MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Theoretical high scores

I am wondering about games such as Giga Wing, Mars Matrix, Guwange, Dodonpachi, etc.

To explain the concept, I will digress a bit. The theoretical highest score in a (meatspace) game of bowling is 300. No one has ever, or could ever, score 301 or higher. That is not how the game is constructed. There is no need whatever to make the scoreboard handle scores over 300. And you can figure this out even if you have never touched a bowling ball or seen a bowling pin in your life.

Now. Giga Wing, as I understand it, is like bowling in that it has finite length and a finite number of scoring opportunities. Even if you blast every enemy and collect every medal, there are only so many points you can score. But here's the tricky part. It might not be possible even in theory to collect every medal. (Kind of like how a 7-10 split in bowling is... oh, never mind.)

Another digression. Tool-assisted speedruns exist for many games. The idea is that, even with the tools, you can only finish a level so fast. Direct manipulation of the game state is, or course, prohibited: you can't just pick up Mario and drop him down at the end of a level; nor can you have 99 coins unless you collect them one by one, etc.

I am looking for the word for something identical in every way (including the ground rules) to a tool-assisted speedrun, except that the aim is to maximize score instead of minimize time. Do such exist for games such as I mentioned in the first sentence of this post?

From what I understand, Giga Wing's multiplier stops at 49999999. Is that a limitation of the underlying arithmetic (such as a multiplication function which multiplies 8 digits by 8 digits to get 16 digits), or was it that the game designers didn't want the multiplier to get too big? If this cap were removed, how much effect would it have on the game scores which would otherwise hit it? One could ask similar questions for other games.