How high does Galaga's 2UP score go?

Post by **gameboy9** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 9:42 pm

Well, I'm using MAME's cheat engine and letting it autofire... so I don't have to do anything.

I've got it up to 365 million... working on a billion. I bet it will roll over at a billion. Anybody want to place bets?

Marco Marocco · Post by **Marco Marocco** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 3:41 am

GB9, P.M. for you !

Post by **gameboy9** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 6:32 am

Well, it shows billions...

That's crazy!

The TJT · Post by **The TJT** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 12:02 pm

You got too much time Pete

Post by **gameboy9** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 12:33 pm

Well that experiment only took about 12 hours to complete (thanks to the Athlon X2 4400)... and I just did it in the background, so I didn't waste THAT much time...

Post by **mahlemiut** » Mon Aug 27, 2007 8:00 pm

Gee... all I'd have done is searched for the score in RAM using the MAME debugger, then changed the score to be a few thousand less, then continued playing. Much quicker

Post by **gameboy9** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 8:25 am

Yeah, but the suspense would also be over much quicker too...

LN2 · Post by **LN2** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 11:24 am

is that the galaga rom set?

the first shot shows odd looking ships..like little Enterprises.

I always thought that using player 2 the score only showed 1 more place.

but maybe no one ever played it beyond 10 million so we wouldn't know.

ok Tommi...fire it up...go for the 10! hehe

Post by **gameboy9** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 4:04 pm

No, it was all MAME's doing. No enterprises, they're real Galaga ships.

The only thing I did was engage a few cheats so I didn't have to actively play it and to speed up the scoring. And speed throttled. Lots of that.

The TJT · Post by **The TJT** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 4:27 pm

gameboy9 wrote:No, it was all MAME's doing. No enterprises, they're real Galaga ships.

Something funny going on anyway.
They could be last challenge stage ships...but what are normal bees doing there then. Maybe it had something to do with the cheats gb9 enabled.

Post by **gameboy9** » Tue Aug 28, 2007 6:40 pm

Oh that! Yeah, the cheats screw up the enemies. There's a cheat that says always a challenge stage, and always a perfect challenge stage. Both of them are enabled just to see how high the score goes. Yeah, that screws up the graphics, but I SERIOUSLY doubt that it does anything to screw up the score.

LN2 · Post by **LN2** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 3:55 pm

oh ok...but yeah....given it does that....I am not 100% sure thawouldn't actually interfere with the scoring as well..but odds are it wouldn't.

but yeah, those enterprise-like ships are the ones from that toughest challenge stage.

I didn't realize until you just said above that the cheats affected the enemies and makes the whole game like one big challenge stage.

BeeJay · Post by **BeeJay** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 10:25 pm

LN2 wrote:I always thought that using player 2 the score only showed 1 more place.

but maybe no one ever played it beyond 10 million so we wouldn't know.

... there's already a 20 million point score on Marp for the fast shooting version of Galaga. So we already knew the 8th digit was supported.

Here's another thought, if it went to 10 billion, will it start to overwrite the zero of the high score? It looks like they just goto the next character position to the left, so it's possible it would just continue using more "characters to the left" for some time yet...

Chad · Post by **Chad** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 10:29 pm

not that looking at the emulation would answer this entirely, it could just wrap around the 32 bit max number, and either not go higher than 2 billion or 4 billion.

Post by **mahlemiut** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 11:20 pm

BeeJay wrote:Here's another thought, if it went to 10 billion, will it start to overwrite the zero of the high score? It looks like they just goto the next character position to the left, so it's possible it would just continue using more "characters to the left" for some time yet...

Yep.

It works directly on the characters in video RAM (the digits are characters 0-9).