The Galaga no-fire-cheat mystery (2012)
jasoneckert.github.io
jasoneckert.github.io
If your into pinball then https://roanokepinball.org/ (Virginia) Limited paid parking, take Lyft to get there. You can play everything in 4-6 hours.
All three are free-play, pay per head for admission, ok to leave and come back same day.
Like I want the fully experience :)
Loved arcades back in the day
Two of them are basically just noisy f'ing bars with a lot of arcade machines you have to pay for and the third, which operates as per your description, has a lot of slightly-broken cabs and uses emulation for several of them.
But what's worse is that when you don't have to pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
One thing I really enjoy, as someone born in the late 80s and missing out on the arcade scene entirely, is experiencing the old games that I've heard so much about. I always try to hit up the local classic arcade whenever I'm out of town. It's fun to search for an arcade that finally has that game I've been hunting down to experience. For example just a month ago, I went to an arcade here in the Twin Cities for the first time, and they had both a Super Breakout (1976) and an Asteroids (1979). I've always heard about how eye-piercingly bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is, but never got to experience the real vector graphics machine until just last month. It was a treat! And Breakout has this huge, physical knob that you use to change game modes -- kchunk, kchunk. Great stuff, very memorable.
One day I'd really like to experience an original Pong :) But I think they're quite rare these days.
The shine does wear off if you keep hitting the same arcade, for sure. But it's fun to explore new ones in other cities, or new ones as they pop up in your hometown. And it's always great to bring along a friend who is new to the scene and show them the sights.
I've always heard about how eye-piercingly
bright the weapons fire in Asteroids is
But what's worse is that when you don't have to
pay for it, it turns out most arcade games really suck.
Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in particular have absolutely sublime risk vs. reward scoring mechanics. They're deadly boring IMO if you simply try and stay alive as long as you can, but if you play for score it gets interesting.
This isn't true for every game, and by the mid to late 80s games had fully transitioned into "stay alive as long as possible" quarter munchers.
Except the Sinistar game shouting at you "RUN, COWARD!"
"Wizard is about to die"
Emulators rarely capture this. My sense is that they more or less perfectly recreate the sound being output by the sound chips. But they are (understandably) not recreating the physical speaker drivers in the cabinets or other analog filtering steps (if any)
I agree with you: most of them get it badly wrong.
(But it's been years since I really looked into it)
I've gotten hundreds of emails since that post in 2012 with people who knew about the cheat in 1982, citing specific events that could not have been misconstrued.
Of course, I haven't revised the blog post to add all of them, but the one that I probably should have added was one person who noted that their mall got their first arcade the month before Christmas in 1982 and he visited it several times a week. Just after Christmas, they imported a Galaga game - and the same day they got it, the owner of the arcade told the patrons about the cheat as a sales feature (even made up a hand drawn sign of how it worked).
Perhaps it was clever marketing on the part of Midway and Namco.
Most arcades didn't have the space to keep games around forever. Games that didn't bring in the quarters got replaced by newer, shinier, flashier games.
By the mid-80s, you'd be lucky to find one Galaga machine in most arcades.
So if an older friend mentioned the trick or you happened to read that specific issue of Joystik magazine in the library, you'd have a hard time even finding a Galaga machine to try the trick.
By the late 80s, ever more expensive arcade games lost their novelty and home entertainment (game consoles/rentable VHS movies) got good enough so overcoming the inertia of staying in the comfort of your home/sofa was too great.
The convenience stores/random stores got rid of their one or two standup arcade machines, then the smaller arcades closed down.
Tedious, yes. You wouldn't want to do this trick in arcade primetime (Sat aft-night). As long as there wasn't a crowd waiting to play the game, I felt no remorse in using the trick. I also played mostly on a tabletop version of Galaga so I just sat for a mostly boring 10-15mins instead of having to stand / lean on the game for the same amount of time.
The goal was to get a double-ship by the time you did the trick.
The double-ship made playing the game after the aliens stopped shooting at you much easier since you had double the firepower.
The problem was that the double-ship also doubled your vulnerable attack surface to the remaining aliens.
The remaining aliens would also use attack patterns (diagonal from right to left towards the bottom left corner, almost horizontal, instead of mostly vertical) which increased the chance of crashing into you and ruining your chance at achieving the trick.
You didn't want to kill the two remaining aliens (which would have wasted all the time you spent avoiding the aliens), but you also didn't want to die.
You couldn't take a bathroom break either - there was no safe space to position your ship and avoid the aliens/their shots.
