osaka roughly in half. By 1976, the system had transported a billion passengers without injury.

(Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

Regulatory restrictions in the US made birth control pills a moonshot idea until 1960.

The US banned contraception in all forms until 1938, which limited the amount of research that went into birth control methods. In the 1950s, however, activist Margaret Sanger convinced a wealthy philanthropist to fund research into the first-ever birth control pill.

It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1960.

“Thousands of drugs have been developed, but only one has been influential enough to earn the title of simply, the pill,” family medicine doctors Pamela Verma Liao and Janet Dollin wrote in 2012.

“The birth control pill separated sexual practice from conception.”

The inventor of DNA fingerprinting didn’t believe that he had created it at first.

In 1984, DNA fingerprinting – the science of determining someone’s unique DNA characteristics as a means of identification – was such a moonshot idea that its inventor couldn’t believe he had created it.

“In science it is unusual to have such a ‘eureka’ moment,” University of Leicester researcher Alec Jeffreys later told the university. “My first reaction to the results was ‘this is too complicated.'”

The technology has helped identify the perpetrators in murder cases and allowed for more accurate paternity testing. In 1985, it also saved a young boy from being deported from the UK by proving that he was the child of a UK citizen.

Chocolate being 3D printed. (Ketchum/Hershey)

One man’s hunch led to the invention of 3D printing.

In 1983, inventor Chuck Hall had a hunch that he could use UV technology to turn computer designs into real-life objects. One night, while tinkering in his lab with an acrylic-based liquid, he managed to zap the substance into a solid piece of plastic.

The process, known as stereolithography, formed the basis of 3D printing, which creates objects from thin layers of material.

3D printing is now used to build homes and make toys, shoes, and furniture. In the future, it could also be used to create artificial bone tissue and blood vessels.

The concept of virtual reality was first popularised by science fiction.

Before it was a widespread technology, virtual reality belonged to the canon of science fiction. In 1933, a short story series called “The Man Who Awoke” described people being hooked up to a machine that allowed them to live an alternate life. Similar concepts later appeared in shows like Star Trek and films like The Matrix.

Today, virtual reality headsets are used for gaming, medical training, and other educational purposes.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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#Tech

[symbianosgames]

By Jamey Pittman

[What design and AI lessons can we learn from Namco's seminal Pac-Man? From history through behavior, Gamasutra presents a comprehensive Jamey Pittman-authored guide to the classic game.]

In 1999, Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida became the first person to obtain a perfect score of 3,333,360 at Pac-Man, eating every possible dot, energizer, ghost, and bonus on every level without losing a single life in the process.

But perhaps what is most amazing is the fact he can play without using any memorized routines widely known as "patterns".

Instead, he relies on his familiarity with how each ghost behaves as it moves through the maze, using that knowledge to keep Pac-Man one step ahead of his enemies at all times.

Unlike Mitchell, most players are only able to rack up high scores with the aid of multiple patterns that take advantage of the game's deterministic nature.

These patterns require perfect memorization and recall to be of any real use - a single hesitation or wrong turn during execution can make the remainder of a pattern useless.

Not surprisingly, an over-reliance on these routines leaves many a player clueless as to how to effectively avoid the ghosts and finish off the remaining dots in the higher levels once a mistake occurs.

Most Pac-Man strategy guides available on the internets today are very similar in content to the books that used to be sold back in the early 80s

A summary of gameplay and scoring is provided first, followed by a list of patterns to be memorized by the reader, but very little insight is offered on how the game works or how the ghosts make decisions.

Therefore, the purpose of this guide is to give the player and game designers a better design understanding of Pac-Man by taking a closer look at gameplay, maze logic, ghost personalities, and the mysterious "split screen" level.

All information provided has been extracted from or verified with the disassembly output from the Midway Pac-Man arcade ROMs along with controlled observations of actual gameplay. As such, I have a high confidence in its accuracy.

That said, if you notice an error or omission, please contact me so it can be corrected as soon as possible. I hope you find the information just as interesting and useful as I did for gaining a better understanding of this classic game.

Special thanks to Don Hodges (www.donhodges.com) whose invaluable contributions to this guide can be found in every chapter.

"I don't have any particular interest in [computers]. I'm interested in creating images that communicate with people. A computer is not the only medium that uses images; I could use the movies or television or any other visual medium. It just so happens I use the computer."-Toru Iwatani

It was 1977 when a self-taught, capable young man named Toru Iwatani came to work for Namco Limited, a Tokyo-based amusement manufacturer whose main product lines at the time were projection-based amusement rides and light gun shooting galleries.

He was just 22 years old with no formal training in computers, visual arts, or graphic design, but his creativity and aptitude for game design were obvious to the Namco executives that met with Iwatani. They offered to hire him-with assurances they would find a place for him in the company-and he accepted.

Iwatani eventually found his place designing titles for Namco's new video games division. His limited computer skills necessitated his being paired with a programmer who would write the actual code while Iwatani took on the role of game designer for the project.

This was a new job for the game industry in 1977 when most games were designed by the programmers who coded them. In addition to a programmer, Iwatani's team would usually include a hardware engineer to develop the various devices and components, a graphic artist to realize his visual ideas, and a music composer for any music and sound effects needed in the game.

Iwatani had initially wanted to work on pinball machines, but Namco had no interest in the pinball business. Perhaps as a concession, his first game design, called Gee Bee, was a paddle game similar to Atari's Breakout but with a decidedly pinball-inspired slant to the gameplay.

Released in 1978, it was Namco's first original video game-they had only ported existing Atari games to the Japanese market up to this point-and it enjoyed moderate success in the arcades.

But the paddle games were losing ground fast to a new genre. The unprecedented success of Taito's Space Invaders in 1978 caused an industry-wide shift toward space-themed, shoot-'em-up games (as well as a national coin shortage in Japan).

Game manufacturers scrambled to match Taito's success with space shooters of their own. Namco was quick to follow suit, assigning a team to start work on a Space Invaders clone at once. It was around this time that Toru Iwatani began thinking about designing a different kind of game. He felt the shoot-'em-up craze was destined to fade away like the paddle games before them.

Rather than make another space shooter, Toru wanted to take his game design in a completely new direction that did not focus on violence or conflict, and would appeal to both male and female audiences.

He took inspiration from a children's story about a creature that protected children from monsters by eating them. One of Iwatani's design methods included taking key words associated with a story to aid in developing his ideas. The kanji word taberu ("to eat"), became the premise for the game.

The word kuchi ("mouth") has a square shape for its kanji symbol and provided the inspiration for the game's main character-the better-known legend of Iwatani receiving his inspiration from a pizza pie with a slice missing was, by his own admission, not entirely correct:

"Well, it's half true. In Japanese the character for mouth (kuchi) is a square shape. It's not circular like the pizza, but I decided to round it out. There was the temptation to make the Pac-Man shape less simple. While I was designing this game, someone suggested we add eyes. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we added eyes, we would want to add glasses and maybe a moustache. There would just be no end to it.

Food is the other part of the basic concept. In my initial design, I had put the player in the midst of food all over the screen. As I thought about it, I realized the player wouldn't know exactly what to do: the purpose of the game would be obscure. So I created a maze and put the food in it. Then whoever played the game would have some structure by moving through the maze.

The Japanese have a slang word-paku paku-they use to describe the motion of the mouth opening and closing while one eats. The name Puck-Man came from that word."

-Toru Iwatani

The monsters from the children's story were included as four ghosts that chase the player through the maze, providing an element of tension. Attacks on the player were designed to come in waves (similar to Space Invaders) as opposed to an endless assault, and each ghost was given an unique personality and character.

The children's story also included the concept of kokoro ("spirit") or a life force used by the creature that allowed him to eat the monsters. Toru incorporated this aspect of the story as four edible power pellets in the maze that turn the tables on the ghosts, making them vulnerable to being eaten by the player.

With a name and a basic design in place, Iwatani was ready to begin work. The team Namco assigned Iwatani to bring Puck-Man to life included a programmer (Shigeo Funaki), a hardware engineer, a cabinet designer, and a music composer (Toshio Kai).

Development got underway in early 1979. In the course of that year, two new pinball-themed designs from Iwatani-Bomb Bee and Cutie Q-were both released during Puck-Man's development cycle. Both games were similar to Gee Bee but with stronger gameplay and improved visuals.

The Namco team working on the Space Invaders clone for the past several months had just achieved a technological coup for Namco: the first game to use a true, multi-colored, RGB display instead of the monochrome monitors with colored cellophane tape so prevalent at the time.

Thanks to the breakthrough of the other team, Iwatani now had the new promise of color to enhance his design. Mindful that he wanted the game to appeal to women, he immediately decided to use it on the ghosts, choosing pastel shades for the bodies and adding expressive, blue eyes. Dark blue was used for the maze itself, while Puck-Man was drenched in a brilliant yellow.

