Maximun # of spiders possible in Millipede?

[godzillajoe]

Anyone know? Been playing it a lot lately and curious if there's a set limit.

 

For some reason I think I got 6 way back when but that seems too high.

 

Perhaps 4?

[+FujiSkunk]

I've definitely seen five.

[godzillajoe]

Gotta say, it's one hell of a game. Does anything else on the 2600 come close to that frantic pace?

 

Yar's Revenge is pretty crazy at the higher levels mostly because of the pulsing music which hypnotizes you but there's lots of hiding and waiting as opposed to running for your life like in Millipede.

[SeaGtGruff]

Anyone know? Been playing it a lot lately and curious if there's a set limit.

 

For some reason I think I got 6 way back when but that seems too high.

 

Perhaps 4?

I don't think six is too high. Once you get past 200,000 or 300,000, there is so much going on that sometimes one of the sprites will pause! For example, a mosquito will be zig-zagging down the screen and then stop where it is, in mid-flight, then after after a while (possibly after some of the other sprites move offscreen), it will resume its flight.

 

This has got to be one of my all-time favorite 2600 games. I love it at the higher levels when the pace is so intense (which just makes it all the more exciting when you just barely avoid colliding with something), and I especially love the bonus(?) rounds when all of the different kinds of bugs start falling like crazy-- you can really rack up the points, possibly earning two extra lives in one bonus round! The sound effects are great, too.

 

Michael Rideout

[RJ]

IIRC in an article I read on the arcade version it can have 9, but I suppose due to the 2600 limitations it's less than that.

[ForceInfinity]

Gotta say, it's one hell of a game. Does anything else on the 2600 come close to that frantic pace?

 

Yar's Revenge is pretty crazy at the higher levels mostly because of the pulsing music which hypnotizes you but there's lots of hiding and waiting as opposed to running for your life like in Millipede.

 

Odd, I never found Yar's Revenge to *ever* be that crazy considering that supposedly on the hardest difficutly level, I could flip the score over like crazy with just some simple timing. Got bored and shut the game off after about 13 mil or so

[godzillajoe]

Yar's is more tense than frantic like Millipede where 100 things happen at once.

 

What is the hardest Yar's Revenge game?

 

Game 6 with both difficulty switches on 'A' or am I remembering incorrectly?

[godzillajoe]

So any of you coding whizzes know how I find this out in Stella using the debugger?

 

I'm sorta blindly trying stuff and all I've managed so far is to screw up some graphics

 

Back in the day I could give myself 255 guys in some C= 64 games by finding where they store the value and changing it.

 

But that was a loooong time ago

[supercat]

So any of you coding whizzes know how I find this out in Stella using the debugger?

 

Hacking the game for a starting score of 300,000 causes five spiders to appear very quickly; I don't see any more than five.

[Urchlay]

So any of you coding whizzes know how I find this out in Stella using the debugger?

 

It looks like the score is stored in BCD at location $E0. If you start a game, then change locations $E0-$E2 to $99 $00 $00, you'll start at 990,000 points and see lots of spiders... I haven't been able to stay alive long enough to see 5 spiders though.

 

I haven't yet found the lives counter or traced the code to find where collisions are checked, but these are two things you can do to keep yourself alive long enough to see the spiders dance around... set the lives counter to $FF, or else NOP out the section of code that checks to see if you've been killed.

[godzillajoe]

Cool! Thanks! I didn't realize they kept the score that way. I was looking for 30,000 in hex. No wonder I couldn't find it.

 

Anyway, I bumped up the score to 990,000 and managed to stay alive long enough to see that 5 is the max # of spiders.

 

If you roll the score back to zero you're back down to just 2, so the game actually gets EASIER

 

Not like there's a chance in hell anyone could roll Millipede without cheating.

 

Next up, starting The Challenge of Nexar at Level 98 to see if it has an ending.

 

I'm gonna have a lot of fun with the debugger!

[Urchlay]

Anyway, I bumped up the score to 990,000 and managed to stay alive long enough to see that 5 is the max # of spiders.

 

You're a better Millipede player than I'll ever be

[godzillajoe]

Ha. I did spend a couple of days trying it the hard way so I have more practice.

[Godzilla]

for intense 2600-ness, some of the best imho, are: stargate later levels, space master x-7, cosmic ark, dragonfire later levels, fast food/taz, entombed and of course kaboom :-) I prefer cent/mili on the 5200, they get even crazier imho but the tball keeps it smooooth. I still want someone to find a way to use 2600 tball in REAL tball mode on milipede like atari promised back in the day.

[BrianC]

I wonder what the max number of spiders in the GCC proto of Millipede is.

[Nukey Shay]

Cool! Thanks! I didn't realize they kept the score that way. I was looking for 30,000 in hex. No wonder I couldn't find it.

 

Most games use BCD scoring. It's much easier to update, and also to display the digit gfx (just split each score byte in half and use each "nybble" as lookup table offsets). So most scoring routines can be found quickly by searching for the SED opcode (which sets up BCD mode prior to the update). Reading through the routine, you might find the ram location used to hold the number of lives as well (if the game you are looking through awards lives at certian score intervals).

[godzillajoe]

I wonder what the max number of spiders in the GCC proto of Millipede is.

 

Seems to be only 2. I started with 900,000 points and it doesn't seem any harder than starting at 0

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Most games use BCD scoring. It's much easier to update, and also to display the digit gfx (just split each score byte in half and use each "nybble" as lookup table offsets). So most scoring routines can be found quickly by searching for the SED opcode (which sets up BCD mode prior to the update). Reading through the routine, you might find the ram location used to hold the number of lives as well (if the game you are looking through awards lives at certian score intervals).

Yup. Searching for SED to find the score and lives is almost always the very first step when I try to disassemble a game.

 

But some games are really tricky (e.g. River Raid). Instead of increasing a score variable, they directly increase the pointers to the digit gfx.