kill-screen

Your mission

Return the level Pac-Man's 8-bit counter shows, and flag the kill screen.

today's brief

1980. Pac-Man was built to run forever: no ending, no final boss, just faster ghosts. But reach board 256 and the right half of the maze detonates into a soup of letters, numbers and garbage tiles. That is the famous kill screen, and reaching it means surviving 255 perfect boards, so almost nobody ran into it during a normal game. The whole thing comes down to one byte that could not count past 255. Did you know the bug was sitting there, waiting at level 256, the entire time?

See it in action

displayed_level(255)

Expected result

Your checklist

For your own tracking. Tests grade your code.

The level counter is a single byte, holding values from 0 to 255.
Return the level reduced modulo 256.
When that value comes out as 0, the counter has wrapped to the kill screen: return -1 instead.

More examples

displayed_level(256)

Expected result

-1

displayed_level(257)

Expected result

Constraints

Expected files

level.c

Allowed functions

None. Write every helper yourself.

Back to compete

Solutions

kill-screen

Your mission

Return the level Pac-Man's 8-bit counter shows, and flag the kill screen.

today's brief

See it in action

displayed_level(255)

Expected result

Your checklist

For your own tracking. Tests grade your code.

The level counter is a single byte, holding values from 0 to 255.
Return the level reduced modulo 256.
When that value comes out as 0, the counter has wrapped to the kill screen: return -1 instead.

More examples

displayed_level(256)

Expected result

-1

displayed_level(257)

Expected result

Constraints

Expected files

level.c

Allowed functions

None. Write every helper yourself.

Back to compete

Solutions