The look and feel of Puck-Man continued to evolve for over a year. A large amount of time and effort was put into developing the ghosts unique movement patterns through the maze and tweaking the game difficulty variables as boards were cleared.

Bonus symbols (including the Galaxian flagship) were added into the mix at some point, and the ghosts were finally given names: Akabei, Pinky, Aosuke, and Guzuta. Sound effects and music were some of the final touches added as development neared an end along with constant tweaking of the ghosts' behavior.

Puck-Man's creation was a year and five months in the making-the longest ever for a video game to that point. Finally, on May 22nd, 1980, it was released to arcades in Japan. Initially, the game did moderately well, but was no overnight sensation.

In fact, Namco's multi-colored Space Invaders clone, called Galaxian, was much more popular with the gaming public-the predominately male, game-playing audience in Japan was unsure what to make of Puck-Man with its cartoon-like characters, maze, and pastel colors, whereas Galaxian was more immediately familiar to them with its shoot-'em-up space theme.

Midway was a distributor of coin-operated video games in the U.S. that was always looking for the next big hit from Japan to license and bring to America. They opted for both Puck-Man and Galaxian, modifying the cabinets and artwork to make them easier to manufacture as well as providing a more American look and feel.

Puck-Man went through the majority of the changes: the cabinet was modified slightly, changing the color from white to a bright yellow to make it stand out in the arcade. The detailed, multi-colored cabinet artwork was replaced with cheaper-to-produce, three-color artwork illustrating an iconic representation of Puck-Man (now drawn with eyes and feet) and one blue ghost.

English names were given to the ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde), and the Namco title was changed to Midway. The most significant change to Puck-Man was the name. Midway feared it would be too easy for nasty-minded vandals to change the P in Puck-Man to an F, creating an unsavory epithet.

Not wanting their product associated with this word, Midway renamed the game Pac-Man before releasing it to American arcades in October 1980.

But the situation in America was reversed from Japan for these two titles. Galaxian got lost in the shuffle of the shoot-'em-up craze that blanketed America's arcades and, by the fall of 1980, it was already competing with more advanced video games like Defender.

In the end, Galaxian enjoyed moderate success in America and in Japan, but was never the smash hit the original Space Invaders was. Pac-Man was another story. There were no games to compare it to-it was in a genre all by itself. The bright yellow cabinet, visuals, and sounds drew a great deal of attention. No one had seen a game quite like this before.

The addictive gameplay and challenge of increasing levels of difficulty kept the die-hard gamers more than happy, while the simplicity of the game appealed to younger children. The lack of war-like motifs and violence did as Iwatani had hoped and attracted a sizable female audience-a first for a video game. Even the parents wary of the violence-themed arcade games had no problem with their kids playing as cute and innocuous a game as Pac-Man.

Pac-Man went on to capture the world's imagination like nothing before or since. It was a genuine phenomenon on a global scale, selling over 100,000 machines in its first year alone. Easy to learn but notoriously difficult to master, everyone from school children to Wall Street executives dropped quarter after quarter into an ever-increasing number of waiting Pac-Man machines.

By 1982, Pac-Man merchandise was literally everywhere: t-shirts, hats, keychains, wrist bands, bedsheets, air fresheners, wall clocks, drinking glasses, trading cards, stickers, cereal boxes, comic books-even a Saturday morning cartoon.

A novelty song called "Pac-Man Fever" received significant radio play, reaching number nine on the U.S. Billboard charts. Many books were written offering tips and tricks used by the best players to achieve high scores-the first-ever strategy guides published for a video game.

Fast-forward to nearly thirty years later: Pac-Man remains the best-selling coin-operated video game in history. Still considered the most widely-recognized video game character in the U.S., his likeness has been licensed to over 250 companies for over 400 products.

His namesake has been adopted by the business world to describe a way to defend against a hostile takeover (the defending company swallows up the larger company instead in a move known as the "Pac-Man defense"). There is even an upright Pac-Man machine on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Unlike the majority of his early-80s contemporaries, new Pac-Man games are still in development today. Most recently, Pac-Man Championship Edition was released in 2007 for the X-Box 360 console with the aid of Namco game designer Toru Iwatani.

Interest in the original coin-op title has never completely faded, thankfully. Thanks to Namco's re-release of Pac-Man and other arcade classics for modern home consoles, new generations of Pac-addicts have worn their hands out playing a game often older than themselves.

Many classic titles are also kept alive thanks to the advent of high-quality arcade emulators available for the home computer (like MAME) that use a software copy of the arcade ROM chips to recreate the game with 100% accuracy. Several web pages with information about the original Pac-Man arcade game can be found online including Wikipedia and the Killer List Of Video Games.

"As Pac-Man was originally conceived to appeal to women players, it is a very easy and approachable game. I believe that is an ingredient in the longevity of the game."-Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man

The Basics

The premise of Pac-Man is delightfully simple: using a four-way joystick, the player guides Pac-Man-up, down, left, and right-through a maze filled with dots for him to gobble up. Four ghost monsters are also in the maze and chase after our hero, trying to capture and kill him.

The goal is to clear the maze of dots while avoiding the deadly ghosts. Each round starts with the ghosts in the "monster pen" at the center of the maze, emerging from it to join in the chase.

If Pac-Man is captured by a ghost, a life is lost, the ghosts are returned to their pen, and a new Pac-Man is placed at the starting position before play continues. When the maze is cleared of all dots, the board is reset, and a new round begins. If Pac-Man gets caught by a ghost when he has no extra lives, the game is over.

There are 244 dots in the maze, and Pac-Man must eat them all in order to proceed to the next round. The 240 small dots are worth ten points each, and the four large, flashing dots - best known as energizers - are worth 50 points each.

This yields a total of 2,600 points for clearing the maze of dots each round. Players have two ways to increase their score beyond what is earned from eating dots:

The first way to increase your score each round is by turning the tables on your enemies by making them your prey. Whenever Pac-Man eats one of the four energizer dots located in the corners of the maze, the ghosts reverse their direction and, in early levels, turn the same shade of blue for a short period of time before returning to normal.

While blue, they are vulnerable to Pac-Man and can be gobbled up for extra points providing they are caught before the time expires. After being eaten, a ghost's eyes will return to the monster pen where it is resurrected, exiting to chase Pac-Man once again.

The first ghost captured after an energizer has been eaten is always worth 200 points. Each additional ghost captured from the same energizer will then be worth twice as many points as the one before it-400, 800, and 1,600 points, respectively. If all four ghosts are captured at all four energizers, an additional 12,000 points can be earned on these earlier levels. This should not prove too terribly difficult to achieve for the first few rounds as the ghosts initially remain blue for several seconds.

Soon after, however, the ghosts' "blue time" will get reduced to one or two seconds at the most, making it much more problematic to capture all four before time runs out on these boards. By level 19, the ghosts stop turning blue altogether and can no longer be eaten for additional points.

The second way to increase your score each round is by eating the bonus symbols (commonly known as fruit) that appear directly below the monster pen twice each round for additional points. The first bonus fruit appears after 70 dots have been cleared from the maze; the second one appears after 170 dots are cleared.

Each fruit is worth anywhere from 100 to 5,000 points, depending on what level the player is currently on. Whenever a fruit appears, the amount of time it stays on the screen before disappearing is always between nine and ten seconds. The exact duration (i.e., 9.3333 seconds, 10.0 seconds, 9.75 seconds, etc.) is variable and does not become predictable with the use of patterns. In other words, executing the same pattern on the same level twice is no guarantee for how long the bonus fruit will stay onscreen each time.

This usually goes unnoticed given that the majority of patterns are designed to eat the bonus fruit as quickly as possible after it has been triggered to appear. The symbols used for the last six rounds completed, plus the current round are also shown along the bottom edge of the screen (often called the fruit counter or level counter). See Table A.1 in the appendices for all bonus fruit and scoring values, per level.

Ghosts have three mutually-exclusive modes of behavior they can be in during play: chase, scatter, and frightened. Each mode has a different objective/goal to be carried out:

CHASE - A ghost's objective in chase mode is to find and capture Pac-Man by hunting him down through the maze. Each ghost exhibits unique behavior when chasing Pac-Man, giving them their different personalities: Blinky (red) is very aggressive and hard to shake once he gets behind you, Pinky (pink) tends to get in front of you and cut you off, Inky (light blue) is the least predictable of the bunch, and Clyde (orange) seems to do his own thing and stay out of the way.

SCATTER - In scatter mode, the ghosts give up the chase for a few seconds and head for their respective home corners. It is a welcome but brief rest-soon enough, they will revert to chase mode and be after Pac-Man again.

FRIGHTENED - Ghosts enter frightened mode whenever Pac-Man eats one of the four energizers located in the far corners of the maze. During the early levels, the ghosts will all turn dark blue (meaning they are vulnerable) and aimlessly wander the maze for a few seconds. They will flash moments before returning to their previous mode of behavior.

