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Salvaging E.T. In Software, Instead of New Mexico
Yesterday, we mentioned a just-approved effort to uncover the remains of goods dumped by Atari in New Mexico decades ago.
New submitter Essellion writes "Among the games that legend has it are there is the Atari 2600 E.T. game, infamous for how bad it was. However, an excavator of another kind has cast doubts on how bad it was by exploring in depth the E.T. ROM, how it played and why, and designing some bug fixes for it."
It sucked. With or without any bugs that I have forgotten in the mists of time, the gameplay was horrible, the field of play was idiotic, and it lacked any immersion into the movie storyline. It sucked.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
If you like this kind of investigation, you might be interested in hacks of the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. The port from the arcade was notoriously bad, because the hardware of the Atari basically didn't map well onto the graphics needed for the game. As a result, everything is basically wrong: the pills are fat dashes, the elegant outline graphics of the original are blocky opaque colors, etc. But worst of all, since the Atari's two sprite registers are used to draw both Pac-Man and the ghosts, whenever there are more than 2 ghosts+PacMan on a horizonal scanline, they start flickering because the porters resorted to the horrible hack of round-robin rotating which sprites got to be drawn in the 2 sprite registers. (This looks slightly less horrible on a CRT with phosphor decay, but it still looks bad.) Anyway, if you want more on the details of why this port sucked, and how it can be traced to hardware mismatches, it's covered in detail in ch. 4 of the book Racing the Beam .
But on to the hacks: Rob Kudla discussed and did some work towards a better Atari 2600 port in the late 1990s, and there are now a number of attempts, though many of them do cheat by doing things like using an 8K ROM rather than the original 4K.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was young, maybe 8 or 10. I had games for a long time but i had no way of judging good from bad games. In the atari days i could only afford a few games and they were all 'good' to me. E.T. wasn't the worst thing ever, im pretty sure i beat it a bunch of times. I never really thought about it until everyone talked about it years later.
Good-bye
Its integration with the actual story was pretty lackluster too, like a five year old relating the film to a distracted parent, who went on to explain it to a coder in a foreign language.
There are millions of people who have spent as much time watching TV game shows. YMMV.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I beat ET repeatedly back in the day as a kid. I guess being able to read was what did it. But even though I literally have seen someone do it, I've never been able to get into the cave while parachuting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the CMOS version of the 6502, the 65C02 and the static core version (clock can be slowed down or stopped without data loss) are still made and still used for embedded applications. We're talking annual volume in the hundreds of millions of units!
http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
That man is a hacker. (Using that word properly.)
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Why is it, whenever someone does something they enjoy doing. Someone else complains that person has too much time on their hands? Are you just jealous that he had the time?
Do you complain about fisherman, who sit for hours. People who lay at the beach to tan? Perhaps anyone that goes to a movie, sits in a hot tub. Plays a game. Sits around chatting with friends. What does one have to do, in your eyes, to not be wasting their time?