h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The article says that the maximum number of pages is 899.

That's almost right. In fact, it *is* right for the pages that are directly accessible by the home user.

However, you can also send pages with hexadecimal values in the tens and units e.g. 1AF. This is used for games, where the hex pages are accessible only via the FASTEXT buttons. Channel4 had a game called Bamboozle that took advantage of this. I don't know if they still do it.

Of course, if you had a teletext adapter in your PC, you could cheat by looking at the pages to which the FASTEXT buttons were pointing, and always choosing the odd-one-out!

Dixons and Currys used to have ads on CEEFAX that were accessible via a hex page number. The shops set the TVs in the window to display the appropriate page. I assume they must have been sent special remotes that could send the right codes to the TV.

jd

Cheating by finding the odd-answer out:

You used to be able to do this on a normal telly, if you were quick, by pressing the buttons one-by-one and noticing when the 'destination' field at the top left of the screen changed... Risky but it worked.

Doesn't seem to work any more though! Try it and you get sent to a random page, it seems... Unless it's just my new tv that does this. Wonder how channel 4 wangled that one?