Reversal Of Fortune

In all three modes of behavior, the ghosts are prohibited from reversing their direction of travel. As such, they can only choose between continuing on their current course or turning off to one side or the other at the next intersection. Thus, once a ghost chooses which way to go at a maze intersection, it has no option but to continue forward on that path until the next intersection is reached.

Of course, if you've spent any time playing Pac-Man, you already know the ghosts will reverse direction at certain times. But how can this be if they are expressly prohibited from doing so on their own? The answer is: when changing modes, the system can override the ghosts' normal behavior, forcing them to go the opposite way. Whenever this happens, it is a visual indicator of their behavior changing from one mode to another.

Ghosts are forced to reverse direction by the system anytime the mode changes from: chase-to-scatter, chase-to-frightened, scatter-to-chase, and scatter-to-frightened. Ghosts do not reverse direction when changing back from frightened to chase or scatter modes.

When the system forces the ghosts to reverse course, they do not necessarily change direction simultaneously; some ghosts may continue forward for a fraction of a second before turning around.

The delay between when the system signals a reversal and when a ghost actually responds depends on how long it takes the ghost to enter the next game tile along its present course after the reversal signal is given (more on tiles in Chapter 3). Once the ghost enters a new tile, it will obey the reversal signal and turn around.

Scatter, Chase, Repeat...

Ghosts alternate between scatter and chase modes during gameplay at predetermined intervals. These mode changes are easy to spot as the ghosts simultaneously reverse direction when they occur. Scatter modes happen four times per level before the ghosts stay in chase mode indefinitely.

Good players will take full advantage of the scatter periods by using the brief moment when the ghosts are not chasing Pac-Man to clear dots from the more dangerous areas of the maze. The scatter/chase timer gets reset whenever a life is lost or a level is completed. At the start of a level or after losing a life, ghosts emerge from the ghost pen already in the first of the four scatter modes.

For the first four levels, the first two scatter periods last for seven seconds each. They change to five seconds each for level five and beyond. The third scatter mode is always set to five seconds. The fourth scatter period lasts for five seconds on level one, but then is only 1/60th of a second for the rest of play. When this occurs, it appears as a simple reversal of direction by the ghosts.

The first and second chase periods last for 20 seconds each. The third chase period is 20 seconds on level one but then balloons to 1,033 seconds for levels two through four, and 1,037 seconds for all levels beyond-lasting over 17 minutes! If the ghosts enter frightened mode, the scatter/chase timer is paused.

When time runs out, they return to the mode they were in before being frightened and the scatter/chase timer resumes. This information is summarized in the following table (all values are in seconds):

Mode

Level 1

Levels 2-4

Levels 5+

Scatter

7

7

5

Chase

20

20

20

Scatter

7

7

5

Chase

20

20

20

Scatter

5

5

5

Chase

20

1033

1037

Scatter

5

1/60

1/60

Chase

indefinite

indefinite

indefinite

Frightening Behavior

Anytime Pac-Man eats one of the four energizers on the level, the ghosts reverse direction and, on earlier levels, go into frightened mode. Frightened ghosts turn dark blue and wander about the maze for a few moments, flashing briefly as a warning before returning to normal. Ghosts use a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) to pick a way to turn at each intersection when frightened.

The PRNG generates an pseudo-random memory address to read the last few bits from. These bits are translated into the direction a frightened ghost must first try. If a wall blocks the chosen direction, the ghost then attempts the remaining directions in this order: up, left, down, and right, until a passable direction is found. The PRNG gets reset with an identical seed value every new level and every new life, causing predictable results.

This is why the frightened ghosts' movements are repeatable in the context of a memorized pattern or sequence. As the levels progress, the time ghosts spend in frightened mode grows shorter until eventually they no longer turn blue at all (they still reverse direction). Refer to Table A.1 in the appendices for the frightened time in seconds and number of flashes, per level.

Speed

The game starts with Pac-Man at 80% of his maximum speed. By the fifth level, Pac-Man is moving at full speed and will continue to do so until the 21st level. At that point, he slows back down to 90% and holds this speed for the remainder of the game. Every time Pac-Man eats a regular dot, he stops moving for one frame (1/60th of a second), slowing his progress by roughly ten percent-just enough for a following ghost to overtake him.

Eating an energizer dot causes Pac-Man to stop moving for three frames. The normal speed maintained by the ghosts is a little slower than Pac-Man's until the 21st level when they start moving faster than he does. If a ghost enters a side tunnel, however, its speed is cut nearly in half.

When frightened, ghosts move at a much slower rate of speed than normal and, for levels one through four, Pac-Man also speeds up. The table below summarizes the speed data for both Pac-Man and the ghosts, per level. This information is also contained in Table A.1 in the appendices.

  PAC-MAN SPEED

GHOST SPEED

LEVEL

NORM

NORM DOTS

FRIGHT

FRIGHT DOTS

NORM

FRIGHT

TUNNEL

1

80%

71%

90%

79%

75%

50%

40%

2 - 4

90%

79%

95%

83%

85%

55%

45%

5 - 20

100%

87%

100%

87%

95%

60%

50%

21+

90%

79%

-

-

95%

-

50%

Cornering

Pac-Man is able to navigate the turns in the maze faster than his enemies. He does not have to wait until he reaches the middle of a turn to change direction as the ghosts do (see picture below). Instead, he may start turning several pixels before he reaches the center of a turn and for several pixels after passing it.

Turns taken one or more pixels before reaching the center are "pre-turns"; turns taken one or more pixels after are "post-turns". Players learn to consistently move the joystick in the direction Pac-Man should go well before arriving at the center of a turn, ensuring each pre-turn is started as many pixels away from center as possible.

This technique is known as cornering and is one of the first skills a new Pac-Man player should master. For every successful pre-turn maneuver, Pac-Man puts a little more distance between himself and any ghosts following close behind.

Such a small gain in distance may not seem terribly significant at first, but cornering through a quick series of turns will shake off even the most determined pursuer. It is a vital tool for survival in the higher levels of the game.

Whenever Pac-Man makes a pre-turn or post-turn, his orientation changes, and he starts to move one pixel in his new direction for every pixel traveled in his old direction, effectively doubling his speed as he moves at a 45 degree angle. Once he reaches the centerline of the new direction's path, he starts moving purely in that direction and his speed returns to normal.

The greatest distance advantage is thereby gained by making the earliest pre-turn possible. The illustration below shows the layout of pre-turn pixels (shown in green), center point pixels (shown in yellow), and post-turn pixels (shown in red) for each of the four possible directions a turn can be approached. Each example shows Pac-Man entering the same four-way intersection from a different direction.

When entering from the left, there are three pre-turn pixels before the center of the turn, and four post-turn pixels. Conversely, entering the same intersection from the right yields four pre-turn pixels and three post-turn ones. Entering from the top as opposed to the bottom exhibits the same property.

For any turn that is made later than the earliest possible pre-turn, Pac-Man will be one frame behind where he would be for every pixel of "lateness" in the turn. Basically, it pays to move the joystick well before reaching a turn to maximize your speed.

(click image for full size)

Turning at the earliest pre-turns possible is also required to successfully execute most any pattern. Patterns are meant to be played with perfect cornering because it removes the human element of uncertainty as to when Pac-Man will turn. Without cornering, it would be nigh-impossible to reproduce the exact timing of every turn as made by the pattern's author, thereby increasing the possibility of unpredictable ghost behavior due to Pac-Man not being in the exact same tile at the exact same time anymore.

Typically, the most popular patterns have been those that tend to "hold together" well when small input timing flaws occur (turning three pixels away from center instead of four when approaching a turn from the right is a timing flaw, for example). Other patterns-especially those that bring Pac-Man very close to the ghosts late in the sequence-tend to "fall apart" unless every turn is perfectly cornered.

During a long Pac-Man session, even the best players will make occasional timing mistakes during a fast series of turns and have to deal with the possible consequences. As such, one should aim for perfect cornering at all times but remain alert for unexpected ghost behavior from subtle input timing flaws creeping into the pattern.

Home Sweet Home

Commonly referred to as the ghost house or monster pen, this cordoned-off area in the center of the maze is the domain of the four ghosts and off-limits to Pac-Man.

Whenever a level is completed or a life is lost, the ghosts are returned to their starting positions in and around the ghost house before play continues-Blinky is always located just above and outside, while the other three are placed inside: Inky on the left, Pinky in the middle, and Clyde on the right.

The pink door on top is used by the ghosts to enter or exit the house. Once a ghost leaves, however, it cannot reenter unless it is first captured by Pac-Man-then the disembodied eyes can return home to be revived. Since Blinky is already on the outside after a level is completed or a life is lost, the only time he can get inside the ghost house is after Pac-Man captures him, and he immediately turns around to leave once revived.

