I'd need a MUCH bigger cut of the take than my standard (and these days very generous but I'm old-school like that) 50/50 hey-this-is-just-for-fun-and-extra-pizza-money split if I were to put Baby Pacman out on route, because let's face it, I'd be back and forth four times a week to fix the bloody thing

Baby Pacman is a 42-year-old cantankerous mess of hot moving parts combined with early 80's computer, a bizarre experiment of a pinball/videogame hybrid made by a pinball company that doesn't know how to make videogames and doesn't particularly want to learn, but who has enough money at this moment in history to fling mud at the wall and see what sticks.

It works by wiring together three completely different computers who hate each other. Their communication is utterly dysfunctional. When pacman eats a dot, the videogame computer tells the pinball computer that a ball just hit a slingshot, and that's how 100 points is scored. The computer that keeps track of the scores and credits has no idea that Pacman exists, the computer that plays Pacman doesn't know how many lives or points you have (lives are BALLS), and the computer plugged into the monitor retrieves the scores for display through wires that are intended to be connected to 7-segment gas-discharge displays.

None of these computers are capable of crashing. Crashing hadn't been invented yet. If the computer does something that the programmer didn't intend then there's nothing to tell the computer to stop, it just keeps on going until something sets on fire. The game is full of high-current components that can set on fire if the computer tells them to set on fire, and it will.

There were seven thousand of these things made and very few remain because they all broke down so hard that techs specializing in EITHER videogames OR pinball couldn't fix them, to keep one of these running you need a tech that specializes in videogames AND pinball AND bad decisions.

So if I'm to route this game - in a pub, mark you, not in a place where there'll be a tech waiting in the back ready to have a good cry - then y'all are gonna have to up your fedi meta game, sincerely, it's gonna have to be against the backdrop of the most rancid ridiculous shit that's ever hit these cursed webbed sites, I hear quote-retweets are coming maybe y'all can do something with that

I quite enjoy computers that don't crash, they can be a lot of fun so long as you never entrust them with anything important

Think of your processor as a little balding dude in an office block, a little guy who thinks he's the boss. At some time after Baby Pacman was made, processors would be sat down in the meeting room at the start of the day, and the Actual Bosses would hold up a picture of something with more tentacles than eyes and say

🦊 Look. You see this?
🐇 ya
🦊 You ever see something like this, you stop, right? You go back home. You go STRAIGHT back home. Back home to memory position zero. And you forget everything. And you take a deep breath, and you start again.
🐇 ok!
🦊 STRAIGHT back home.
🐇 I understand!
🦊 Alright off you go, have fun, don't forget your backpack.

and then the little 45-year-old salaryman dude wanders off down the corridor and people hand him bits of paper,

🐻 Boss can you add these two numbers?
🐇 Of course!
🐛 Sir, please jump forward to memory position 0ff0
🐇 Can do, watch me now, BIG jump!
🦓 Welcome to here sir, can you please hold this in your - oh shit I bumped him with my hip, where'd he go

The lil salaryman encounters ONE malformed bit and he goes off the rails and disappears through the wall into the outside world and he sees a 👺 and goes 🐇 Well that's not right, and he jumps back and starts his day over again. This is a computer crashing, this is you getting the blue screen of death, and you should be so, so thankful. If you'd seen what happened in the hundredth of a second before that BSOD popped up you'd be mopping your brow and going "Phew, thank goodness that got caught before things got REALLY out of hand."

Because nobody ever told Baby Pacman that a 👺 wasn't normal. So Baby Pacman's processor does what 👺 says, and 👺 is made of the stuff that comes out of your speakers when your radio's not tuned in.

So now Baby Pacman has left the office and is in the outside world going 🐇 la lala lala, he's frolicking through echoes of the Big Bang, he's interpreting a syllable out of an AM radio talk show host's mouth as an instruction for him, he's encountering little bottles that say DRINK ME and he's growing extra fingers and tripping over legs that are too long and he's going 🐇 this is a strange day for sure but ours is not to reason why!

He's a fastidious worker and he'll do whatever he's told to the best of his ability and he absolutely. Will. Not. Stop.

When you turn off the machine and turn it back on again and put 🐇 back where he belongs, there's no log, there's no way of ever knowing where 🐇 went, he just pootled off on a little adventure to the land where the sky turns green if the neighbour starts the microwave, and who knows what he did there? You'll never know. It was a wonderland, vast and awesome and terrifying and beautiful and now it's gone and you will never, ever know. Wave the smoke out of your eyes and try to forget. Anyway should this machine go in a pub

🐴 Surely computers crashing is a bad thing
🐇 it says here I've got to overwrite this device driver with farting noises, haha that's a little odd but nobody's objecting so I guess it's ok~