What's your score in Galaga?

[AE35]

Hey!

I just got 177k on Galaga, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I know that someone will be able to get a gazillion, and that's OK!

So let me hear..what's your score? and NOT NOT on fast-fire hack. That is
an abomination!..an abomination of all that is holy

They move really fast around level 20...they REALLY want to get you! The bottom
is very crowded with shots and aliens, but it's great when you get in the zone
and just keep sliding between shots! Not to mention the beers and the
Smirnoff

[leapinlew]

Hey! Congrats on your score -

Galaga is one of my favorite games. On the fast firing Class of 1981 machines I can play till I want to quit. It's kind of fun being able to whip up like that...

On the regular version, my high game is near 400k. I can usually get to the point where the challenge stages start repeating. The real challenge is after level 10 when you lose your double ship is trying to get a double ship again without losing too many lives. I can't do well with just a single guy.

Great game!

[AE35]

I had hoped for a poster with a lesser score than me

Well, I recently moved away from going dual, or I only do it in the beginning!

Maybe we should talk tactics!

[destructor]

For tactics go to MARP and watch replays:
http://marp.retrogames.com/index.cgi?mode=search&short=^galaga$
I see highest score is over 5mln but old MAME version was used for recording.
Score from 2nd (almost 4mln) was recorded using wolfmameplus101, you can watch it without problems.

Trick (banned on MARP) for this game is:

BANNED TECHNIQUE : making the enemies stop shooting completely. Way to do that : on the first stage, kill everything but the two bees in the bottom left corner ; then just wait, dodging the bees' shots, until the bee no longer drops any shots towards you ; after the bees stop firing, let it pass for 5 more trips or so and then kill them ; for the rest of the game, the enemies will not drop shots. It will take approximately 15 minutes for the bees to quit shooting at you.

[leapinlew]

The no-shoot trick I never knew about till Mame. The version of Galaga on my cabinet doesn't allow this.

[destructor]

I see that on clones trick doesn't work. It works on Namco Revision B .

[Xam]

I avg around 100-120k on that game. My best is around the 150k mark.

I had a buddy that used to shred me on that game...bad score for him was around 300k.


Xam

[CheffoJeffo]

I can go about 120K without the noshoot trick ... with the trick I get bored.

Cheers.

[BamBam]

I had hoped for a poster with a lesser score than me

Well, I recently moved away from going dual, or I only do it in the beginning!

Maybe we should talk tactics!

My meager 107,000 may be of assisatnce to you 

[shardian]

I am most proud of my 145,000 on a jakks handheld without using a double ship. I tend to do better without the extra ship...it just costs me a life. I still haven't got around to playing galaga on real controls.

[Buddabing]

Typically in the arcade I'll score 400K or so. High score about 1.2 mill. I don't have the patience to do the "no shoot" trick.

Tips:

1) Kill the red guys first, then the edge yellow guys.
2) Get one doubleship at your first opportunity and when you lose one half, don't get another one. IMO doubleships are very difficult to maintain after stage 10 or so.
3) Learn the three entrance patterns and where to move to get the most hits.
4) Learn the challenging stages.

It helps to have a real machine to play on at home.


 

[erictrumpet]

Wow I was expecting to read scores in the millions. I feel like Superman with my high score of 303,010.

I only broke 300k (and just barely) once, but I've topped 200k several times, and 150k pretty much every game. I use no hacks or cheats, just good old-fashioned shootin' and dodgin'. I get the double ships on Stage 1 and hang onto them as long as I can.

The secret to a high score in Galaga is to get a perfect score on every Challenging Stage. If you calculate the difference between getting 39 and 40 bad guys, it's staggering. You lose the points for that one guy, plus you lose the little bonus for getting all the guys in that particular wave, and of course you lose out on the perfect bonus for getting all 40.

My MAME says I've played Galaga 190 times since the last install which was about 2 years ago. 190 doesn't seem like a lot for some reason. That would be only $47.50 in quarters back in the day. But at 10 minutes per game (and a 200k+ game takes longer than 10 minutes I think), that's over 31 hours. Wow.

EDIT: Just saw Buddabing's post above. High score 1.2 mil, typical 400k. That's pretty impressive. His tips are good advice. However, when I lose double ships I get them back as soon as possible. I don't shoot the capture aliens, and when there are only 1-2 guys left, I allow capture and get the double ships back. Maintaining them is tough, yes, but with them you can better thin out the attack waves at the beginning of each stage, and without them it is pretty much hopelessly impossible to get perfect Challenging Stages which are where you can get big points.

Eric.