That's about all there is to know about Blinky's behavior in terms of the ghost house, but determining when the other three ghosts leave home is an involved process based on several variables and conditions. The rest of this section will deal with them exclusively. Accordingly, any mention of "the ghosts" below refers to Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, but not Blinky.

The first control used to evaluate when the ghosts leave home is a personal counter each ghost retains for tracking the number of dots Pac-Man eats. Each ghost's "dot counter" is reset to zero when a level begins and can only be active when inside the ghost house, but only one ghost's counter can be active at any given time regardless of how many ghosts are inside.

The order of preference for choosing which ghost's counter to activate is: Pinky, then Inky, and then Clyde. For every dot Pac-Man eats, the preferred ghost in the house (if any) gets its dot counter increased by one. Each ghost also has a "dot limit" associated with his counter, per level.

If the preferred ghost reaches or exceeds his dot limit, it immediately exits the house and its dot counter is deactivated (but not reset). The most-preferred ghost still waiting inside the house (if any) activates its timer at this point and begins counting dots.

Pinky's dot limit is always set to zero, causing him to leave home immediately when every level begins. For the first level, Inky has a limit of 30 dots, and Clyde has a limit of 60. This results in Pinky exiting immediately which, in turn, activates Inky's dot counter. His counter must then reach or exceed 30 dots before he can leave the house.

Once Inky starts to leave, Clyde's counter (which is still at zero) is activated and starts counting dots. When his counter reaches or exceeds 60, he may exit. On the second level, Inky's dot limit is changed from 30 to zero, while Clyde's is changed from 60 to 50. Inky will exit the house as soon as the level begins from now on.

Starting at level three, all the ghosts have a dot limit of zero for the remainder of the game and will leave the ghost house immediately at the start of every level.

Whenever a life is lost, the system disables (but does not reset) the ghosts' individual dot counters and uses a global dot counter instead. This counter is enabled and reset to zero after a life is lost, counting the number of dots eaten from that point forward.

The three ghosts inside the house must wait for this special counter to tell them when to leave. Pinky is released when the counter value is equal to 7 and Inky is released when it equals 17. The only way to deactivate the counter is for Clyde to be inside the house when the counter equals 32; otherwise, it will keep counting dots even after the ghost house is empty.

If Clyde is present at the appropriate time, the global counter is reset to zero and deactivated, and the ghosts' personal dot limits are re-enabled and used as before for determining when to leave the house (including Clyde who is still in the house at this time).

If dot counters were the only control, Pac-Man could simply stop eating dots early on and keep the ghosts trapped inside the house forever. Consequently, a separate timer control was implemented to handle this case by tracking the amount of time elapsed since Pac-Man has last eaten a dot. This timer is always running but gets reset to zero each time a dot is eaten.

Anytime Pac-Man avoids eating dots long enough for the timer to reach its limit, the most-preferred ghost waiting in the ghost house (if any) is forced to leave immediately, and the timer is reset to zero. The same order of preference described above is used by this control as well. The game begins with an initial timer limit of four seconds, but lowers to it to three seconds starting with level five.

The more astute reader may have already noticed there is subtle flaw in this system resulting in a way to keep Pinky, Inky, and Clyde inside the ghost house for a very long time after eating them. The trick involves having to sacrifice a life in order to reset and enable the global dot counter, and then making sure Clyde exits the house before that counter is equal to 32.

This is accomplished by avoiding eating dots and waiting for the timer limit to force Clyde out. Once Clyde is moving for the exit, start eating dots again until at least 32 dots have been consumed since the life was lost. Now head for an energizer and gobble up some ghosts. Blinky will leave the house immediately as usual, but the other three ghosts will remain "stuck" inside as long as Pac-Man continues eating dots with sufficient frequency as not to trigger the control timer.

Why does this happen? The key lies in how the global dot counter works-it cannot be deactivated if Clyde is outside the house when the counter has a value of 32. By letting the timer force Clyde out before 32 dots are eaten, the global dot counter will keep counting dots instead of deactivating when it reaches 32. Now when the ghosts are eaten by Pac-Man and return home, they will still be using the global dot counter to determine when to leave.

As previously described, however, this counter's logic only checks for three values: 7, 17, and 32, and once those numbers are exceeded, the counter has no way to release the ghosts associated with them. The only control left to release the ghosts is the timer which can be easily avoided by eating a dot every so often to reset it. Click on the YouTube video below to see a demonstration of this curious behavior:

The last thing to mention about the ghost house is how to determine whether a ghost will move right or left after exiting the home. Ghosts typically move to the left once they get outside, but if the system changes modes one or more times when a ghost is inside, that ghost will move to the right instead of the left upon leaving the house.

Areas To Exploit

The illustration above highlights four special "zones" in the maze where ghost behavior is limited by certain conditions which can be exploited to the player's advantage. The two red zones represent the areas where ghosts are forbidden to make upward turns. Once a ghost enters either of these two zones, it may only travel from right-to-left or left-to-right until exiting the area.

Thus, only Pac-Man has access to these four, upward-facing tunnel entrances. It will serve the player well to remember the ghosts can still access these tunnels from the other end! The red zone restrictions are enforced during both scatter and chase modes, but in frightened mode the red zones are ignored temporarily, allowing the ghosts to turn upwards if they so choose.

The pink zones are in the two halves of the connecting side-tunnel. As mentioned previously, any ghost that enters the tunnel will suffer an immediate speed penalty until leaving the zone. This slow-down rule is always enforced and applies to ghosts only-Pac-Man is immune.

We need to take a look at how ghosts are able to move through the maze in pursuit of a goal. All pathfinding logic described in this chapter is shared by the four ghosts - it is important to understand what they have in common before we get into what makes them different.

Before we proceed, let's see how the game tracks the location of Pac-Man and the four ghosts (herein referred to as actors for brevity's sake). The visible game screen should be thought of as a regular grid of tiles, each eight pixels square.

The actual pixel dimensions of the screen are 224 x 288, so dividing each value by eight yields a grid that is 28 x 36 tiles in size.

Each tile is either in legal space or dead space. In the picture above, legal space is shown as the gray-colored tiles; all other tiles are considered dead space.

Actors only travel between the tiles in legal space. Each dot sits in the center of a tile, meaning they are exactly eight pixels (one tile) apart-this is useful for estimating distances during gameplay:

What Tile Am I In?

As the actors move through the maze, the game keeps track of the tile each one occupies. An actor is only associated with a single tile at a time, although its graphic will overlap into the surrounding tiles. The location of the actor's center point is what determines the tile it occupies at any given time. As the actors can move at pixel-level precision, they are often not centered directly on top of the tile they are in. Consider the following example:

(click image for full size)

The transparent red ghost is moving left-to-right across a row of tiles in legal space. In frame one, its occupied tile (shown in bright red) is near the left side of the picture. It does not matter that some of the ghost's graphic is not in the tile-what matters is that the ghost's center point is in the tile.

By frame two, it has moved far enough for its center point to be in the adjacent tile to the right and its occupied tile is updated accordingly. The ghost continues to be associated with the same tile until frame six where its center point has now crossed over into the next one.

The underlying concept of tiles is essential for understanding the ghosts' pathfinding logic as it only cares about the tile an actor occupies-not its per-pixel location within that tile. To the logic routines, the five actors look very much like the picture below.

Each actor is defined by the tile it presently occupies along with its current direction of travel. Distances between actors are also measured in tiles (the pink ghost is five tiles away from Pac-Man horizontally and one tile away vertically, for example).

Just Passing Through

It wasn't too long after the release of Pac-Man when word began to spread of players occasionally passing straight through a ghost unharmed, seemingly at random. This rumor turned out to be completely true as most die-hard Pac-Man players can attest.

If you play the game long enough, you will eventually see Pac-Man run into one of the ghosts and come out unscathed on the other side-it doesn't happen very often so enjoy it when it does! Some players have even gone so far as to incorporate this mysterious pass-through oddity into their patterns.

The root cause of this elusive peculiarity lies in the way the game detects collisions between Pac-Man and the four ghosts. Any time Pac-Man occupies the same tile as a ghost, he is considered to have collided with that ghost and a life is lost.

It is irrelevant whether the ghost moved into Pac-Man's tile or Pac-Man into the ghost's-the result is the same either way. This logic proves sufficient for handling collisions more than 99% of the time during gameplay, but does not account for one very special case:

The above picture illustrates the conditions necessary to produce this curious behavior. There are five consecutive frames showing Blinky and Pac-Man passing through each other. Below each frame is the same scene represented by the tiles they currently occupy and the per-pixel location of their center points. Pac-Man and Blinky are at just the right position and speed relative to one another to cause them to swap tiles with each other simultaneously.

In other words, Pac-Man's center point moves upwards into Blinky's tile in the same 1/60th of a second that Blinky's center point moves downwards into Pac-Man's tile, resulting in them moving past each other without colliding. Note that Pac-Man's origin point is centered on the top edge of his tile in frame four; this is still considered to be inside the bottom tile, but moving up one more pixel will push him over the edge into the next one.

