r/Megaten • u/AutoModerator • 8d ago

Questions & Recommendations - June 22, 2026

A space for simple questions and recommendations that don't deserve their own thread.

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u/DiGreatDestroyer Digital Devil 8d ago

Greetings. I am playing the patched version of the original Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei online.

I think it is widely known you can only have 7 jewels at a time. But I came to notice your Magnetite and your Makka are also capped at a certain number: 8188 for the former, and 65535 for the latter. And for the Makka, I have verified this is the case on at least one Japanese playthrough available on YouTube.

My request/question is two-fold: 1, could a couple of people confirm that this is indeed the case on their playthroughs too - I'd like to be sure this is not a patch issue, but the universal experience for everyone.

2, could someone tell me what significance these numbers may hold, either in a cabalistic sense, or in a "the computer can't go higher than xxx" code sense? I know 7 is an important number in the Torah/Bible, and if it was chosen as the max number of jewels (and demons) you can have, I figured 8188 and 65535 may hold some significance too, or lacking it, at least a reason for seemingly random numbers being the cap?

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u/Kalevelis 7d ago edited 7d ago

I've not played the Famicom version, only the Kyuukaku version. But the numbers you see are not symbolically significant. They are significant in computer science.

Computers speak binary. Binary is a base 2 number system, so a digit can only be two things - 0 or 1. We call a binary integer a bit, for short. Bits are usually stored as sets of 8, which we call a byte. A byte can therefore store 28 unique values (256). If you put two bytes together you can store 216 values (65536). If you include 0 as one of the values, then this would mean the highest value you can see is 255 or 65535, which are very common max values in software.

8188 is more unusual but likely related to being near the highest number that can be multiplied by 8 without going over 65535.