Disregard my above comment; sent in error. But just checking to see if the car was given away yet. I would love to add it to the collection (if nephew is too good for your old beater)
Up to a certain year, gen2s would stop counting at 299k. Past that year they kept accumulating. See post 5. There are benefits to reading the thread.
That limit always struck me as a particularly bizarre engineering choice. I'm not privy to the design of the display, but it would surprise me if the high digit isn't physically capable of lighting up (if wired to do so) to show all 10 digits. They may have used a custom "only 1 and 2" display element, but since the market generally demands all 10 digits be possible (often with plus, minus, period, and/or comma) that reduced function element would cost more than a full function element. Also there's nothing special about 299k (actually 300000 - 1). It isn't a power of 2 thing. 2^18 is 262144, so they need at least 19 bits to do 299k, and 2^19 is 524288. If they could count that high, why not stop there? But these days any sort of adder is going to come in multiples of 8 bits, and the next one up is 2^24, which would have got them all the way to 16777216. Could they have been using binary coded decimal rather than binary? Sure, but then they would have needed a whole digit for the high value, and that would have put the limit at 999k. Once again, I suppose they could have crippled the top digit by giving it only two bits, but you see the problem. One bit would not have been able to count to 2 in that position, because the count starts at 0, but 2 would allow it to count 3, and the limit would have been 399k.
