Galaxian (NES)

Galaxian is a game featuring Galaxians attacking Galaxians and Galaxians (flagships). Nobody really knows who's who, other than your mission is ostensibly to destroy aliens.

Programmer's Credit
Appears at the very beginning of the ROM: COPR.1984 NAMCO HARUHISA UDAGAWA

HARUHISA UDAGAWA is used as the soft-reset RAM check (at ) as well. Haruhisa Udagawa seems to have been a programmer for Namco, as his name appears in some other games such as Lupin Sansei: Pandora no Isan.

Music Player


Reset the game 44 times, hold A + B on Controller 2, and reset again. There are a total of five songs accessible by this method, all embedded in the CHR data. The reset counter is located at the RAM address.

The music player uses RAM set as the sprite DMA area, so as the song plays a sprite will scroll down the screen, indicating the current playing notes and the progress through the song. A 1 will randomly flip while going across the screen, but this has no impact on anything.

Resetting before the song fully ends will increment a counter in RAM, with the next song playing after another 45 resets. If at any time the song is allowed to finish fully, the game will reset back to the title screen. After another 256 resets from when the player is enabled, the game is reset to the title screen.

Some of the tracks are next to graphics that are actually used, and will play garbage before or after the music is played.

At least one of the tracks is a recreation of another song, but it's unknown what most of them are.

La Reine de Saba, composed by Michel Laurent.

Nausicaa Requiem, a music in the movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind which was released the same year as Galaxian, composed by Joe Hisaishi.



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The last song is not a complete one, but can be binded to the first song as an intro.

Note that some of the music is played from the garbage graphic data rather than the right beginning, and keeps playing garbage after the music is over. These clips have been cut down to remove said garbage.