"In the previous article on Donkey Kong, we saw that the game designers built in a mechanism to prevent the player from ever passing level 99. After level 99 is reached, it repeats forever, never advancing to 100. However, this is not widely known because a timer bug prevents anyone from ever passing level 22. If only the designers of Pac-Man had done something similar.

But they didn’t, and Pac-Man suffers from the well known split screen when level 256 is reached. We will examine how and why this occurs, and create a patch to fix the program’s bug."