ancipdate
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I've fully explored sections A through D. I went back through section B and marked down the location of the yellow camel key and the goat of power I missed. I've fully documented the help screen for every room, which is 64% of the map. I've found the blue and cyan camel keys, and learned what colors all the doors are. It seems like you need to go through the 7 sections in order, so I went ahead and recolored every section to match the color of the door that leads there. I have a save state at the beginning of section E with a full stock of 9 lives.
I wish I could say this is because I've become the world's best Ancipital player, but in truth, I've become an elite C64 hacker and broken the boundaries of the game.
By which I mean I downloaded the vice core for the steam version of retroArch, used RA's built-in cheat tools to figure out which memory address holds your number of extra lives, and set it to always be 9. It's address #24170 (00005E6A) if you want to be a hacker too.
I would've liked to have infinite health as well as infinite lives, but I couldn't find an obvious memory value that corresponds to it. Your health is represented by 10 camel icons in the UI. If you just stand around in an area where nothing hurts you and watch your health tick down, it takes 8 ticks for a full camel to disappear. This made me think that your health is a value that starts at 80 and goes down to 0 as you get hit/time ticks down, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I figure it's some more complicated variable tied to the game's internal clock. It's okay, infinite lives is fine, it just makes it slightly more time-consuming.
I'm guessing the red key is in section E, and then the purple key will be in the big red section on the right, which I'll tentatively name section F. The game's a lot more linear than I expected it to be, which makes sense, because it's also basically impossible. I don't believe anyone could 100% the game without infinite lives or save states. Having to guess what order you're supposed to do the sections in would make an already impossible game even less playable.
But seeing how everything is ordered makes me think maybe there will be some sort of actual ending to the game at the end of the purple section, since it's a linear path and the last thing you can do in the game. Also, if the pattern continues, the last 2 goats of power are probably in sections E and F, meaning section G will have a unique reward and not just be the location of the last goat. I hope I'm right; finally making it to the end to find out it's just another room would be a drag.
Then again, I'm full-clearing every section in order, so I won't be in a situation where I get there and have to backtrack to clear the rest of the rooms. Me getting to the last room of section G will correspond with 100%ing the game, so if there's any kind of reward for doing so, I'll be getting it regardless. I'm fully expecting it to just be a generic congratulations message, but hey, it's gotta be documented.
I've updated help.txt and I've also uploaded the infinite lives cheat if anyone wants it. Just change the extension to .cht and you should be able to import it into retroarch. I'll roll all this together with the documentation page when I'm done and add a higher-resolution version of the completed map.
Keep on hackin', blasterinos!!! 🦝