I've been thinking of what Chris Parsley was saying as to when the death screen was... he said 16 * 16 * 16, or 4,095(really 4,096... but...) screens, before the game goes into death.

I have to disagree with this, and I'll tell you why.

Games are programmed in bytes. Each byte has 8 bits. Each bit has a 0 or a 1. If you use 1 bit, you have 2 possibilities, 2 bits, 4 possibilities, 3 bits, 8, and so forth.

With this reasoning in mind, you would have 256 possiblities in each byte, because there are 8 bits in a byte(2^8)

I believe galaga used two BYTES, which means that the hardest difficulty(which is the difficulty that's supposed to be used in the tournament btw) has 256 * 256, or 65,535 stages(really 65,536... but...), not 4,095.

That's what I think is the reality of Galaga...

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), July 21, 1999

Answers

Perhaps what we need is someone with a bit of spare time to create a hack that will allow level skipping in Galaga via the press of a key. Then this argument could be put to the test.

BeeJay.

-- beejay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), July 22, 1999.

Yeah, BeeJay, and then maybe I could pass Level 20 on this miserable game. LOL!

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), July 23, 1999.

Ok, I'm sure everyone has been awaiting my reply to this thread. Working 2 jobs now, this is the first time I responded in here in probably 2 months. Anyway, as far as all these bytes and bits, I don't know cow doodie about this stuff but can tell you that I find it very impressive that someone has actually found a rack advance to Galaga. I don't thing I read this correctly, but what happened at 256 * 256? Here's some interesting facts, if there was a so called kill screen at stage 65,535 and I made it there (ha, would never happen in any human life form!) it would of gotten me 9,856,000,000 pts (my average of 3.850M by 256 on turbo fire) and lasted 4,106,666,666 hours! which is 171,111,111 days! 468797.564688 years!! So hows that?! Actually, what I think I can do with alot of psychological exercising, is play a game slightly modified which would be a turbo game playing with the no-fire bug and play for a 100M game which would take just under 50 hours to do. I thought of doing this with a good friend of mine in conjunction with a charity of course. Not for the score to be mixed in with any of the other Galaga scores but to see if the game will actually show 100,000,000 for a score on the 2 player side! I know it shows 8 digits, (funny thing, I did a 10M game last night at my work along side my friend who did the same) I'm curious as hell to see if it shows 9 digits. This almost happened in May at the Funspot Classics tourney I went to but they didn't have a turbo ver.

Regards, Steve Krogman ... Galaga ~ 15,999,990

-- stephen krogman (skrogman@concentric.net), July 25, 1999.

65,536 stages?! i'd love to see that! ;-)

-- david oliver (cartman@solanobiz.net), July 25, 1999.