I'd like to commet on Iur Dhurin's description he put under his nibbler score when he asked if Phil used a cheat to get his score of almost 10M pts. I don't know enough about the game, but can tell you that scores on this game range into the hundreds of millions of points with a 16M on Mark Longridges page and the world record being just over 1B (yes billion) pts. The story is in the TG book of world records explaining the different attempts Tim McVey did before he finally reached the first Billion on any video game.

Regards, Steve Krogman

-- stephen krogman (skrogman@concentric.net), December 01, 1999

Answers

Steve, it sounds like you didn't watch Phil Lamat's INP file. He's clearing screens before he even eats all the objects. *AND* Iur Dhurin does eat every object on each screen, *AND* he's using the same version of mame (version 34).

Iur Dhurin also uses a stalling technique I saw in the arcades, by hitting a wall to stall the nibbler. Phil never seems to need to do that.

It's also possible that Nibbler is running at the wrong speed, I'm not certain.

-- Mark Longridge (cubeman@iname.com), December 01, 1999.

I used to play to this game a lot some months ago and made a wide variety of different scores on different machines : about 700000 pts on a 486 66MHz and only 100000 points on a P III 500 MHz. So, I think this game is sensitive to the speed of the computer and that's why we can see low scores and very high scores. I definitely abandoned when Phil made his 10 M score, but I know Phil uses an old and slow computer. This is probably an explanation for his other high scores which trigger off some recent discussions...

-- lagavulin (darre@club-internet.fr), December 01, 1999.

Also Steve, the 16 million point score on my page was never verified by an INP file.

-- Mark Longridge (cubeman@iname.com), December 01, 1999.

Mark, Phil's clearing screens - some, not all ! - before he even eats all the objects, that's right. But I did too. In some stages ( quite rare, fortunately ), screen was automatically ended without reason. I never understood why.

-- lagavulin (darre@club-internet.fr), December 01, 1999.

I would have liked this game in a previous life. Actually, I played a few quite similar ones on the Commodore 64. Anyway, all I'm trying to get at is that I don't feel like testing the following, but it seems to me that if you eat (at least) a certain number of objects before the timer reaches 900, you automatically advance to the next wave.

Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), December 01, 1999.

Hmmm...we have the evidence through Mr. Lagavulin's testimony. Now, should we ask if checking of framerates to ensure equal play between MARPers is possibly illegal in France? Aha! Then that would explain it all!

The saga continues...

JoustGod

-- JoustGod (pinballwiz1@msn.com), December 02, 1999.

lagavulin....ALL DAMN games are sensitive to speed, emulated or not !!! But that's not a justification for Lamat (and others) behaviuor....and scores....
As I posted time ago, I showed that what Lamat did could be done with my 200Mhz PC slowered down to 50 Mhz, not 166 !!!

Cicca (getting tired of howling.....)

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), December 02, 1999.

For you , Cicca, slow is slowering : I know all of you are working on informatic but this is not my case ; my pc was bought in 1995 (before the pentium era) and for the moment I have nore the wish either the money to change it ; one year ago I was one of the first to speak about speed problems on the board , but nobody answered me at this occasion. So now I'm fed up of beeing howled at, and guys like mister "GrouseGod" should come back to play instead of uttering racist sentences against my country

About nibbler : the "non all points eaten" on certain levels is probably an emulation default (elsewhere my 9M game ends by a bug) ; concerning the game there is about a dozen of different mazes , not more ; when I played this game I elaborated ways for each maze and the world record of 1 billion Steve speaked about doesn't surprise me : after level 20 it's always the same mazes and you have one more live each 4 waves, so the only difficulty is to fight the tiredness ! A precision : there is a difference between nibbler and nibblera after level 32 : when you die, you need to restart the level from the beginning on nibblera ; this is not the case in nibbler (just to prevent new grouse howlings)

Phil

-- phil (plamat@club-internet.fr), December 02, 1999.