Pac-Man and Blinky have now swapped tiles with each other in frame five, and Pac-Man can go on his merry way because he never "collided" (i.e., shared the same tile) with Blinky at all! Click on the YouTube video below to see an example of the pass-through bug (it happens 40 seconds after playback begins):

Target Tiles

Whenever a ghost is in chase or scatter mode, it is trying to reach a target tile somewhere on (or off) the screen. A target tile is merely a way to describe the tile a ghost would like to occupy at any given moment.

This tile can be fixed in place or change location frequently. Whenever the ghosts scatter to the corners of the maze, for example, each ghost is striving to reach a fixed target tile located somewhere near its home corner.

In chase mode, the target tile is usually (but not always) related to Pac-Man's current tile which changes often. Although it may not be obvious at first, the only difference between chase and scatter mode to a ghost is where its target tile is located. The same pathfinding logic applies in either case.

Looking Ahead

Ghosts are always thinking one step into the future as they move through the maze. Whenever a ghost enters a new tile, it looks ahead to the next tile along its current direction of travel and decides which way it will go when it gets there.

When it eventually reaches that tile, it will change its direction of travel to whatever it had decided on a tile beforehand. The process is then repeated, looking ahead into the next tile along its new direction of travel and making its next decision on which way to go.

When a ghost looks ahead into the upcoming tile, it must examine the possible exits from that tile to determine a way to proceed. In the picture below, the red ghost has just arrived at tile A and is moving right-to-left. It immediately looks ahead to tile B (the next tile along its direction of travel).

Each tile has four potential exits to be considered: right, left, up, and down. In the case of tile B, the up and down exits are blocked by walls and must be discarded as potential candidates. The right exit is also discounted because it would only take the ghost back to tile A again, and ghosts never voluntarily reverse direction. With three of the four possible exits eliminated from tile B, moving left is the only remaining choice.

This example is the most simple to explain as the ghost has but one way it can legally move. As such, we did not have to worry about where its target tile was located. The majority of game tiles in legal space are similar to this one, but things get more interesting when a ghost approaches a tile with more potential exits to choose from.

Intersections

When a ghost arrives one tile away from an upcoming intersection, it must choose between several possible directions in which to proceed. Consider the following example:

(click image for full size)

In the first picture, the red ghost has just reached tile A and is seeking its target (shown as the green tile). It immediately looks ahead to the subsequent tile along its present direction of travel (up). In this case, that tile is a four-way intersection. As this intersection tile has no walls blocking off any of the exits, the ghost can only discard his reverse direction (down), leaving three exits open for travel.

It looks one tile beyond the intersection in each of the three remaining directions, collecting "test tiles" (shown as the tiles with dashed, white lines). In the middle picture, the ghost triangulates the distance from each of these test tiles to its target tile.

Whichever direction's test tile has the shortest distance to the target becomes the direction the ghost will take upon reaching the intersection tile. In this case, the right test tile has the shortest distance to the target, and the ghost updates its chosen direction for the intersection tile accordingly.

Sometimes a ghost is presented with two or more test tiles that have the same distance to the target tile. In the example below, the red ghost must choose between moving down or left at the upcoming intersection tile. Unfortunately, both test tiles have the same distance to the target (bottom left).

To break the tie, the ghost prefers directions in this order: up, left, down, right. Up is the most preferred direction; right is the least. Therefore, the ghost chooses to go left at the intersection because left precedes down in the preference list. Although it may seem obvious to a person that going down was the better choice to reach the target, ghosts are not that smart. They cannot see more than a few tiles ahead and, as a consequence, cannot recognize the disparity between these two options.

Scatter Targets

As mentioned before, each ghost has a fixed target tile it is trying to reach in scatter mode. The picture below shows the actual tile used by each ghost. Notice each target tile is in dead space on either the top or bottom edge of the screen. As such, the ghosts will never be able to reach them.

Luckily, a ghost does not care if its goal is attainable or not-the A.I. routines are very short-sighted. All a ghost cares about is following the pathfinding logic described above to make the best choice it can on which way to turn at the next tile.

As a result, it will simply make circles in the area of the maze nearest its target tile until the target is set to some other location. That's all scatter mode really is. The only reason a ghost has a "favorite corner" of the maze at all is due to the location of a target tile it will never reach.

"First, you've got to learn how to control the monsters. See how the red, pink and blue are grouped together? It's easier to control two monsters than four."-Billy Mitchell, champion Pac-Man player

In the last chapter, we learned how a ghost follows a target tile through the maze. Now we will take a closer look at Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde to better understand why they behave so differently when in chase mode. They all share the same pathfinding logic for chasing a target tile, so how is it each one behaves differently when following Pac-Man?

The answer is delightfully simple: Pac-Man's tile is not always the target. Every ghost has a distinct method for calculating its target tile in chase mode, resulting in their unique personalities. Some of the ghosts use Pac-Man's actual tile as the target; others only use it as an intermediate step to find another tile.

Sometimes a ghost is targeting a tile that has absolutely nothing to do with Pac-Man at all! Regardless of where a ghost's target tile is at the time, Pac-Man will still be killed if he gets in that ghost's way.

Rumor has it Toru Iwatani and his team spent months doing nothing but tweaking and refining the ghost A.I. routines before releasing Pac-Man to the world. Their efforts show in the final product: Itawani's team created the illusion of complex pathfinding by using very simple logic and very little code.

Blinky: The red ghost's character is aptly described as that of a shadow and is best-known as "Blinky". In Japan, his character is represented by the word oikake, which means "to run down or pursue". Blinky seems to always be the first of the ghosts to track Pac-Man down in the maze. He is by far the most aggressive of the four and will doggedly pursue Pac-Man once behind him.

Of all the ghosts' targeting schemes for chase mode, Blinky's is the most simple and direct, using Pac-Man's current tile as his target. In the pictures above, we can see Blinky's target tile is the same as Pac-Man's currently occupied tile. Targeting Pac-Man directly in this way results in a very determined and tenacious ghost who is tough to shake when he's right behind you.

All ghosts move at the same rate of speed when a level begins, but Blinky will increase his rate of speed twice each round based on the number of dots remaining in the maze. While in this accelerated state, Blinky is commonly called "Cruise Elroy", yet no one seems to know where this custom was originated or what it means.

On the first level, for example, Blinky becomes Elroy when there are 20 dots remaining in the maze, accelerating to be at least as fast as Pac-Man. More importantly, his scatter mode behavior is also modified to target Pac-Man's tile in lieu of his typical fixed target tile for any remaining scatter periods in the level.

This causes Elroy to chase Pac-Man while the other three ghosts continue to scatter as normal. As if that weren't bad enough, when only 10 dots remain, Elroy speeds up again to the point where he is now perceptibly faster than Pac-Man.

If a life is lost any time after Blinky has become Elroy, he will revert back to his normal behavior and speed when play resumes, heading for his home corner during the initial scatter period. But once the last ghost (Clyde) has left the ghost house in the middle of the board, he will turn back into Elroy again.

Keep in mind: he is still in scatter mode the entire time. All that has changed is the target tile-he will still reverse direction when entering and exiting scatter mode as before. As the levels progress, Blinky will turn into Elroy with more dots remaining in the maze than in previous rounds. Refer to Table A.1 in the appendices for dot counts and speeds for both Elroy changes, per level.

Pinky: Nicknamed "Pinky", the pink ghost's character is described as one who is speedy. In Japan, he is characterized as machibuse, meaning "to perform an ambush", perhaps because Pinky always seems to be able to get ahead of you and cut you off when you least expect it.

He always moves at the same speed as Inky and Clyde, however, which suggests speedy is a poor translation of the more appropriate machibuse. Pinky and Blinky often seem to be working in concert to box Pac-Man in, leaving him with nowhere to run.

In chase mode, Pinky behaves as he does because he does not target Pac-Man's tile directly. Instead, he selects an offset four tiles away from Pac-Man in the direction Pac-Man is currently moving (with one exception). The pictures below illustrate the four possible offsets Pinky will use to determine his target tile based on Pac-Man's orientation:

If Pac-Man is moving left, Pinky's target tile will be four game tiles to the left of Pac-Man's current tile. If Pac-Man is moving right, Pinky's tile will be four tiles to the right. If Pac-Man is moving down, Pinky's target is four tiles below.

Finally, if Pac-Man is moving up, Pinky's target tile will be four tiles up and four tiles to the left. This interesting outcome is due to a subtle error in the logic code that calculates Pinky's offset from Pac-Man. This piece of code works properly for the other three cases but, when Pac-Man is moving upwards, triggers an overflow bug that mistakenly includes a left offset equal in distance to the expected up offset (we will see this same issue in Inky's logic later).

