darryl

Generalist nerd

Space, software, board games, puzzle games, general nerdery. Canadian. Middle-aged. Ask me whatever you want, but if it’s something about naked-eye/binocular astronomy, you’ll make my day

[[[[where to find me]]]]
dshpak on Discord
@darryl@toot.community on mastodon (never use it but WHO KNOWS)
darryl on goblin.band


Discord
dshpak
Goblin.band (the profile is totally default but I promise it’s me I’m just not using it yet)
goblin.band/@darryl

nicky
@nicky

this is not a joke. here's proof. it got accepted and everything

and yet, if you go to the Garfield leaderboards on Twin Galaxies, my old puny score of 1,909,896,121,651,051,877,238,357,850 is still listed as my record. AND ALSO if you go to that old record, the video has been replaced by a completely different video of a different game!

Twin Galaxies sucks. wish there was a better high score leaderboard thing



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in reply to @nicky's post:

how the score is that large? every "level" ends with garfield rescuing nermal from uhh falling from the roof of a house. upon Nermal Touch, your score is multiplied by 2. you play for 8 hours like i did, that adds up lol

the game only displays the last 6 digits of the score but it keeps track of it nonetheless!

Huh, ok. Thanks for that! My question was a twofold “How can you score that many points in a video game?” (which you answered) and “How can you get that big a number on an Atari 2600?” That’s a 91-bit number; did an Atari 2600 programmer really allocate that much storage for the score? (And write the code to do math on it?) Or (more likely IMO) is it just tracking six decimal digits of score, using BCD or something, and the overflow digits get dropped?

Either way, an incredible accomplishment.

thanks!! i'm very proud of my big video game number. i'm no computer wizard but i've been told the most likely answer is in fact ur second suggestion. i think if the atari tried to hold onto a 91-bit number the universe would implode