It wasn't a difficult trick to perform. Failed the first few times I tried it, but once you got the hang of avoiding the aliens at that point, success rate was more than 75%.
> However, if the cheat was widely known shortly after the game’s release, then it is very very likely that it was a planned cheat by someone at Namco
The article even mentions that a developer might have seen the bug through code analysis, but then reverts to "random chance or intention". Neither is completely impossible, but intentionally planting a backdoor by building what is close to a buffer overflow, without causing the game to crash? That's highly unlikely, IMHO.
I'm not even yet convinced of the "highscore theory". My best guess: The developer spotted the bug while proofreading the code, found it to be non-fatal but a bug nonetheless, and then a decision was made (by devs or management) to leave it in there because it's hard to trigger and non-fatal and the deadline was close. The highscore thing may have come as an afterthought, assuming it is even true.
So anyone watching the player would wonder why he doesn't shoot the last two enemies but just dodges them for 10 minutes.
A kid might. They might also think he’s dumb and just goofing off. Kids also might find it themselves because they’ll do weird stuff in games, imagining situations in the game world, like sparing a character and giving them a chance at redemption or something.
A lot of speedrunning tricks are found by kids with a lot of time to just goof off and do seemingly pointless stuff in games.
Most of those seemingly pointless stuff is done very intentionally.. one of the oldest tricks is to go "too fast" through a thin "wall", so you skip over it... and trying to squeeze between two polygons.
The rest is mostly seeing weird bugs and trying to recreate them in a way that helps the played... with the spread of streaming (by getting noticed and can be recrated after), this has gotten easier in years (and it's not just "i have no idea what I did, but i swear I went over that wall, and I didn't have a camera to take a literal screen shot").
The most likely discoverer is some kids, more interested with wasting time than getting high scores, seeing who can survive the longest on a single quarter. Or maybe they wanted to troll others and hog a machine as long as possible.
I suppose it could be a bug found during development/QA, deemed not worth fixing, and then leaked by those with knowledge showing off, followed by viral spread. But just typing this out it sounds more complicated than kids being kids.
I would bet money that it is not a clever developer sneaking a cheat or Easter egg into the game.
Looking at the forensics of the original ROM at the provided URL[0], the fix is nontrivial. It looks like a bug, IMHO. But if it is a bug, who stumbled upon it? I would think that if the author put that in there to get the high score all the time, it certainly is obfuscated enough, but he would run the risk of being discovered. Perhaps the cheat is obfuscated in order to sneak it through code review and not be fired by Namco?
What really supports the bug theory is that the flight pattern of the far left bees has to be altered to account for their location on the screen. This REALLY feels like a bug, because when I'm trying to alter a corner case in code, I can rarely see the second-order consequences without code coverage/fuzzing. This is a total code smell IMHO.
But again, how would someone even exploit this flaw without the ROM. Which leads me back to the intentional cheat by the programmer.
I'm legit ambivalent about this. But if I was pushed, I'd have to say it was an intentional cheat slipped into the code, because programmers were just too good back then.
TEAM CHEAT FTW.
Sigh...
A kid pushed his last coin into the slot, 30 minutes until his parents come to collect him; he will prolong this game for as long as he can.
Then of course word would spread and investigations would begin as to how to reproduce and optimize the phenomenon.
I've said that same phrase about so many games and I'm still amazed at people's ability to track these things down.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4045527-the-complete-gui...
reccomending that you practice playing games dodging not shooting and seeing how long you can live to build up your skill.
The ** is code review? Most places didn't even have version control. Version control in most game development studios was "let me copy my source files on to another 5+1/4 floppy just in case disaster happens."
If lucky to have access to a mini computer with a hard drive then you kept separate directories for backups of your code. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because your backups were taking up more than 500KB of drive space. Maybe you got SCCS that would happily destroy your work regularly if you breathed wrong. If your company was rich it had a fully paid up copy of RCS runing on the Perkin-Elmer mini computer with 1MB of RAM and a 200MB HDD hooked up to a data station that looked like it was stolen off the set of Silent Running along with a 32kbps serial cable to your ICE box plugged in to the arcade board. And you got cussed out by the high priest of IT because now your RCS directory was bigger than your backup directory. And then inevitably someone wasn't paying attention one day and did an 'rm -rf *' on the wrong directory and the version control repository for your project got erased.
