Is someone keeping tally of lives earned and lost? Or is it just estimated? I heard them talking about 100-man breaks, just curious how that's tracked in marathons.
It's easiest to track only deaths. You know how many lives you start with (3), you earn the first extra life at 8,000 points, and you earn each additional life every 14,000 points after that. So you can compute how many lives you'd have at any point threshold assuming a perfect game (no deaths). For games that do not display all extra lives on screen marathoners typically make up a huge table ahead of time to assist with tracking. When you reach a specific point threshold just reference your chart to find the total number of lives and then subtract however many lives you've lost. You can keep a rough count in your head that way.
For taking breaks usually the number of lives lost during the break is just estimated based on time away from the machine. On
Q*bert you lose a man every 15-17 seconds you are away, so roughly 4 deaths per minute. Late in the game he'll be able to take a 25-minute power nap to stave off distorted vision and hallucinations and he'll shed about 100 lives.
Q*Bert is kinda unique in that the number of extra lives that can be held in storage is absolutely huge, estimated to be over 300,000. (See
this thread for a code disassembly and computation by Don Hodges.) So thankfully there are no concerns about rolling the extra lives counter back to zero like on
Robotron or
Nibbler. The better you do on
Q*bert the first 36-40 hours or so when you're relatively fresh, the more lives you'll have in storage, so you can afford to take breaks more frequently the second night and the third day, when the going gets really rough.
The boards/discs always have the same layout too - at what round/level does that start?
Each level has four rounds. The current level number and round number are displayed at the upper-right of the screen. I'm not a
Q*bert expert but I believe level 9 just repeats at some point, so you see the same four rounds for level 9 over and over again.