Don Hodges' website has an excellent article giving a thorough, code-level analysis of this bug, including the source code and a proposed fix-click here to go there now.

Pinky is the easiest ghost to exert control over thanks to his targeting scheme. By changing direction, you can dictate where Pinky will turn next when he is nearby (see above picture). If you are facing off closely with Pinky, he will turn before he reaches you if he can. This happens due to the fact Pac-Man has come close enough to Pinky for Pinky's target tile to now be behind him.

In the picture above, Pinky chooses to turn up at the intersection because moving left would have taken him further away from his target tile. The longest-lived example of this is the technique known as "head faking". This is where the player shakes the joystick to cause Pac-Man to rapidly change direction back and forth, hopefully causing a ghost to change course in the process.

As it turns out, the shaking is not necessary-one well-timed, quick reversal of direction towards Pinky just before he decides what to do at an upcoming intersection is all that is needed to get him off your tail.

Inky: The light-blue ghost is nicknamed "Inky" and his character is described as one who is bashful. In Japan, he is portrayed as kimagure, meaning "a fickle, moody, or uneven temper". Perhaps not surprisingly, Inky is the least predictable of the ghosts.

Sometimes he chases Pac-Man aggressively like Blinky; other times he jumps ahead of Pac-Man as Pinky would. He might even wander off like Clyde on occasion!

In fact, Inky may be the most dangerous ghost of all due to his erratic behavior. Bashful is not a very good translation of kimagure, and misleads the player to assume Inky will shy away from Pac-Man when he gets close which is not always the case.

Inky uses the most complex targeting scheme of the four ghosts in chase mode. He needs Pac-Man's current tile/orientation and Blinky's current tile to calculate his final target. To envision Inky's target, imagine an intermediate offset two tiles away from Pac-Man's tile in the direction Pac-Man is moving (shown as the dashed, green tile in the picture above), then draw a line from Blinky's tile to that offset. Now double the line length by extending the line out just as far again, and you will have Inky's target tile as shown above.

For the same reasons already discussed in Pinky's case, Inky's offset calculation from Pac-Man is two tiles up and two tiles left when Pac-Man is moving up (shown above). The other three orientations have the expected offset of two tiles in the direction Pac-Man is moving.

Inky's targeting logic will keep him away from Pac-Man when Blinky is far away from Pac-Man, but as Blinky draws closer, so will Inky's target tile. This explains why Inky's behavior seems more variable as Pac-Man moves away from Blinky. Like Pinky, Inky's course can often be altered by Pac-Man changing direction or "head-faking". How much or how little effect this will have on Inky's decisions is directly related to where Blinky is at the time.

Clyde: The orange ghost is nicknamed "Clyde" and is characterized as one who is pokey. In Japan, his character is described as otoboke, meaning "pretending ignorance", and his nickname is "Guzuta", meaning "one who lags behind".

In reality, Clyde moves at the same speed as Inky and Pinky so his character description is a bit misleading. Clyde is the last ghost to leave the pen and tends to separate himself from the other ghosts by shying away from Pac-Man and doing his own thing when he isn't patrolling his corner of the maze.

Although not nearly as dangerous as the other three ghosts, his behavior can seem unpredictable at times and should still be considered a threat.

In chase mode, Clyde's target differs based on his proximity to Pac-Man. When more than eight tiles away, he uses Pac-Man's tile as his target (shown as the yellow target above). If Clyde is closer than eight tiles away, he switches to his scatter mode target instead, and starts heading for his corner until he is far enough away to target Pac-Man again.

In the picture above, Clyde is stuck in an endless loop thanks to his targeting scheme. Outside of the dashed area, Clyde acts exactly as Blinky would, heading straight for Pac-Man, but upon entering the dashed area, Clyde will change his mind and head for his scatter target instead.

Leaving the eight tile perimeter surrounding Pac-Man causes his target to change back to Pac-Man's tile and results in Clyde circling the island indefinitely until Pac-Man moves elsewhere or a mode change occurs.

Clyde's targeting method results in him not being particularly dangerous unless you get in his way as he runs back to his corner or before he can reach an intersection to turn away. Extra care should be taken when Pac-Man is in Clyde's home corner as Clyde is less likely to get out of the way.

"This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but with a whimper." —T. S. Eliot

On The Edge Of Forever

Pac-Man was always meant to be a game with no ending. The developers at Namco mistakenly assumed the game's increasing difficulty was sufficient to prevent anyone from playing indefinitely. Of course, within a few years of Pac-Man's release, players had discovered that every level beyond the 21st was identical.

Patterns were quickly created to exploit this fact and, for any player able to get past the first 20 levels, the game now became a test of endurance to see how many points you could rack up before losing focus and making a mistake. High scores soared into the millions and most players agreed the game simply went on forever.

Eventually, a few highly-skilled players were able to complete 255 consecutive levels of play (scoring over three million points and taking several hours to accomplish) and found a surprise waiting for them on level 256. It was a surprise no one knew about-not even the developers at Namco.

The 256th level displays the left half of the maze correctly, but the right half is a jumbled mess of randomly colored letters, numbers, and symbols. Notice the bonus counter in the lower-right of the screen is also malfunctioning.

The left side of the maze plays normally, but the right side is a different story. Although both the player and the ghosts can navigate through the right half of the screen, the original maze walls no longer apply.

Instead, Pac-Man must be guided through a confusing series of open areas, tunnels, one-way intersections, lone walls, and pass-throughs-all invisible to the player-while four ghosts are in hot pursuit.

Why does this broken level happen in the first place? The culprit is the routine responsible for drawing the bonus symbols along the bottom edge of the screen. Here's what happens: when level 256 is reached, the internal level counter is incremented to 255 (the level counter starts at zero - not one) and the routine for drawing the bonus symbols is called.

The routine loads the current level counter value (255) into a CPU register and increments that register by one. Unfortunately, 255 is the largest number that can fit in a single byte which is the size of the Z-80 CPU registers, so when the value is incremented the overflow is discarded leaving a zero in the register instead of the expected value of 256. This zero value leads the routine to believe this is an early level since its value is less than seven.

The routine starts drawing bonus symbols using the confused register as a counter. At the end of every drawing loop, the register is decreased by one and then checked to see if it is zero (the signal for the routine to stop drawing symbols). Since the register already has a zero in it to start, the first decrement will roll the value back to 255. It will keep decrementing the register and drawing symbols until the register is reduced to zero again, causing the loop to run a total of 256 times.

This means that memory locations outside the bounds of the bonus symbol table are drawn to the screen at increasing locations in video memory. This half-broken level was named the "split screen" by players; developers refer to it as a "kill screen".

Playing The Level

There are 114 dots on the left half of the screen, nine dots on the right, and one bonus key, totaling 6,310 points. When all of the dots have been cleared, nothing happens. The game does not consider a level to be completed until 244 dots have been eaten, so there is nothing left to do but sacrifice Pac-Man to a hungry ghost.

Interestingly, every time a life is lost, the nine dots on the right half of the screen get reset and can be eaten again, resulting in an additional 90 points per extra man. In the best-case scenario (five extra men), 6,760 points is the maximum score possible, but only 168 dots can be harvested-not enough to change levels-so we are stuck. There are no more dots to gobble or energizers to eat.

There is no final victory waiting for Pac-Man, only an empty half-maze full of ghosts. The game has an ending after all-just not a very happy or exciting one.

Four of the nine dots on the right half of the screen are invisible, but can be heard when eaten. The picture on the left shows all nine dot locations. Dots 1, 5, 6, and 9 are invisible; the rest can be seen but some are a different color than normal.

Anyone reaching this level quickly realized: to safely map out the right side of the screen something had to be done about the ghosts. After much tinkering, it was discovered that a ghost would get "trapped" on the right edge of the screen if he got too close to it.

Once trapped, a ghost can only move up or down but never right or left again. By leading ghosts near the edge of the screen, a skilled player could eventually get the ghosts out of the way and concentrate on exploring the right half of the maze and collecting the dots.

There are many methods for trapping the ghosts. One of the easiest ways to trap the three important ghosts is shown in the picture to the right. The yellow line shows Pac-Man's path from the start of the level to a spot near the bottom-right.

The exact instructions are as follows: begin by going right until you reach a blue letter 'N', then go down. Keep going down until you reach a blue letter 'F', then go right. Keep going right until you reach a yellow 'B', then go down again. When executed properly, Pac-Man will hit an invisible wall almost immediately after the last turn is made. Now we wait.

The red ghost will get stuck first. The pink ghost follows a few seconds later. The blue ghost will continue to move freely for several moments until the next scatter mode occurs. At that point, it will try to reach some location near the right edge of the screen and get stuck with the pink and red ghost instead.

Now the orange ghost is the only one still on the loose (bottom-right). Clyde is no real threat, however, since he runs to his corner whenever Pac-Man gets close (see Chapter 4), making it relatively easy to clean up all the dots. Be sure to take care around the lower-left corner of the maze-the orange ghost will have nowhere left to run to and will be much more aggressive.

