Rethinking race-free process signaling

So on an unrelated topic, but similar issue...years ago, the Madden series of American football games had a hard limit of 255 points that could be scored in a game and 1023 rushing yards that could be gained (I assume other stats were similarly capped, but these were the ones I noticed) (these limits may or may not still be there, it's been years since I played). For those of you who aren't familiar with American football, those numbers are ridiculously unachievable in any real game, but when playing the video game on easy settings it's quite plausible to reach both of those limits by halftime (particularly with skillful clock management--in short, American football rules specify that whether or not the game clock keeps running between plays is generally contingent upon the outcome of the just-completed play, with some complications for timeouts, penalties, and injuries, and when the end of the half or game is near--manipulating these rules with play-calling is a crucial part of late-game strategy). The 255-point limit was annoying but straightforward enough to understand, but for the life of me I couldn't understand why accumulated rushing yards was limited at 1023. This was in the mid-to-late 2000s; it wasn't *that* long ago, and memory certainly wasn't scarce enough that it was worth the extra trouble of using bitfields or implementing an explicit limit in code that was less than the max value of the data type used.

Now that I think of it, maybe this is where those extra ten bits from the PID cap went :)