Gearheads

Online duel

Both of you need your Gearheads files (the same edition) and this page. Each player uses their own keys, gamepad or touch buttons. The host picks the playfield and toybox size; toys are dealt at random, as in the original's two-player duel.

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Hidden screens

Quit quips

Encrypted one-liners inside the program, shown on the Quit screen only when Tag=1 is set in GEARHEAD.INI (Enhanced always shows one). The original picks one of 55, but the table holds 54: the last slot is empty.

Developer leftovers

• Command-line switches. -d debug mode (Caps Lock freezes the game, objects can be dragged with the mouse, a menu jumps to any level), -z debug plus mouse control of the arrows, -a unlocks every tournament level, -q kiosk demo.
• Tuning dialogs. GEARCON (each toy's mass, speed and energy), ROCKCON (obstacles), RECTCON (collision boxes) and AINN, the computer player's weight tables, which it could save to ai0.txt / ai1.txt.
• Live menu editing. In debug mode the menus are read from a loose screens.txt instead of the encrypted copy inside the program.
• Logo easter egg. With the second character of Tag set to 1 and E held, the R/GA logo screen draws on white and shows the colour table.
• Resume key. Pressing R during the opening logos jumps straight to restoring a saved tournament.
• The staff photo's hot spots also put objects into the left player's toybox, including Small Fry, the rocket, the Bug, the Block and two walls, but toy selection only ever cycles through the twelve real toys, so they can never be played.
• Unfinished. A game mode 5 is checked for but never set; a "design" screen is reachable only from the debug level menu; several computer-player routines (a whole alternative lane strategy) and an edge-bounce routine are never called; a "previous screen" key and a flag to disable screen timeouts are parsed but unused.

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Everything runs locally in your browser; the game files never leave this computer.