Click on the YouTube video below to watch this ghost-trapping method in action:

Believe It Or Not

Some versions of the Pac-Man ROMs have a "rack test" feature, allowing the cabinet owner to skip ahead to the next level of play whenever they want. To date, the only known way to legitimately get past level 256 is by using the rack test switch inside these machines.

The result is that the game loops back around to the first board, but with the score intact and the ghosts still behaving as though it were level 21 or above. Many of the Pac-Man ROMs available for use with the MAME emulator also have this rack test feature, making it relatively easy for those without an arcade version handy to quickly get to the split-screen and beyond.

For decades, Pac-Man enthusiasts worldwide have heard the whispers about a "secret trick" allowing a player to get past level 256 and continue playing without using the aforementioned rack test. Several players have boasted having acquired this holy grail of Pac-Man knowledge over the years, but no one has been able to make good on their claims by actually proving it.

This topic became so hotly debated in the upper echelons of the arcade gaming community that Billy Mitchell-who was convinced it was impossible-offered a $100,000 cash prize to the first player to prove they could legitimately get past level 256, leaving the challenge open for a full year. The prize money went unclaimed.

In spite of the evidence against there being a way to get past level 256, rumors still persist and can occasionally be found in classic gaming forums online, yet no one has been able to back up their words with indisputable proof. It's hard to imagine why anyone who could legitimately get past the level did not collect Mr. Mitchell's prize money to be sure.

Still the occasional whispers can be heard. Perhaps it is simply natural for people to want to believe in the possibility as opposed to not-like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Then again, maybe there is some middle-aged Pac-Man junkie out there who is withholding secrets to a 30 year-old amusement device for his or her own unfathomable reasons. Stranger things have happened. You be the judge.

Splitting Apart The Split Screen, Don Hodges

Pac-Man's Ghost Behavior Analyzed And Fixed, Don Hodges

Pac-Man Source Code With Comments, Chris Lomont

Pac-Man Emulation Guide, Chris Lomont

The Virtual Pac-Man Museum, Chuck and Vicki Gill

Pacman: The Phenomenon - Part 1, Marty Goldberg

The History of Pac-Man, Doug Trueman

Pac-Man Entry At Arcade History, Alexis Bousiges

Pac-Man ghost behavior revealed, Twin Galaxies forum topic

Pac-Man ghost AI question, AtariAge forum topic

Reawakening The Sleeping Giant: The Pac-Man CE Interview, Christian Nutt

(click image for full size)

Table A.2 - Difficulty Specifications

There is a small spot on the Pac-Man PCB where you can solder two pads together to set the game to "hard" difficulty. The only difference in hard difficulty is that five of the levels (1, 3, 6, 19, and 20) are eliminated from play. The system does not eliminate any of the bonus symbols, however, causing much confusion as to what level you're really playing.

Level two is the first board in hard difficulty for example, but the cherry symbol is used instead of the strawberry. It's still level two in terms of gameplay, but with cherry symbols in place of the usual strawberries. Also, the bonus point values are changed to match the current symbol being used. You can determine the difficulty setting of a machine by observing which ghost kills Pac-Man during the attract mode demo game.

In normal difficulty, Pac-Man gets captured by Inky in the lower-left area of the maze. If the difficulty jumper has been connected, however, he is captured by Clyde near the same location.

Normal

Normal Bonus

Hard

Hard Bonus

1

Cherries

-

-

2

Strawberry

2

Cherries

3

Peach 1

-

-

4

Peach 2

4

Strawberry

5

Apple 1

5

Peach 1

6

Apple 2

-

-

7

Grapes 1

7

Peach 2

8

Grapes 2

8

Apple 1

9

Galaxian 1

9

Apple 2

10

Galaxian 2

10

Grapes 1

11

Bell 1

11

Grapes 2

12

Bell 2

12

Galaxian 1

13

Key 1

13

Galaxian 2

14

Key 2

14

Bell 1

15

Key 3

15

Bell 2

16

Key 4

16

Key 1

17

Key 5

17

Key 2

18

Key 6

18

Key 3

19

Key 7

-

-

20

Key 8

-

-

21+

Key 9

21+

Key 4+

This section is meant to contain not only the easter egg below, but also tricks-interesting ways players have found to create unexpected behavior in Pac-Man. I have seen a few of these curious abuses of a Pac-Man machine before, but I don't know how to recreate them.

As such, I am asking for any help the readers of this guide can provide towards expanding this section. Please send any Pac-Man tricks you may know me for inclusion in the guide; full credit will be given for your altruism and ingenuity.

NAMCO Easter Egg

There is a secret message hidden in Pac-Man by the developers at Namco. To see it, put the machine into service mode and wait for the settings screen to appear. Now quickly toggle service mode off and on (an alignment grid will appear on the screen).

While holding down the player 1 and player 2 buttons, toggle service mode off and on again very quickly (if done properly, the grid will stay on the screen), and then push the joystick in the following directions: UP x 4, LEFT x 4, RIGHT x 4, DOWN x 4. The message "MADE BY NAMCO" will appear sideways on the screen, spelled out using energizers.

Specifications:

Platform - NAMCO 8-bit PCB

CPU - Z80A at 3.072 MHz

ROM - 16K in four, 4K chips

RAM - Almost 2K

Display - Raster

Orientation - Vertical

Resolution - 224x288

Colors - 16

Attributes - Eight 16x16 hardware sprites

Refresh rate - 60.61 Hz

Sound - Custom monophonic 3-voice waveform sound generator chip

Controls - One 4-way leaf joystick, 1P/2P buttons

Models - Upright, Mini, and Cocktail

Midway Operator's Reference Books:

apple: The bonus symbol for levels five and six. Worth 700 points.

bell: The bonus symbol for levels eleven and twelve. Worth 3,000 points.

Blinky: The red ghost. Also known as “Akabei” or “Macky” in Puck-Man.

bonus symbol: The often fruit-related symbol that appears twice per level below the ghost house and can be eaten for additional scoring. The point-value depends on the specific symbol and can range anywhere from 100 to 5,000 points each. Also known as fruit.

cherries: The bonus symbol for the first round of play. Worth 100 points.

Clyde: The orange ghost. Also known as “Guzuta” or “Mocky” in Puck-Man.

cornering: The technique of moving the joystick in the direction one wishes to go well before reaching the center of a turn, ensuring Pac-Man will take the turn as quickly as possible.

Cruise Elroy: When a certain number of dots are all that remain in a level, Blinky (red ghost) will change “gears”, speeding up as well as chasing Pac-Man even in scatter mode. He speeds up yet again when half the dots remain from the first change.

dots: The 244 objects in the maze Pac-Man must eat to move on to the next round. There are 240 small dots worth 10 points each, and 4 energizer dots worth 50 points each. Also known as pills.

energizer: One of four, large, flashing dots located near the corners of the maze worth 50 points each. When Pac-Man eats an energizer, the ghosts simultaneously reverse direction and, on earlier levels, turn dark blue. Pac-Man can then eat the blue ghosts for additional points, scoring more for each consecutive ghost eaten from one energizer: 200, 400, 800, and 1,600 points respectively. Also known as a power pills, fuel tanks, and vitamins.

flipping: “Flipping the machine” refers to when a player earns one million points. The game is unable to display a score larger than 999,999, so the score readout “flips” over to zero and keeps counting. Also known as rolling the machine.

fruit: See bonus symbol.

galaxian: The bonus symbol for levels nine and ten. Also known as a tulip or a thunderbird. Worth 2,000 points.

ghost house: The rectangular area in the middle of the maze where the ghosts start each new level and new life, returning to the house whenever they are captured by Pac-Man. Also known as the monster pen.

ghosts: Pac-Man's four enemies in the maze are typically referred to as ghosts or monsters.

grapes: The bonus symbol for levels seven and eight. Also known as a grenade. Worth 1,000 points.

grenade: See grapes.

head faking: Changing Pac-Man's direction back and forth in quick succession in an attempt to affect the turning logic of one or more ghosts in play. Blinky and Clyde do not use Pac-Man's current direction in their chase logic, so they are unaffected by head faking.

Inky: The blue ghost. Also known as “Aosuke” or “Mucky” in Puck-Man.

intersection: Anywhere pathways in the maze intersect, yielding more than one option on which way to proceed.

key: The bonus symbol for levels 13 and above. Worth 5,000 points.

monster pen: See ghost house.

monsters: See ghosts.

orange: See peach.

pattern: A memorized series of turns associated with a particular level or levels that, when repeated, clears the maze of dots without getting Pac-Man captured by any of the ghosts. Also known as a routine.

peach: The bonus symbol for levels three and four. Also known as an orange. Worth 500 points.

pills: See dots.

