63...?

[War6]

Why does the passing TD statistic for quarterbacks cap out at 63? Is there a hack out there that can increase the max TDs to incrementally accumulate correctly after 63?

[Knobbe]

15 hours ago, War6 said:

Why does the passing TD statistic for quarterbacks cap out at 63? Is there a hack out there that can increase the max TDs to incrementally accumulate correctly after 63?

 

A space saving technique for storing data.  0-63 is 64 values which can be represented by 2^6

[bruddog]

@War6 there isnt much in the way of save memory left in order to do that at least on the 28 team rom. You’d have to sacrifice something else in order to expand how many tds the game can save. For example getting rid of individual punt and kick return stats. 

[Dusto]

to expand a little cause I've been deep in this section lately, a lot of the statistics already double up on how they're represented, the original game was going for efficiency

 

The touchdowns value is both a modifier of pass attempts and its actual value.   

Since the decimal max of a particular position is 256.  When you go past 256 pass attempts the game starts keeping a counter of how many times you've surpassed 256 in a different column.  (Think of it like a tally mark representing 256 per tally ) 

 

 To keep from using a whole other field for this, they instead did some trickery around touchdowns, and make the number a multiple of 4.

 

If the number was evenly divisible by four,  (example 16), you'd see 4 touchdowns on screen. All numbers that were not a factor of 4, would then utilize the remainder value as a counter for any pass attempts over 256.

 

 

So if you had the number 5 in the touchdowns position for a QB and 100 in the attempts column.   That would translated to 1 touchdown

5/4 = 1 (in integer division)

 

and

 

The remainder  5-4 = 1   would represent a tally mark  of 256 attempts   (1*256)

 

so that qb would display 1 touchdown, and 356 passing attempts represented by the touchdown number

modifier = (passTdBase % 4) * 256

passAttempts = passAttemptsBase + modifier

---
modifier = (5 % 4) * 256         ->  1 * 256
modifier  = 256

passAtempts = 100 + modifier
passAttamptes = 100 + 256      -> 356 attempts total

 

 

TLDR: 

the change would need to be utilizing an extra offset for each qb on 32 teams,  so 64 EXTRA spots (56 on 28 team rom) in total allocated to stat saving, in order to stop using touchdowns as the pass Attempt offset. It would allow it to count up to 255,  while pass Attempts would use a whole new counter column. 

 

Edited April 27, 2021 by Dusto

[War6]

Good explanation! I've always wondered why the counter would cap out at 63 for TD passes while receptions and other statics would continue to accrue. If my memory is correct, the NES version continually counts in excess of 100 while the SNES version will revert to 01 after passing 99? Thanks again for the explanation, much appreciated. Good old Tecmo!