Sorry for the double post.
The writer of the FAQ, Marcus, had this to say:
"Officially, there are no cheat codes or anything to
skip levels, but using emulation there are ways to do
things such as making a stage clear as soon as it
appears by not allowing the dots to appear. I don't
know a lot about emulation, though, or hacking the
game's programming, so this was just something I've
happened to have read before and remembered.
[^^Would that be a debug feature or something else within the MAME program that could make the dots not appear, or would someone have to make an actual hacked rom that does not allow levels 1-255 to load the dots, and then level 256 to show the dots and make the player clear the board, thus completing the level ?]
Supposedly, people have used this to reach and
actually complete round 256, and after completing it,
the game just resets to round 1, though the ghosts
stay at the top speed, and I'm not sure if you keep
your score. But there have been no videos of it like
you guys are thinking of making, so maybe you could
try it out if you can figure out how to do the ROM
stuff."
I plan to do some google searching for any ROMs or hacks that dont allow the circles to load up, and will post whatever I happen to find (of course, I won't post a ROM, if it exists ;) )
EDIT:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=69005 has some nice info, of particular note are the post that seems to be a book (5+ paragraphs) and on page 2 there is some code about "where the error occurs", however not being a programmer it is all gibberish XD
