Does Gorf save high scores?

fatherpain

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Hi guys,
I just picked up a Gorf ur and noticed the scores all read zero on power up. Is Gorf supposed to save high scores?

Thanks
Tom
 
Hi guys,
I just picked up a Gorf ur and noticed the scores all read zero on power up. Is Gorf supposed to save high scores?

It doesn't... which is stupid, since they have all the circuitry on the board to have 1k of memory need a special interlock to write to (to avoid spurious writes on power up/down), but no battery backup, and the code clears the memory at boot.

I did start to look into doing this a year or so ago, but the code is *really* *really* convoluted (obviously compiled code rather than hand-written assembly) and you'd have to document LARGE portions of the game to find a place to insert the high score store / restore routines.

Astrocade games are some of the few I've seen that have no real 'boot sequence'. If you reset the game, the level you're playing just restarts -- it doesn't go back to attract mode. Try it in mame -- it's bizarre. It's also why you have to power-cycle to get into test mode.

One day I may get back to it, but there's not much space in the card cage to add a kit anyway.
 
Thanks Mark! It's encouraging to know someone of your caliber has looked into this. If you one day achieve success with it, I'm sure
there'd be a gorfian horde waiting to snatch a kit up. I'd snag one!

Tom
 
Thanks Mark! It's encouraging to know someone of your caliber has looked into this. If you one day achieve success with it, I'm sure
there'd be a gorfian horde waiting to snatch a kit up. I'd snag one!

Well, to be fair, "looking into it" consisted of commenting some disassembly and playing around in mame debug when on a plane -- but it looked non-trivial...

Would be nice to have a wiki site somewhere, where people could collaboratively work on commenting and understanding code, but I don't know how many people other than myself look at this kind of crap on a regular basis...
 
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