Fester's Quest (USA)

Fester's Quest (USA) is on a MMC1 board with 131,072 bytes of program. A crawl of 8,000 steps from power-on kept 221 paths that found new code. Played back over 314,881 frames, they executed 13,207 bytes of it, 10 percent.

What the rules named

• The poll: 2
• The wait for the frame: 5
• The jump engine: 1
• The bank switch: 5
• The picture writer: 1
• The palette writers: 1
• The sprite writers: 4
• The scroll writer: 1
• The sound driver: 1

The 82 routines the runs entered

Every place the game's code was entered, by a call, an interrupt or a jump through a table. The ones a rule named come first, with what the rule saw, and their names in the listing say what they are: a poll, an engine, a drain.

Where it waits

Loops a rule named that sit inside a routine and are not themselves a place the code is entered.

The tables it jumps through

A table of addresses the game picks one from. Some sit right after a call to a jump engine; others are anywhere in the cartridge, and we find them by where the address the game jumped through was loaded from. Some games jump by pushing an address and returning to it, and some keep a table as two, the low bytes of its addresses in one place and the high bytes in another; both are found the same way. An entry is counted as far as the runs saw one taken; the true table may be longer. The last column is the byte of memory whose value picked the entry, where we could follow it: the game's mode, or what one of its objects is doing.

The memory its routines share

390 bytes of memory were written by one routine and read by another, and 49 places were reached through an index, which is what a table or a set of object slots in memory looks like.

Reaches through an index: those that hold positions, then the longest

The 24 busiest shared bytes

This page shows none of the game's bytes. The listing these figures were read from stays with the cartridge.

All the games