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Crystal Quest Scoreboard

Voice Card  -  Volume 10  -  John Card Number 7  -  Mon, Oct 30, 1989 9:47 PM







As most of you know, I am a Crystal Quest addict (current high score 7140275, wave 64). Recently I have been playing the game with the multifinder active. For some reason this causes Crystal Quest to insert "(Anonymous)" for my name every time I reach a new high score. This ruins an otherwise breathtaking TOP 30 Scoreboard!

So I found a way to fix it. I figured out where and how the scores are stored, and with that information and a program like RESEDIT, it is possible to repair the scoreboard. Of course I do not find it necessary to edit my scores, but perhaps a lesser player, like Paul, may find such an option tempting. Here's the info:

The scores are stored in a resource called HIGH. ID=1 stores the top 30 scores and ID=2 stores today's top 9 scores. In both cases the record structure is the same.

Each score is stored as a record of 30 bytes. Thus ID=1 has a total of 900 bytes, while ID=2 has 270 bytes (with a score of zero marking the end of the list when there are less than nine scores). Each record is defined as followed:

Bytes    Description

01-04    Score (in hex)
05-10    All zeroes
11-12    Score ID
13-13    Length of name in chars
14-28    Name (ASCII, max=15)
29-30    Number of Waves

Every score is given an ID number. The ID number of the most recently played game is stored in a separate resource (HIID), and that number is incremented by 2 each time a game is played. By comparing each score's ID with the number stored in HIID, the program can figure out which score to underline. The date of the last game played is stored in yet another resource (DATE) so that the program can figure out when to wipe the Top Nine scoreboard.

From this we can deduce the following bit of Crystal Quest Trivia: the most number of waves possible (before the program breaks down) is 65,535 and the highest possible score is 4,294,967,295 (I have a ways yet to go)!

I was also able to determine that I have played 253 games since I first broke 5 million a year ago. So at that rate I can expect to spend about 4 days out of every year chasing crystals.




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