Galaxian -- Hidden Music Easter Egg

Update: Well, we know what two of them are. Now if we just knew the rest. (Annotations provide details and links to respective songs.)

Galaxian for the NES has a little-known secret, not that it's hard to understand why.

To view this, you have to reset the console 44 times, and then hold A+B and do it again. To change tracks, you had to reset it another 45 times. Fun!

This morning I spent some time trying to dig out all the information about it I could, resulting in this script -- it takes all the pain out of viewing it. :)

The sprite at the top that scrolls horizontally has no meaning. The sprite at the left does -- its position is that of the position in the song, and its tile represents the notes it is playing (although it's hard to tell).

My script removes the garbage between music tracks and automatically jumps to 1 from 5, since they seem to fit together pretty well.

If you open it in a tile viewer, you'll likely find a lot of garbage tiles among the rest of the graphics; this is some of the game's text (like the scoring table), as well as the music here. :) Sneaky ones, they are.

This script will be available with FCEUX, hopefully.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Galaxian
• NES
• easter
• egg
• music
• hidden
• secret
• nintendo
• nes
• lua
• fceux
• rom
• emulation
• namco
• galaga

[ikyokyo]

Well...Maybe I can explain why there are hidden Easter Eggs in some early games.Back in FC/NES games, they are strored in ROM of the cartrige. ROM always comes in some actual size,64KB,128KB,and so on. If a game was completely and perfectly developed and nothing to improve recently, but still not fill all the rest ROM space, those're wasted.Eg, If a game is totally 72KB but ROM is 128KB, the rest 56KB do nothing.So they fill it with Easter Eggs or garbage or sth like that to make ROM fully used.

[Xkeeper0]

@ikyokyo If you're interested in this kind of thing, google the Cutting Room Floor Wiki. It's a site I run that aims to catalog all of this stuff, and you might be interested in helping us with research.

[ReyVGM]

There are actually 5 hidden songs. Check gamefaqs for the complete cheat.

[Xkeeper0]

If you read, I know there are 5 songs; just two of them fit together as one.

[tovara22]

Mine didn't look like this with a MENU!

[gabxrevolution05]

@Xkeeper0 Not only at Famicom... In NEC PC-Engine and SuperFamicom too.

[bakudandanLL]

Because they're bored, it's their program and they can do whatever the fuck they want with it?

[Xkeeper0]

Famicom (Family Computer) is just the Japanese version of the NES; they all play the same ROMs. (The only distinction is FDS, Famicom Disk System images; those are a different format from the cartridges)

[nonobaOMGWEEGEE2]

oh, but i have a .NES file not a .FCM rom file xD

[Trogdorbad]

Well well well. I learned something new today.