Code merging on non-UNIX development was usually "give me your floppy and I'll re-type bits of code you changed in that text file into my text file and then I'll give you back a fresh copy of the file to work with." If you were both smart about it, you worked in separate files and just had one or two common files that you played hot potato with, which was the fashion back in the day. Or you had a nifty little tool that would concatenate all the files together and then deleted duplicate lines and kept only the last version of changed lines because we believed we were too manly to use real development tools but the real reason was the company was too tight fisted to pay for them. "Hard drives are for the weak and why do you programmers need the high quality DS/DD floppies from Fujitsu anyway!?! Look, I've got this little gadget I bought for you that'll punch a notch in the other corner so you can just flip the disc over and use the other side too."
> and not be fired by Namco?
Nobody would have gotten fired over that even if they had purposely put it in there. The QA team would have found it, severity would have been decided, and it would have probably be pushed to "eh, there's not enough bytes in the ROM to patch it, it doesn't crash the machine and we've just burned enough PROMs on the gang programmer that the cost of pulling the PROMs off of arcade boards, junking a few thousand ICs and doing over is too great." It is almost certain that someone on the QA team found the bug, wrote it up, it was discussed, and then WNF'd, and then a little later on, news about it leaked out.
This also assumes of course they had a QA team and it wasn't just Bob who took a smoke break between running his bare hand over the live wiring looms feeling for shorts and exposed wiring to kill a few burbling aliens.
I'm dying laughing at this, your prose is amazing an so brough me back to my childhood growing up around these nerds ;)
Love it!
IT becoming upset when the things people need to do to get work done deviates from their IT model?
Some things never change.
Developer: I need half a million in equipment.
Management: Here's your stuff.
IT: I need 50k in equipment so we can actually backup/support the new equipment the developer got so we don't lose millions in work.
Management: I'm sorry, we don't have the budget for that.
IT: We'll I'm right screwed, ain't I.
This is why I'm glad to see the old guard boy's club fading into a memory, despite the loss of skills that we may never see again as a culture. It's a mixed blessing.
However, this was great for me, as I had the keys to the games and could load up free credits on them to my heart's content before or after hours. We had Defender, Pac-man, Centipede, Galaga, and 8-10 others which, because traffic was so low, the manager encouraged that I play so people might be enticed to come in. Eventually, I noticed that one of the few regulars, a kid around 12 years old, had the ability to play of Galaga just to the point he would roll the high-score counter on a single quarter. Then he'd move over to Pac-Man and do the same.
Curious, I asked him to show me how he did it in exchange for free credits on the other machines. He demonstrated that there was a pattern on Galaga that, if you followed precisely, would allow you to cruise through each level. The first key step, of course, would be get your ship captured so that you could free it and double your firepower.
He also demonstrated that there was also a pattern on PacMan, and again, if you followed the pattern precisely, it would also allow you to cruise through each level, while maximizing points.
Over the course of a few days, I committed the patterns to memory. Then, with this new-found skill, I was able to go to other arcades around town and obtain the high score. (At that point in my life it was the absolute best feeling to see every line High Scores Screen filled with my initials).
Shortly afterwards, the arcade where I worked closed (I can tell you it was a sad day for me when the truck came to pick up all the games as I was hoping to buy one on the cheap). I then found a new job, which involved a lot of physical activity, which caused me to lose a bunch of weight, which suddenly made girls show an interest in me, which then made video games much less attractive to me... and so, I forgot the pattern.
(geez, I sound like an old man - I guess soon I'll be yelling at kids to get off my lawn ...)
> UPDATE: Jon (I won’t give you his last name) sent me an email after visiting my post. In it he sent me a link to an October 1983 special edition issue of Joystik Magazine that covers winning strategies for common arcade games of the time. In the TRICKS OF THE TRADE section near the end of the magazine, they cover the Galaga No Fire Cheat beautifully!
Page 61, Disarm The Bugs.
I wonder what fake information will be birthed out of this high pagerank.
It will fade as recency effect wears off.
https://archive.org/details/book_how_to_win_at_video_games_c...
I heard it as something like: don't kill them until they run out of shots, and then nothing will shoot at you.
BTW: Space Invaders => Galaxian => Galaga always seemed like a natural evolution to me.
Easy way to get the high score when visiting an arcade.
It was also fairly to see if the locals knew the cheat — the high scores would be unusually high.
Then the challenge was just to get on the board, especially if one player had all of the high score slots.
I remember this floating around about Mike Tyson’s Punch Out ways to beat specific fighters easily, and another for Final Fantasy 2 (US) about a special rare drop item on the moon.
As far as I know, the game is otherwise unchanged apart from the fire speed.