Garegga counterstop possible, but probably not really

[ptoing]

OK, I dunno if anyone did this before, because I was talking with Plasmo about Kamui's Z score at stunfest and we were wondering what comes after. I fiddled around a bit with MAME and Cheatengine and came to the conclusion that the score in Garegga is stored in 2 values.

One which goes up to 65535 and one which goes up to 976. After A-Z it goes through a-z and then ! and finally ?

Counterstop happens at ?,999,990 = 63,999,990 points.

In the highscore table it goes through numbers again at some point, but those are then red instead of white, tho I did not look further into this, I guess it goes through the symbols in the order of what you can enter as initials. \o/

Just checked for fun. The counterstop shows on the hiscore table as 999,990. I guess there is a space in front of it

[shmuppyLove]

Well in theory doesn't every game have a counterstop value at some point?

I think the only "problem" is when the game designers don't anticipate the possibility of someone maxing out whatever value the maximum possible score is, either through plain short-sightedness (e.g. bosses spawning infinite popcorn and not timing out or something), or because there was a 'glitch' or exploit found at some later point (like the Pink Sweets infinite lives).

So really it's more down to how possible a counterstop is, given a finite set of scoring opportunities.

Design is law.

Play more Nightmare in the Dark.

[Giest118]

Well in theory doesn't every game have a counterstop value at some point?

If not a counterstop, then an overflow. Which has more or less the same meaning: the score got too large for the game to keep track of.

And when it is actually possible to achieve in gameplay, it is indeed some kind of oversight. Another example is MushiFutari Ultra, which might not even be a miscalculation so much as one of the programmers noticing it was possible and thinking "... Well I could set aside another byte or two of memory to store this number but... aw fuck it, nobody's actually gonna do this, I mean look at this fucking game." And then a few people did it anyway. :V

[trap15]

Futari's is the closest 'round' value to the limit of a 32-bit integer. I don't think it's a "eh, too much work" as much as "nah, no one will ever do this".

And yes, every game either has a counter-stop or a roll-over at some point, so the question becomes less of "is it technically possible" to "is it effectively possible". For most games, the answer is no.

[Ed Oscuro]

(insert class of games with finite scoring possibilities well below the counterstop / overflow point)

[rjosal]

If, for example, the score in a Java game was tracked in a BigInteger, the maximum score would not be an attribute of the game, but the [VM on the] hardware it runs on. I haven't tested it though.

[Plasmo]

Thanks for checking ptoing. So Kamui is going for the "a" score then. 63mill is definitely far from possible, the maximum is around 40-43mill (Extended mode of course).

[ptoing]

Then something like e-g or so is perhaps possible.

And yeah, true, every game probably has a counterstop value, tho I am sure you could code a score in a way that you just break the display of the score up into bits, like millions. That way you probably would still run into a theoretical counterstop but it would be stupidly high. The other problem would be how to display very very long scores.

In the case of Cave and stuff like Futari Ultra I wonder if it would not be possible to do a bit of maths to figure out what could be done. I mean they know how many enemies are in a stage, how many gems you can get from one enemy and so on, so they could at least have done some approximation and set the possible score higher, no?

Ed: Yeah I am sure there are plenty of shmups which have finite (all of them really) as well as more rigid (those without chipdamage and/or complex scoring systems) possible scores. One prime example is something like Guxt, where when you play score attack, where you only have 1 life, thus can not do the stupid as hell checkpoint milking, chip damage not giving points, and there being only a couple of scoring tricks, the score indeed is very finite and reaching a perfect score in some of those games probably is not too hard with a bit of dedication.

[Special World]

I don't know why more games don't do their scoring like Garrega. Is it really that difficult to have numbers overflow into letters? Seems like a great failsafe for any arcade game.

[DrInfy]

I don't know why more games don't do their scoring like Garrega. Is it really that difficult to have numbers overflow into letters? Seems like a great failsafe for any arcade game.

I don't know why someone thought it was a great idea to use letters in place of numbers...
Most people probably don't appreciate their scores represented with cryptic symbols or letters, just a wild guess.

[danbo]

it might be different for players whose first language isnt english but i think most people like the letters.

i like when shmups group the digits as different colours but iirc the only game i remember doing that is giga wing?

[trap15]

I like DFKBL/AkaiKatana/SDOJs thing of grouping by size. the first 4 digits are smaller than the next 4, which are smaller than the next 4. Really aesthetically pleasing.

[ptoing]

I don't think that it has to do whether your first language is not English. Using numbers as letters does not happen outside of stuff like hexadecimal counting which is pretty much only used in computer science.

