Related on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18412547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18412547 > Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atar

Related on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18412547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18412547 > Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game One type of archaeogaming research is digital excavation, a technical examination of the code and techniques used in old games' implementation. We apply that in a case study of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game released in 1982 by US Games. The player in this game is, appropriately, an archaeologist who must make their way through a zombie-infested maze. Maze generation is a fruitful area for comparative retrogame archaeology, because a number of early games on different platforms featured mazes, and their variety of approaches can be compared. The maze in Entombed is particularly interesting: it is shaped in part by the extensive real-time constraints of the Atari 2600 platform, and also had to be generated efficiently and use next to no memory. We reverse engineered key areas of the game's code to uncover its unusual maze-generation algorithm, which we have also built a reconstruction of, and analyzed the mysterious table that drives it. In addition, we discovered what appears to be a 35-year-old bug in the code, as well as direct evidence of code-reuse practices amongst game developers. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035 https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035