Ok, I found out a little while ago that nobody thinks player 256 can exist.
I made a map a long time ago, with regular staredit on a mac. I had installed some new editor, (emerald edit) but it screwed up and I had to revert back to the normal editor. After this, when ever I selected units from different forces and changed an attribute, they turned into player 256. This was back in the day, before I made any good maps. Here is a small example of player 256. (Look at the black buildings.)
[attachmentid=6559]
Huh? Aren't you rather late?
On a one-byte scale, there are 256 players(Player 0-255).
0 would be what you know as player 1.
The only existing players are 0-11(1-12), and I call them the Main Players.
Player 256 has no special 'attributes' except for changing colour when units are created/destroyed.
Players 13-256 only read beyond the allocated memory(AKA- Buffer Overflow) and can read/affect certain properties of the game.
Examples of what extended player data writes to: Main Player supply(current, max, and limit), Main Player technology/upgrade availability/max/current, Speed of the game, player screen, and many more.
Examples of what extended player data reads from: Upgrades determined by location positions, alliance status FROM Main Players determined by the number of pauses a player has left, and definitely more.
There can be many more possibilities, but new patches mean big changes, so some attributes may change with every patch. There are also a lot more attributes that many havn't discovered yet.
PC and MAC computers will drop from each other if an extended player is used, because the data is not written the same way.
This says 256, its not 0-255. It has many similar properties to player 1. It isn't one of those old things. Look at the map.
Notices of player 256 has been known for quite some time now, and is it really that important? Even w/o player 256, you still got 255 players to use!
Like DK said, it's just working on a different scale. When you get down to the code/binary it's 0 to 255. But when you get to plain english terms and using it, it's 1 to 256.