Star Raiders rank explanations?

[Lauren Tyler]

I've always been confused by the way the rankings are. Are they listed from lowest to highest (e.g. Cook, Scout, etc.) and do the numbers mean pretty much what class you're in with 5 being lowest? (E.g. 5th class Cook, 3rd Class Scout, etc.?)

[Lord Thag]

Cook is the lowest, Scout the next and so on up to Star Raider and the like. The numerical rankings are 5th (lowest) through 1st (highest) That help?

[godzillajoe]

Yeah you wouldn't expect the ship's cook to be ranked highest

[SRGilbert]

Yeah you wouldn't expect the ship's cook to be ranked highest

I also wouldn't be expecting them to be manning the controls either!

[rockman_x_2002]

Yeah you wouldn't expect the ship's cook to be ranked highest

I also wouldn't be expecting them to be manning the controls either!

 

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

[BassGuitari]

Yeah you wouldn't expect the ship's cook to be ranked highest

 

Maybe he's a really good cook?

[Nukey Shay]

As posted, the rankings are (from lowest to highest) Cook, Scout, Pilot, Ace, Eagle, Star, Nova, and Atari (the mystery rank). This differs from the original 8-bit game, because the GFX had to fit within one side of playfield GFX. The 8-bit ranks were Rookie, Novice, Ensign, Pilot, Ace, Lieutenant, Warrior, Captian, Commander, and Star Commander (the ranks Garbage Scow Captian and Galactic Cook were "joke" ranks if you failed to make it to the Rookie rank).

 

Just as with the 8-bit version, the ranks are given a class number...with 1 being the highest.

 

Interestingly, the mystery (Atari) rank is given 4 additional pointers to it. I dunno why they lowered the number of ranks from 10+2 to only 8, as there's plenty of unused space (2.5k!) in the bank to hold additional GFX. But perhaps having only 5 letters to work with had something to do with that. Or, it's just because of the truncated formula used to compute it.

 

The formula used to decide the rank/class in the 2600 version is shown in section 5 of the manual.

http://steverd.com/docs-26/star_rad.txt

 

The original 8-bit formula is shown in section VII of it's manual:

http://www.sonic.net/~nbs/star-raiders/docs/vii.html

 

 

Here's a quick disassembly that shows where the GFX for the rankings exists (LD461 onward):

StarRaid.zip

Edited September 3, 2007 by Nukey Shay

[Lauren Tyler]

Thanks folks, now I'll know how well I'm doing when I play again! (I just need to find my overlays!)

[Starhopper]

Yeah you wouldn't expect the ship's cook to be ranked highest

 

Maybe he's a really good cook?

Steven Segal before he got all horky and pretentious?

[Gabriel]

Yeah you wouldn't expect the ship's cook to be ranked highest

 

Maybe he's a really good cook?

 

Or maybe he's Akito Tenkawa.

[Nukey Shay]

BTW Star Raiders stores sprite objects in 2 tables which are printed on odd/even scanlines (like Alien does). Hacking the objects becomes easier if the tables are unscrambled first.

 

I updated the disassembly to allow this. Just edit the bitmaps at the beginning of the file, and Dasm will sort it out for you.

StarRaid.zip