Things Begin to Heat Up...
Shortly after the MAGFest event, another great marathon player, David Gomez out of Texas, topped Ken's Robotron score while streaming on TwitchTV. David's 125 million point game was watched by hundreds of stoked enthusiasts, once again thanks to Jace Hall and his LeetLounge feed.
The fact that there were numerous Robotron players stepping up to play true marathon games quickly got the attention of Larry DeMar, original VidKidz programmer and one of the two people (along with Eugene Jarvis) that created the game. Larry was so inspired by the enthusiasm of current Robotron marathon players and the discovery of the 100 million point "Goldilocks Affect" that he dug out his old developer kit and created an updated set of ROMs that included the extra scoring digit AND tracked the actual number of men a player has saved up (the original code of the game stored up to 255 extra men, but due to space limitations on the screen, only showed up to 7).
This new ROMset, labeled the Tie-Die ROMs, is currently in beta testing (I am very proud to have been asked to test out these ROMs on some long games) and should be publicly released in the coming year. Some folks were asking in my last post why my top score in the All Time Robotron Heroes list was 9,999,999 (instead of9,999,975 - traditionally highest score possible on the leader board readout). When using the new Tie-Die ROM set, if a player scored over 10,000,000 points, the score will read as 9,999,999 on the leader board. This is because the leader board can only track up to 7 digits, even though the in-game score readout can now read 8 digits. So when you see 9,999,999 points on the leader board for a machine that is using these new ROMs, the player scored at least 10,000,000 points (but quite possible much more).....