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Does anyone know how scoring system works on this game?

Not exactly, but I think each judge does keep an eye on something different (with minimal value growing over time as you progress trough the game), like mission reached, speed of game, maybe special moves used, etc...

I'm unfortunately unable to say anything exact about it, the only sure thing is, that the farther you go into the game, the better the average score is, so there's point in trying to get as far as possible.
After maximizing your progress, you may try to change thing here and there and see what it does to score, but I get very steady 8.80~8.88 marks every time I reach Mission 4-2 without any big variation to the way I play. (I can't get over that shooting stage, as I'm at zero energy since end of M3 and single enemy hit means instant kill then) Also I can't variate my play too much, if I want to reach that far.
I have seen 8.80 from M3-2, so I'm not saying there's no point to decipher judges and play according to their taste, it certainly helps, but I think unless some insider or hacker will tell us what's going on, it's next to impossible to decipher it exactly.
One of my scores (from 4-1).

That said, maybe I should upload my record to MARP too... Didn't play astorm for some months, and I'm working on other records right now, but maybe I will try it couple of times, I should be able to get 8.7+ score relatively easy without hard training.

I did some further check of screenshots of scores at EMUX ( Best scores Best levels ).

As far as I can tell, the women gives 10.0 score all the time (maybe except some suicide in first stage).
The robot gives 5.0 for M2, 6.0 for M3 and 7.0 for M4. (I wonder if it goes like this with further missions, maybe somebody with lot of free time and virtual coins should try ... if the scoring does survive continue that is)

The first three judges (from left) are scoring something less obvious and I don't have even wild guess, which one does what. I'm just brave enough to say they score the "style" of play. But I have no idea what style is good and what not.
(I think obvious things like killing as many aliens as possible and doing it as fast as possible should count, but I bet that's not complete list)

ped wrote:I did some further check of screenshots of scores at EMUX ( Best scores Best levels ).

As far as I can tell, the women gives 10.0 score all the time (maybe except some suicide in first stage).
The robot gives 5.0 for M2, 6.0 for M3 and 7.0 for M4. (I wonder if it goes like this with further missions, maybe somebody with lot of free time and virtual coins should try ... if the scoring does survive continue that is)

The first three judges (from left) are scoring something less obvious and I don't have even wild guess, which one does what. I'm just brave enough to say they score the "style" of play. But I have no idea what style is good and what not.
(I think obvious things like killing as many aliens as possible and doing it as fast as possible should count, but I bet that's not complete list)

Thanks for that. One day it might be figured out.

Also I forgot to mention one detail.
The final score is not average from the shown marks of judges, it has finer resolution. (i.e. for the screenshot posted by me the average of marks is pure 8.80, but the final score on the LED display is 8.86)

I think the judges actually do assign finer resolution marks like 7.63 to player (inside in the code), from those the final score is calculated as average, and then they are rounded to 0.5 accuracy for graphic marks in hands, which were hand-drawn by artist and can handle only small set of prepared numbers (0.0, 0.5, 1.0, ..., 10.0).

This adds another obfuscation to already non-obvious scheme, if you would try to decipher it just by playing many games and watching score screen.
I think some reverse engineering of the game code would lead to result much faster, but it still may be serious amount of work (more like weeks/months then hours/days).

As I see, the game does use Motorola 68000 @10MHz and Zilog Z80 @8Mhz.
I [did] know Z80 inside-out, but I'm afraid the game code is running at that 68k and Z80 is probably used only for audio syncing and maybe some other "boring" tasks, bookkeeping, etc... Hard to tell, I never tried to RE any arcade machine and astorm is sort of start of "modern" HW where the interaction between chips can be quite complex and usually there's some protective cipher involved to prevent reading the game code straight from ROM chip on these machines.

Actually if somebody skilled would point me in right direction how to debug mame emulated code (if it is possible at all), I may take a look even at 68k code, I was sort of ASM guru 15 years ago, so I should be able to learn it quickly. But I have no idea how to break into the game code with MAME (without spending couple of weeks with MAME sources).
And I think MAME is not as debug friendly as modern ZX Spectrum emulators, where many of them allow you to break into the game directly and step trough the code with built-in Z80 debugger. (Once I was bored enough to do some funny things to Hero Quest on the fly, like adding more action points every turn and similar .. with good tools it's not that hard to change some basic things even if you don't fully understand whole game code)

edit: from this link it looks like the MAME ROMs are probably already decrypted. That would save the hassle with decryption, still having a good debugger to trace the game code on the fly would be welcome, I don't like the idea of studying disassembled ROMs listings without any chance to toy with the code in action.

Later versions of MAME have the built-in debugger enabled in standard build. So you can just start with mame astorm -debug, and get the MAME internal debugger.

this game is "banned" or "discarded" from gamest (no official score) but I found some results in game center scoreboard:

gordon 9.42
carla 9.46
scooter 9.38

maybe score system is random?

It is not [completely] random for sure.
I would love to see 9.xx score with Gordon and Carla, because that means there must be some trick on the second phase of the big boss at end of M3. I can get trough it only with scooter using his reincarnation special attack, after that I have zero life and any mistake in shooting stages is "game over".

If anyone would learn me some way how to beat the second phase of the boss, I would probably manage to get past 4-2 then.
(first and third phase are ok, I know how to beat it)

Back to scoring...
mahlemiut: and some simple way to obtain disassembled ROMS of astorm[3]?

The MAME debugger can produce disassembly output to a file, it's not fancy, but it does the job. Check the debugger's help function for more info. MAME should display and output decrypted code.

I think the guy in the middle notes something related to energy used (if you don't use any, you get 0.0)

ped wrote:The robot gives 5.0 for M2, 6.0 for M3 and 7.0 for M4.

So should be 8.0 for M6 ?
For sure you get 10.0 if you finish the game (see MamEnd).

Note that in clone astormu he gives only 2.0 for mission 1 complete, so that explains why scores are lower for this one (2/5=0.4 point less).