Top Gun's Carrier Landing: Exposed

Summary

Top Gun's Carrier Landing: Exposed Best read with Danger Zone playing on loop Like most people, you’re probably an absolute expert at landing on the aircraft carrier in Top Gun for the NES. But if you’re in the silent minority that have not yet mastered this skill, you’re in luck: I’ve done a little reverse engineerining and figured out precisely how landing works. Hopefully now you can get things really dialed in during your next practice session. Let’s get those windmill high-fives warmed up! tl;dr: Altitude must be in the range 100-299, speed must be in the range 238-337 (both inclusive), and you must be laterally aimed at the carrier at the end of the sequence. As a reminder in case you haven’t played Top Gun in the last few decades (weird), the landing portion of the stage looks like this: Mercifully, the game suggests you aim right in the middle of the acceptable range per the “Alt. 200 / Speed 288” text on your MFD. Altitude and speed are both controlled by throttle input and pitch angle. There’s no on-screen heading indicator, but the game will tell you if you’re outside of the acceptable range (“Right ! Right !”). The ranges for speed and heading are pretty tight, so focus on those: the range for altitude is much wider. After about a minute of flying the game checks your state and plays a little cutscene showing either a textbook landing or an expensive fireball. Either way, you get a “Mission Accomplished!” and go to the next level (after all, you don’t own that plane, the taxpayers do): Stuff for nerds Memory locations of note: Address Contents Acceptable range (inclusive) $40-$41 Speed stored as a binary coded decimal 238 - 337 $3D-$3E Altitude stored as a BCD 100 - 299 $FD Heading, ranging from -32 to +32 0 - 7 $9E Landing state check result 0; other values change the plane’s trajectory during the crash cutscene Speed and altitude are stored as binary coded decimals, likely to simplify the rendering of on-screen text. For example, the number 1234 is sto...