[Texasmame]

I had a friend who could play that forever back in the day but Galaga never really held my interest.  I just get bored with it - kinda like Pac-Man and his bretheren.

I know it's in excess of 100,000 before I say, "what's the point of this?" and stop. 

[Buddabing]

Eventually, the bonus for clearing one of the challenging stage groups climbs to 3000 points. So, if you can get two or three of those you're well on your way to get your next extra man, even if you don't get the perfect.

I hardly ever get perfects without a doubleship. If I do, it's mostly on the scorpion one. (stage 15)

[NOP]

BANNED TECHNIQUE : making the enemies stop shooting completely. Way to do that : on the first stage, kill everything but the two bees in the bottom left corner ; then just wait, dodging the bees' shots, until the bee no longer drops any shots towards you ; after the bees stop firing, let it pass for 5 more trips or so and then kill them ; for the rest of the game, the enemies will not drop shots. It will take approximately 15 minutes for the bees to quit shooting at you.

FYI: you only need ONE of the leftmost bottom bees for the trick to work.  I did this (again) just a couple months ago and tried to keep a mental count of how many times the bee has to divebomb you before it stops shooting.  It makes sense that it would be 255 times, and my count was certainly pretty close to that.  More scientific studies must be done! 

-jeff!

[WareWolF]

The game also crashes at level 255 when you do this cheat I think... used to do it in the arcade all the time people would get really pissed watching you not shoot the alien for 15 mins if they wanted to play... of course once they saw what happens then they were the one playing galaga for 1-1/2 hrs the next day.

[AtomSmasher]

My high is around 336k, I generally get over 250k each game, which I feel pretty good about now

[Buddabing]

I played a game in honor of this thread tonight. 225k, suckage!

That's what happens when you don't play for two months.

[AE35]

WOOT!!!

New hiscore: 226.000 !

That's ok, right??

Man, I love that game!!! The graphics, the sounds..everything.

By the way, I went back to trying to get doubleship no matter what!

[RetroBorg]

The wife and I have a great rivalry on this game and at one stage she owned all the top five scores but not anymore. 

Me 313,280

Wife 290,790

I do screen snaps of all the high score screens and display them in mamewah, so I can concentrate on the games I'm not house champ at.

[DarkDraco]

with the fast shoot hack i can beat it while sleeping, with the normal double shot i average 400-500k. pretty much after like level 20 it doesnt get any harder and the levels kinda repeat. so it just a matter of when you start getting tired of play and start wearing down that you mess up and die

[modessitt]

I have a customer who has an original Galaga dedicated with the dip switch set for rapid-fire (which allows about 2 or 3 shots on the screen at once) and doesn't allow a score above six figures.

When I was there working on some other games, he had a double ship, tons of free guys and was over 500,000 points.

Had to come back a few days later and noticed the high score was 999,990.  Wonder how long that took?  And he wasn't using the no-shoot trick either.

[leapinlew]

I have a customer who has an original Galaga dedicated with the dip switch set for rapid-fire (which allows about 2 or 3 shots on the screen at once) and doesn't allow a score above six figures.

When I was there working on some other games, he had a double ship, tons of free guys and was over 500,000 points.

Had to come back a few days later and noticed the high score was 999,990.  Wonder how long that took?  And he wasn't using the no-shoot trick either.

It took approximately 2-3 hours.

As for the rapid-fire - is that a dip switch setting or a hack? I was under the impression it took a special IC chip on original Galaga's.

I'm not sure if player 2 allows scoring past 999,999 but it has 1 more digit than the player 1 side.

[sez]

1.28 million at Enfield Tenpin Bowling, 1984 on a Galaga upright.

One of the best days of my life.

[RayB]

As for the rapid-fire - is that a dip switch setting or a hack? I was under the impression it took a special IC chip on original Galaga's.

It's a hack.

[mccoy178]

307k is my high score.  I love it with the leaf switch.  I play it with the micros at the bar and I don't like it as much.

QUESTIONS:  Somehow, I lost the ability to have the high scores with the initials.  I only have the high score at the top.  How can I get that back?  Is that a mame version issue?  I hate always having to shoot for the top.  Also, I have mine set to extramen at 20, 70k, 140k and so on.  Will I lose my high score if I go back to the original 20k 60k?  Any help on these issues would be appreciated.

[modessitt]

It appears I was wrong,and it does not have the rapid fire chip, just the stuttered firing of two bullets at once.

Just found out that while player 1 only has 6 digits in their score, player 2 has seven digits, allowing scores over a million.  Will have to tell them when I see them later this week. Play 2 player, kill off player 1, and have fun!

[Buddabing]

I played the Ms Pac-Man/Galaga reunion cabinet this past weekend.