If you would give players the choice between score being shown as i.e. 23000000, 23,000,000 or N,000,000, I am pretty sure you would get a strong, if not unanimous vote for 23,000,000. Using numbers is nothing but a fudge to overcome back hud design or weird code restrictions. Instead of writing 1P, 2P and TOP, they could have made 3 extra graphics which save space and would allow for more digits to be displayed in a readable fashion.

I also like when shmups do something to highlight numbergroups, be it millions, billions, or asian concepts like man, oku and so on. There are a few shmups that do this in different ways, such as newer Cave games using different sized numbers for example, or some games using commas between the groups.

[Special World]

I don't know why more games don't do their scoring like Garrega. Is it really that difficult to have numbers overflow into letters? Seems like a great failsafe for any arcade game.

I don't know why someone thought it was a great idea to use letters in place of numbers...
Most people probably don't appreciate their scores represented with cryptic symbols or letters, just a wild guess.

What I mean is - say you think the hypothetical scoring limit of your game is 500 points. Just to make sure that people won't hit it, you make your point limit 999. But, to be extra sure, why not program it so that if you hit 999, it overflows into A00? I can understand why you wouldn't want to just put extra number places. It would make the game look weird - why are there spaces for a ton of different numbers when players are only reaching 500 points? But overflowing it into letters allows for a failsafe in case players manage to exceed your expectations.

Just seems like a good idea to me.

[ptoing]

No, it's still a fudge around bad interface design. I doubt that Yagawa did not know that 10+ mil points was possible in his games and just did it as a failsafe. I am not saying he is the sole person responsible for it, I do not know who set up the badly layed out HUD in Garegga and the other games he made.

[Meseki]

No, it's still a fudge around bad interface design. I doubt that Yagawa did not know that 10+ mil points was possible in his games and just did it as a failsafe. I am not saying he is the sole person responsible for it, I do not know who set up the badly layed out HUD in Garegga and the other games he made.

Considering that 10+ million scores don't show up the same way on the high score board (on the arcade version), rolling over to A, B, etc. probably was a side effect of how they programmed the score display; it probably just displayed the next character in the font when a digit carried over, and since there wasn't any digit above millions, it didn't reset/decrease the value in the millions place when it exceeded 9.

[ptoing]

If you check the TEXT TEST thing in Garegga you can see this is not the case. There are some other symbols in the in the small font between upper and lower case letters, and the ! and ? do not follow the lowercase letters directly.

Same goes for the font in the score display, in which the letters come last and there is a lot of other stuff between the numbers and letters. Why the stuff is how it is is because of fudging and nothing else. You can not tell me that it would have been a problem to at least make sure to make the stuff show up the same on the hiscore table as it does in game.

It is just inconsistent, nothing else, but you can see some effort was put into it, like how it goes into numbers again when going quite high but then the numbers are red instead of white. But at some point it looked like he just did not care enough. And I still maintain that all this would be a total non issue if the HUD would be better designed. No one needs to see the name of the level or the boss all the time you fight them. Level names could be displayed between levels when you get the fadeovers, and bosses could have warning messages before they appear which have their names. And then it would have been no problem whatsoever to move the text a few pixels up, does not have to touch the top of the screen, and do the rest of the layout like Dodonpachi and other Cave games or even older Toaplan games. Bam, enough space for 8 numbers, no problem at all.

[Udderdude]

He was too busy adding characters from his other games to worry about that .. :3

[ptoing]

His? Did Yagawa work on The Mahou games?

[THE]

Maybe the reason for this letter score is that he didn't know how to program 32 bit division on the 68k for converting the DWORD number to ASCII? The 68k can't do it natively, it needs to be manually programmed in assembly.

[ptoing]

He is not using DWORD for the score at all. He is using unsigned WORD to count most recent 65535 points and then another value to see how often you got 65535 points. I guess to add those up it would need DWORD. But you do not need that at all. You can happily display any length of score you want without having that actual number in code anywhere. So he could have coded it differently and have gotten an 8 digit score without using DWORD at all.

And if what you say is the case, that still makes it a fudge. I am sure in that case he could have asked some other coders if they knew how to approach it or read up on the topic a bit. I am sure there were books on 68k asm back in 95 or whenever he coded it.

[trap15]

He is not using DWORD for the score at all. He is using unsigned WORD to count most recent 65535 points and then another value to see how often you got 65535 points.

That's called a dword

I'm pretty sure he just didn't anticipate getting more than 10M, but added that as a failsafe.
Just like in Bakraid he didn't anticipate people getting scores higher than 64M, so they had to re-do the HUD and increase the counterstop.

[ptoing]

coding nomenclature = confusing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_(computer_science)