On the Atari 2600

[vincenttoups]

Your podcast is great, please keep doing it.

[SpindleyQ]

Thanks! I have a very solid idea of who I want to have on next but I got sidetracked by life events and then by other projects so it’s been a while since the last episode. But it’s an important project that is dear to my heart and there will be more!

[SpindleyQ]

The black line in the corner of your screenshot there is a basically-unavoidable artifact of how HMOVE works and is called the “HMOVE comb”. If you look at Atari screenshots and pay attention you’ll see them everywhere. Activision had a policy of hiding the effect by ensuring that the first 8 pixels of every scanline were always black by strobing HMOVE on every scanline.

[wourme]

Researchers still don't know why this Atari 2600 game works

Having exhausted other possibilities including retro-engineering the table, the researchers reached out to one of the people involved in the game’s development, Steve Sidley, yet even he remembered being confused by the table at the time. Sidley told the researchers: “The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked.”

[vincenttoups]

There is only a finite number of possible meanings for this sequence of bytes, so I’m sure someone can figure out why this works if they look at the code.

[wourme]

Additionally, someone created a 2600 game inspired by Shadow of the Beast.

Legacy of the Beast by ΛERIF°RM