Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What's the most you can score?

A: The maximum possible score on completion of level 1 is 8,650 plus 3,900 for every life used. I used to be able to repeatably obtain 8,650. The maximum possible score you can have by the end of level 2 is 19,925 if you don't die, so it is not possible to start level 3 with more than 2 lives in reserve. I have got maximum score on the first two levels a few times.

I haven't bothered to calculate similar statistics for the other levels, but I can if anyone's interested...

If you meant "What's the most you've ever scored", the answer is 75,975.

Q: What's the most anyone's ever scored?

A: Have a look at the Digger hall of fame on http://www.digger.org/fame.html to find the latest top scores. If you can do better than the 10th best person in the world, submit a recording of your game to Einar Johan (fame@digger.org).

Q: Can you give me some tips to improve my game?

A: The best I can do is suggest that you play back the recorded games in the hall of fame (http://www.digger.org/fame.html) - who better to get tips from than the world's best Digger players?!

Q: What other interesting things do you know about Digger?

A: (by Andrew Jenner) In my explorations of the code of the game, I have discovered lots of things which might be of interest to someone.

On each new level up to level 10:

Levels above 10 use the same variables as level 10 but different layouts.

The level plan is 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-6-7-8 followed by the sequence 5-6-7-8 repeated 247 times. If you complete level 8 249 times, all the subsequent levels use the layout from level 5.

Gold (as in a broken bag) disappears very quickly if you dig underneath it.

Monsters going up change direction when there is a bag falling on them, but they do the same thing even if the bag is below them in the same column.

Player 2 (in two player mode, obviously) doesn't get the extra life until after multiples of 20,000. Player 1 (in either mode) gets it *at* multiples of 20,000.

The noise made when you complete a level is polyphonic if no background music has been played since the game was started.

The original game allocated enough resources for 6 monsters, but only 5 are on screen at any given time. By changing a single byte in the original executable, you could make all 6 appear at the same time.

When you get a game over and no high score, the screen used to flash between its two colour schemes for a while, but the original didn't do this on my 8086. Apparently it did on some other people's computers, though, so it must have been a hardware oddity. It was taking ages to get back to the title screen, so I removed it.

In the original, you couldn't collect more than 4 spare lives. If you got 60,000 points without dying, you wouldn't get an extra life at that point. Some people thought this was unfair, so in Digger Remastered I added an option (/U) to allow you to collect as many lives as you like. However, care should be exercised using this option if you intend to record a game for the hall of fame, since your score will be calculated as if you played by the original rules. So you might not have as many lives as you thought you did, and your game might finish sooner. A few people have been caught out by this.

There are no more extra lives to be had at or after the 1 million point mark. Although this was a bug in the original Digger (a kludge really - Windmill software never counted on anyone getting that far) I've kept it on in Digger Remastered to give an extra little bit of difficulty to anyone that good.