Why does pacman stop at level 255

because the data for the game glitches up at level 256 because the level counter is held in a limited number of bytes. the counter then rolls over to 0 and glitches the level. the game tries to display 256 fruits at once and corrupts the right hand side of the screen causing it display random letters and numbers. it is impossible to collect all the pellets on this screen, so it has been reffered to as the kill screen. hacking has shown that had level 256 been passed, the game would restart at level 1 but the ghosts would keep their speed and invunrability to power pellets. the highest score possible is 3,333,360 if you collect every pellet, power pellet, eat every ghost, and get every fruit and can take 3 hours or more to acheive