Salamander (Arcade/PSP) - Life count overflow
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As far as I'm aware, this is only possible on the PSP port of this game on Salamander Portable, but I'd assume the same circumstances would occur on the original game if it were modified to allow this to happen.
Salamander Portable has "Extra Settings" menus for each of the five games. To access it, you enter the regular settings menu, put the cursor on "Game Settings", and then hold right until the Extra Settings option appears. Unlike the regular settings, which are your usual lives/extend/difficulty settings that require the game to be reset upon changing, these settings can be patched in on the fly during gameplay.
One of the options that is offered is maximizing your life count. In Salamander and Life Force, this bumps your life count up to 90. However, in Salamander, inserting any credits beyond the first one will actually add lives to your starting count. This only works up to a maximum of 8 times, so if you start with 2 lives in reserve, you can get your life count up to 26 in this manner.
By using the Max Lives option to get 90 lives, then inserting some credits, you can get your life counter up to 100, at which point the game automatically assigns a Game Over. My guess as to why this happens is that the life counter is only stored as two digits, so when it gets to 100, only 00 is read by the game, so it thinks you've lost all your lives and calls for a Game Over. (In this video, the overflow occurs when the life counter's at 99, but that's probably because it reads 99 plus your character, which would equal 100). This works with both the Vic Viper and Lord British.
The arcade version of Gradius II is known to have a similar bug. Life Force also has this max lives option on this collection, but extends in that game are earned via scoring and not by adding credits. I'm not sure if the overflow can happen in that game as well (I'm not really wanting to test it), but I would assume it does, since I doubt this oversight was found between the development of the two games.
Note that in order for the Game Over to occur, the life count has to be exactly 100. For example, if you start with 90 lives, die once, and then insert 4 credits, your life count will go from 89 to 92, 95, 98, and then wrap around to 101, skipping 100 and the Game Over. Though, at that point, you'll only have 1 life.
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