Figuring Stuff Out Mega Challenge

Here is this month's Figuring Stuff Out Mega Challenge

The arcade game Galaga has a bug wherein the enemy space insects can be made to cease firing upon the player. This state is achieved by destroying all but the leftmost two bee-type things and allowing them to divebomb the player ship for about ten or fifteen minutes. They will eventually stop firing. They should be allowed to divebomb two or three more times and then destroyed. After this point, no enemy will fire upon the player ship for the rest of the game.

Why does this happen. I cannot think of any reason for the game to track the number of shots which have been fired at the player. I cannot think of any reason why some overflow of such a counter would cause the game to no longer fire at the player. I cannot determine the significance of these two bee-type things. I suspect that this is not a bug, but a feature.

For the person who successfully disassembles Galaga (any revision of the software should exhibit this problem — even the newer Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga combo machines have it) and figures out exactly why this happens, I have a FABULOUS PRIZE. The prize is probably not worth your time at all and it's really really stupid, but who cares

The bug is documented much better in Places Other Than Wikipedia (the description there is slightly inaccurate and I should {{sofixit}} already), so look around. Go get MAME (you'll want a build with the debugger, of course) and some Galaga ROM dumps (look for a MAME full ROM set torrent and just get galaga.zip from it, probablydump the ROMs [for personal use only] from your Galaga board which you legally purchased from an authorized distributor) and figure it out. It should take like half an hour if you're just a little more clueful about this shit than me (I admittedly haven't messed with this at ALL, but I Probably Will Later™).

I could do it myself but the trick is that I don't want to because I'm busy and this is a fun game so get to work

I'm probably going to do one of these every month because I'm tgies