Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg | Hacker News Reader

Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg

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228 pointsanjalik19 comments

I love seeing that photo of the old PCB where the tracks are clearly hand laid with through hole components.

Ready Player One in real life? Hunting eggs.

Finally read last week, really enjoyed it, so that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. logs into OASIS to search for the egg

I forget my 6502 assembly code, but it looks like it gives you 16 free games ($10) not 10,which I think would be 0A in hex

Maybe it's thinking in BCD

Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gzApjA...

So was Bonus Time enabled for the shipped consoles?

From the article: "[Ron Milner] remembered showing it off to some buddies at a county fair when the game first came out, but that was 40 years ago!"

Perhaps it did?

It was a DIP setting on the board, so it would be up to the arcade operator to set it. Many old arcade games had difficulty and pricing and other settings that could be changed by the operator with either DIP switches or built in menus to update CMOS settings.

I remember being able to just about 1cc a NeoGeo soccer game (Super Sidekicks) in my local arcade only to come in one day and be dumbfounded when I suddenly couldn't even win the first game.

1cc?

Sorry, lapsed into gaming vernacular there. One credit complete, finishing the game on a single coin, i.e. because you don't lose you don't have to pay for any continues. So, for the game in question, one coin would get me all the way through to the World Cup final.

(Modern games got wise to people getting too good and some only offer a single play per coin, win or lose.)

Didn't I read the same story here yesterday?

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=arcade&sort=byDate&prefix&page...

ah thats quite annoying, it was the first time i read it but annoying to see how many times its been posted

6th times a charm! All by different people though; it's interesting to see how this story eventually made it to the front page thanks to Ars.

8th time in 9 days.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=arcade%20easter%20egg&sort=byD...

"What follows, as detailed in his blog post, is one of the wilder retro-gaming goose chases in recent memory."

Didn't sound all that wild. Sounds like they figured it out pretty quickly just by looking at a hex dump.

If you read the article, there is a lot more going on then a simple hex dump. Digging through schematics, and finding the bonus time dip switch, to actually get it triggered is the key bit here.

The link has been changed to point at a better source. I read it when it was the Ars post too, and felt similarly underwhelmed.

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