Pac-Man's Hiding Spot

Erm, we all knew about this three decades back. It was what you did when you needed a rest - the trouble was that it could mess with your patterns if you didn't come out of hiding at exactly the right point. IIRC on some levels you could actually use it as part of the pattern.

I have seen it live back in the early 80's. The person who showed me said that it only worked after a certain level.

Yeah, this works on some old pacman machines. I noticed that machines in Europe didn't seem to have this issue, though. Apparently, in some earlier (than European) machines the ghosts would hover in the upper and lower region, being part of the logic: to search where pacman was last seen. As soon as they included a timeout, after which the ghosts started roaming the greater labyrinth again, they would unavoidably run into a targeting field that would allow pacman to be discerned.

Could all be some old folklore, but the times I tried this it did at least seem to work.

I believe the way you're facing when you enter makes a difference.

There's this great article on how the ghosts target you:
http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior

With these simple rules for their behaviour, I guess it's not too surprising that there's one spot in the maze where, if you're looking the right way, their pre-defined paths never reach you.

As many years as I have been playing Pacman, I did not know this. I'm off to go warm up the Atari and switch the box from TV to Game/computer. Then I'll spend a little time jiggling the cable and discover that one of the screws into the antenna has come loose. So I will need to get the screw driver, or attempt to just screw it back in using my fingernail. At which point my nail will rip so I will need a bandaid....skip it all. I'll just take your word for it.

Well, this has never worked for me on any of the versions I played. In fact I did it the other way around. I would move right up to power pellet and stop and wait until the ghosts were right on top of me. Then I get the pellet and go after ghosts. I never had an issue with them not coming after me when I stopped moving.

This is a very old and common trick in Pac-man. Players in the 70s/80s would use this trick in arcades when they would get so far and want to leave for a bathroom session/food ect.

Yes, you need to be sure the ghosts don't see you go to the hiding spot. If you pause the video at the :26 second mark, you'll notice none of the ghosts have pacman in their view when he? reaches the hiding spot.

Does that work in Ms. PacMan also?