Pinky: The pink ghost. Also known as “Micky” in Puck-Man.

power pill: See energizer.

routine: See pattern.

side tunnel: The connecting tunnel between the right and left edges of the screen. Entering this tunnel will “wrap” the player around to the other side of the screen. The monsters always suffer a speed penalty while in the tunnel while Pac-Man does not. Also known as The Tube, The Time Warp, and The Scoot.

split screen: The 256th level of the game, where the right half of the screen is filled with garbage instead of the usual maze.

strawberry: The bonus symbol for level two. Worth 300 points.

thunderbird: See galaxian.

tulip: See galaxian.

Q: How do I get past the split screen?

A: The only known way to get past the split screen is via the “rack test” feature available on some Pac-Man ROMs (see Chapter 5).

Q: What is a “perfect score”?

A: A perfect score in Pac-Man is 3,333,360 points, which can only be attained by playing a perfect game. This requires catching all four ghosts at every energizer, gobbling down every bonus fruit, and never once losing a life for 256 consectutive levels of play.

All extra lives are needed once the split screen is reached to eat the nine dots hidden on the right side of the screen the maximum number of times—they respawn every time a life is lost. This was first achieved by Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida in 1999.

Q: Is it true that some of the ghost A.I. routines examine the joystick directly to make decisions?

A: This is false. The memory-mapped IN0 joystick port is completely removed from the pathfinding and logic routines in the code.

Q: What other games from the Pac-Man family will this ghost logic work with?

A: Pac-Man Plus and Ms. Pac-Man both use the same basic pathfinding/targeting logic as the original Pac-Man. Many popular bootleg ROMs like the Atlantic City Chip and Hanglyman also use this logic.

Q: Why are all of the bonus symbols food-related except for the galaxian, the bell, and the key?

A: The galaxian was added as a nod to the Namco space-shooter title, Galaxian, which was under development at the same time as Pac-Man. No one knows why Toru Iwatani chose a bell and a key for the final two bonus symbols.

It has been theorized the bell may actually be some sort of food like an Asian cashew or even a blancmange dessert, which would make it consistent with the food theme. The bell at least has the possibility of being something else—no one has any theories on the key being anything but ... well ... a key.

Q: Why are some members of the NAMCO development team listed by name but not others in Chapter 1?

A: I have not been able to find out these persons' names—I'm sure they are documented somewhere but I have yet to find that information. If you know of any reliable sources for the names of the full NAMCO development team, please let me know (jamey.pittman@yahoo.com).

[NOTE: The latest version of the Pac-Man Dossier is available at Jamey Pittman's website, and he can be contacted at jamey.pittman@yahoo.com with questions, comments, and updates. Gamasutra will be working with Jamey on new dossiers for other games to be published in the future.]

Return to the full version of this article Copyright © UBM Tech, All rights reserved

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Zone Momentum Breakout Forex Trading Strategy

When I first got into trading, I read everything about forex that I could scour from the internet, like any newbie trader would. I learned something about almost anything trading and forex. One of the most interesting things that caught my attention when I first learned about trading strategies was breakouts.

Breakouts are very interesting because the possibilities are endless. Technical traders know that price would often bounce off support or resistance lines. Once broken, price would often move towards the next support or resistance line. These spaces where price could move are called pockets.

Breakouts however, if it is the last support or resistance line near the vicinity of the current price, have an endless room for price to run. This often allows price to trend strongly in one direction. Traders who can catch such trades could grow their accounts exponentially.

However, trading breakouts is a double-edged sword. While breakout traders look for price to breach such levels, supply and demand traders, as well as reversal traders look for bounces off these levels. Trading breakouts is tricky. However, there are ways to greatly increase the probability of a win.

Zone Momentum Breakout Forex Trading Strategy allows traders to take trades on momentum breakouts with a relatively high success rate. It uses indicators that help traders identify breakout zones and hold trades until the momentum or trend generated on the breakout has fizzled out.

SDX Zone Breakout

SDX Zone Breakout is a custom indicator which helps traders identify the range of a currency pair during a given trading session. It then marks the range with support and resistance lines creating supply and demand zones.

Although this indicator plots supply and demand zones quite differently, it also does work quite well as a basis for support and resistance line breakouts.

Traders could use this indicator in two ways. Reversal traders who expect price to range could trade on bounces from the support or resistance line. Breakout traders on the other hand could trade on strong momentum breakouts from the support or resistance zone and ride the momentum after the breakout.

Slope Direction Line

Moving averages are one of the most basic indicators available to technical traders. In fact, most indicators have an element of a moving average incorporated in it.

Moving averages are primarily used to identify trend direction and trend reversals. One of the most popular ways to identify trend direction using moving averages is by looking at its slope. A moving average that is sloping up indicates an uptrend, while a moving average that is sloping down indicates a downtrend.

The Slope Direction Line is basically a modified moving average line that could help traders identify the direction of the trend based on how it is sloped. This indicator simplifies this by changing the color of its line depending on the direction of the trend.

In this setup, the Slope Direction Line is colored light blue during an uptrend and tomato during a downtrend.

Trading Strategy

This trading strategy is a basic momentum breakout strategy using the SDX Zone Breakout indicator.

To trade this strategy, traders simply wait for a momentum candle to breakout from the support or resistance lines. We will be using the topmost and bottom most lines to identify the support and resistance levels.

A break beyond the outermost lines would alert us that a possible momentum breakout could occur. However, we should not be taking the trade right away. Instead, we wait for price to retest the support or resistance zone.

Retest simply means price action would revisit the area of the support or resistance line and show signs of price rejection of the area. Some traders call it a confirmation, and rightfully so. It would indicate that price is creating higher swing highs and lows after a bullish breakout, or a lower high and low after a bearish breakout. As many professional traders would say, “Confirmation is key.”

Trades are then held if the Slope Direction Line color agrees with the direction of the momentum breakout. Trades are then closed as soon as the Slope Direction Line color changes, indicating that the momentum has fizzled out and price might soon reverse.

Indicators:

SDX-ZoneBreakout (default setting)

Slope Direction Line (default setting)

Preferred Time Frames: 5-minute and 15-minute chart only

Currency Pairs: major and minor pairs

Trading Sessions: Tokyo, London and New York sessions

Buy Trade Setup

Entry

A bullish momentum candle should break above the upper most resistance line.

The Slope Direction Line should be color light blue.

Price should retest the resistance lines.

Price should show signs of price rejection on the area of the resistance line.

Enter a buy order as soon as price action resumes its bullish pattern.

Stop Loss

Set the stop loss on the fractal below the entry candle.

Exit

Close the trade as soon as the Slope Direction Line changes to tomato.

Sell Trade Setup

Entry

A bearish momentum candle should break below the lower most support line.

The Slope Direction Line should be color tomato.

Price should retest the support lines.

Price should show signs of price rejection on the area of the support line.

Enter a sell order as soon as price action resumes its bearish pattern.

Stop Loss

Set the stop loss on the fractal above the entry candle.

Exit

Close the trade as soon as the Slope Direction Line changes to light blue.

Conclusion

This strategy is a classic price action based breakout strategy. It provides trade signals on momentum breakouts from support or resistance lines.

Not all classic breakout strategies employ taking trades after the retest. However, breakout strategies that do this tend to have better win rates.

This strategy differs only because it uses a technical indicator to plot the support or resistance lines. This could be helpful for newbie traders. However, seasoned traders might be able to plot more accurate support and resistance lines.

It also simplifies the exit strategy by using the Slope Direction Line. Most breakout traders do not have a systematic method of exiting the trade. Instead, they would opt to set fixed take profit targets. Using the Slope Direction Line allows traders to hold on to a trade as long as the trend is still in place.

This strategy could work well in many trade setups. Traders who could identify the right trade setups could profit much using this type of strategy.

Forex Trading Strategies Installation Instructions

Zone Momentum Breakout Forex Trading Strategy is a combination of Metatrader 4 (MT4) indicator(s) and template.

The essence of this forex strategy is to transform the accumulated history data and trading signals.

Zone Momentum Breakout Forex Trading Strategy provides an opportunity to detect various peculiarities and patterns in price dynamics which are invisible to the naked eye.

Based on this information, traders can assume further price movement and adjust this strategy accordingly.

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How to install Zone Momentum Breakout Forex Trading Strategy?

Download Zone Momentum Breakout Forex Trading Strategy.zip

*Copy mq4 and ex4 files to your Metatrader Directory / experts / indicators /

Copy tpl file (Template) to your Metatrader Directory / templates /

Start or restart your Metatrader Client

Select Chart and Timeframe where you want to test your forex strategy

Right click on your trading chart and hover on “Template”

Move right to select Zone Momentum Breakout Forex Trading Strategy

You will see Zone Momentum Breakout Forex Trading Strategy is available on your Chart

*Note: Not all forex strategies come with mq4/ex4 files. Some templates are already integrated with the MT4 Indicators from the MetaTrader Platform.

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