Is there a way to get more than 31 pieces of candy in E.T.?

[+Random Terrain]

Has anyone figured out a guaranteed way to get more than 31 pieces of candy? The following page says:

 

http://www.digitpress.com/eastereggs/26et.htm

Candy - on rare occasions a round will offer more than 31 candy pieces. If you collect more than the 31 (which the manual says isn’t possible) the programmer’s initials will appear in the score counter, along with some strange graphic symbols, in the following round. E.T. will also turn black. {Jeff Adkins} Note- this wasn’t Warshaw's planned method to revealing his initials! The candies appear at 17 second intervals (the formula in the code is 16*64/60).

 

I got black E.T. back when the game was new, but it never happened again. I played the crap out of the game from a little before Christmas of 1982 until at least the summer of 1983. E.T. got less attention once I started making my own games on the VIC-20. Anyway, I'm making some new E.T. YouTube videos since the crappy LiveVideo players keep playing automatically no matter what I do to stop them.

 

Since I'm also redoing the E.T. Easter Eggs video, I thought it would be nice to add black E.T too. Is it really a rare, random occurrence or is there some trick, like giving Elliott a certain number of candy pieces at a time or eating a certain number of candy pieces or something like that. If nothing else, does anybody know how to hack the ROM to start the game with more than 31 candy pieces so I can get this video finished?

 

 

Thanks.

[+Random Terrain]

In case anyone wants to know, I figured it out. It seems 32 pieces does not make E.T. black. You need 33. (I knew it! HSW must work for the Illuminati!)

 

 

This is What I Did to Get Ninja E.T. the Easy Way:

 

Fired up Stella, started E.T., selected game 3 to make it easier, collected the candy until it was gone (gave it all to Elliott). I collected 15 pieces this time around. I subtracted 15 from 33, so that left 18. That's an easy number to deal with. All I had to do was get 9 pieces of candy twice. I opened the debugger (` key above Tab) and went over to the area that looks like this:

 

 

At d0: down and 2 over, I changed 0a to 9a, hit the enter key, and went back to the game. Gave the 9 pieces of candy to Elliott, then went back to the debugger to do the same thing. Returned to the game and gave Elliott 9 more candy pieces. I phoned home, went to the forest, and got picked up by the ship to end the round. Hit the fire button to start the next round and I had ninja E.T. and a messed up energy count. After making ninja E.T. walk around for a while, I noticed the energy count was getting low, so I had E.T. eat a piece of candy. Wham! The fun was over. E.T. turned green and the energy count jumped up to a full 9999.

 

 

Random Terrain

[Luc]

Coooool! I have been trying to find Ninja ET for ages, but I never succeeded. I even started to think that this was maybe some early easter egg that was removed from the code when the game was released. Glad to see I was wrong! I just experimented a bit myself, and found that there are some more strange things going on. What I did was give Elliott 3 x 9 pieces of candy (by changing the value at $d2 in the debugger) to get all the pieces of the phone, and then took X pieces with me in the spaceship.

 

When X = 5, I got this:

 

 

When X = 6, I got this:

 

 

When X = 7 or 8, I got this:

 

 

And finally when X = 9 I got this:

 

 

(The strange character looks a bit like Obelix in the Obelix Wave in Asterix, don't you think?)

 

 

However, I never managed to walk around in the ninja suit like you say you did. As soon as I started moving, ET got his usual color back immediately. (?)

 

Anyway, congrats and thanks for solving this mystery!

[+Random Terrain]

However, I never managed to walk around in the ninja suit like you say you did. As soon as I started moving, ET got his usual color back immediately. (?)

 

Anyway, congrats and thanks for solving this mystery!

I should have a YouTube video uploaded later today showing the Easter Eggs and Ninja E.T.

[Omegamatrix]

Dennis Debro did a complete commented disassembly of E.T. IIRC. It should be on Bjars archives. Some answers might be easier to find there.

[Cebus Capucinis]

Wow! Never knew something like this even existed. Is it just sloppy code ala pac-man screw-up level? The game just gets to a point that they didn't code for and just starts acting bizarre?

[+Random Terrain]

Finally got done with the video:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUsgtNxCOOk&rel=0&fmt=18&showinfo=0

 

 

Took longer than I expected.

[+Random Terrain]

If I use a voice in other videos, do you like the text to speech one I used in this video or would you like me to use other text to speech voices?

[Skylark68]

Great video! I like the speech too.

[+Random Terrain]

Great video! I like the speech too.

Would you like to hear the same voice in other videos or would you like different voices?