I didn't like it, the joystick was too stiff. I like the loosey-goosey leaf switches.

I barely got 300,000. 

@McCoy: High scores are not saved in Galaga (in MAME) unless you use state saves or the hiscore.dat modification.

[(+_+)]

The last time I played a real one was at LaGuardia airport in NY before my flight back to Montreal. I hadn't played in a long while and still manged to get 999,925. Don't quote me on the last 2 digits since I can't remember for sure, but I did try to cap the high score as close to a million as possible. I believe it was set at 30,000 for the first free man and 70,000 thereafter. No Stop firing trick was used. If I remember correctly, you had to save one ship and then wait on the far right until the guy stopped firing. I remember it taking far to long (maybe 20 minutes). I personally prefered the Joust teradactyl trick.

[NOP]

FWIW, according to:
http://www.arcadeshop.com/galaga/galaga.htm  (a fantastic galaga repair site BTW)

here's the technical explanation of the player 1's score having less digits than player 2:

"You may have read about the Galaga 1,000,000 point bug. The bug is usually described as follows: The "Player-1" score counter in Galaga is 6 digits, but the "Player-2" counter is 7 digits. Therefore, most good players start a 2-player game and play exclusively on the Player-2 side so their score won't "roll over" at 999,990. So what is the real truth to this? The truth is that Galaga really doesn't have a limit on either the Player-1 or Player-2 scores at all. It does have a 6 digit limit on displaying the high score, comparing against the high score, and on how large of scores can be saved in the high score table. So why does it appear the player-2 counter is larger than the player-1 counter? The answer is because the player-1 score occupies the first 6 visible columns of the screen display. The word "visible" is very important here. When the player-1 score rolls over from 999,999 to 1,000,000 the 7th digit is actually stored in the video ram, however, that column of video ram is not displayed because it is off the screen and supressed during video blanking time. [Sort of like column -1. There are 4 columns total that are never displayed]. When the player-2 score "rolls over", the 7th digit is in a visible place on the screen, hence you see the score. It should be noted that neither of the scores are limited, if they were to roll to an 8th digit, or 9th digit, they would continue to be displayed. The limits come into play when comparing against the high score, displaying the high score and at the end of a game when the storing the top 5 high scores. These limits are all 6 digits, maximum score 999,990 (the last digit is always 0). Unlike other more typical games, the Galaga software does not maintain seperate CPU variables for the two player's scores, instead it relies only on what is stored in Video RAM. When it manipulates the score in Video RAM, it is treats the number as an unbounded string of characters. [there are special checks to supress leading zeroes]. Most other games will have a separate CPU RAM copy of the score, which gets displayed on the screen as needed. Typically in these types of games, the largest score is determined by how many bytes the programmer allocated to hold the score (usually 2 or 3 bytes, usually stored in BCD, and usually does not include the trailing 0)."

[galagamaster]

i got 3 millon   

[UFO]

One thing about this game, which I think is only particular to this game, is the fact that when two players play, player one can have a "Game Over" (because of the dual ships) situation before the second player has had a chance to even fire a shot.

I don't know any other game that does this...

Well done Galaga Master on 3 million - my best is about 150,000!

 

[Malenko]

As for the rapid-fire - is that a dip switch setting or a hack? I was under the impression it took a special IC chip on original Galaga's.

The extra IC board just allowed you to hold the fire button down and it'll autofire the next shot.

[kixfan]

WOW!   A 6 year old thread!

Now that's got to be a record!

Average Galaga score: 275k

[PL1]

WOW!   A 6 year old thread!

Now that's got to be a record!

Not even close, Kixfan.

There was an almost 8 year bump here in Artwork today and Ken Layton did a 9 year, 2 week bump here.   


Scott

[CraftyMech]

Well since the thread has been brought back to life however fleetingly, I'll add my scores of ~750K for a straight up game, and 1.5 mil with the no-shoot trick. One of my favorite games.

[Malenko]

WOW!   A 6 year old thread!

Now that's got to be a record!

Not even close, Kixfan.

There was an almost 8 year bump here in Artwork today and Ken Layton did a 9 year, 2 week bump here.   


Scott

naw the record was in the BST section, someone bumped a 12 year old thread.

[yotsuya]

Bumping an old thread like this isn't as funny as when someone asks if something is still for sale even though Bush was still president the last time the OP logged in.

[JDFan]

Bumping an old thread like this isn't as funny as when someone asks if something is still for sale even though Bush was still president the last time the OP logged in.

Sometimes with the prices people want for their used things it takes that long and longer for the price to actually get any interest !!