256 Levels of Zen

Our first project for this class is to have a chain of some sort, with the clasp as the focal point. And as you may guess I'm basing this one on Pac-man. You may also be wondering then why I didn't title this post Pac-Mania or something similar, but we'll get to that in a moment. First some back story though.

Long time readers know I went to a CAD workshop last year hosted at the college, and came up with an abstract Pac-shape that I reeeeeeally wanted to use at the time but didn't quite have time to dwell on it. Now that I have mulled over it for a while my plan is thus:

I'll start by loosely riveting flat brass Pac-men eye to power pill. Since it will be a necklace I can't really paint the metal bright colors like I originally wanted, since the friction will likely wear it away. I may break up the monotony of the chain with blue Pente or Parcheesi pieces as a reference to to the color of the maze, ghosts, and as a more visible pellet. 

The clasp however will be a big 3D Pac-man sitting on the back of the neck. Not only will it reference the transition in to three dimensional games in the late 90s/early 00s it will also represent the 256th level of the original arcade Pac-man from 1982. Wikipedia explains what happens on that level better than I can:

"Pac-Man was designed to have no ending – as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to play the game indefinitely. However, a bug keeps this from happening: Normally, no more than seven fruit are displayed at the bottom of the screen at any one time. But when the internal level counter, which is stored in a single byte, reaches 255, the subroutine that draws the fruit erroneously "rolls over" this number to zero, causing it to try to draw 256 fruit instead of the usual seven. This corrupts the bottom of the screen and the entire right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols, making it impossible to eat enough dots to beat the level. Because this effectively ends the game, this "split-screen" level is often referred to as the "kill screen". Emulators and code analysis have revealed what would happen should this 255th level be cleared: The fruit and intermissions would restart at level 1 conditions, but the enemies would retain their higher speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the higher stages."

 And this is what it looks like. Therefore my clasp will be an unrecognizable  barely Pac-mannish shape, all glitched and distorted. Exactly how I'm not sure yet, but there's still a little bit of time to decide on that. All in all I'm actually looking forward to this project more than usual, goes to show what a good theme can do for generating ideas. For the immediate moment of this post there's no where to go except to drag up some relics from 1982 and the height of Pac-man (and arcade) fever starting of course with the Buckner & Garica  song:

The board game version:

and the intro to the cartoon:

Not to mention all the other merchandising...