Reverse-Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600 | Hacker News Reader

Reverse-Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600

github.com

42 pointstodsacerdoti18 comments

Wow this brings back memories of frustration. We could never figure out what that game wanted us to do, and there was no Internet or even Nintendo Power to help.

This seems to be true of a lot of old games. Feels (to me, today) like the point was to discover everything yourself and share found information in social circles like your school friends. Now we expect the game to be a self–contained asocial experience.

I played the hell out of this game at around 7 y/o. My father read the manual and helped me with it. I played it recently under emulation and was a little shocked that I remembered the entire game.

This documentation is very, very nice. I particularly like seeing how the scoring worked. It was always a mystery to me, playing the game, as to why my scores were so low. Escaping the prison room looks like it was the culprit. It would be interesting to go back and read the manual with knowledge of the game's internals.

How much does the manual help? The game looks infuriatingly difficult, even by 2600 standards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3Py3T5J3e0

The manual helps a ton. It has out right spoilers in it (with decent spoiler warnings). I'd say, having had a chance to read the manual after seeing the scoring details laid out in this RE that the manual doesn't really divulge much in the way of how scoring works. The Yar easter egg is mentioned but I never figured out how to activate it.

This is a pretty decent manual scan: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Atari_2600/Manual...

Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the best games for the Atari 2600 and I say this without any nostalgia for the title. It's an early adventure game and has a kind of complexity absent in most Atari 2600 games which, based on today's standards, are largely stupid. I've discovered things about this game years later by reading a walkthrough... It has a point system similar to the Sierra games because some activities are actually optional, a breakthrough feature.

In fact, the Howard Scott Warshaw works are great: Yars Revenge, with simple but classic gameplay and E.T., the victim of one of the most unfair public lynchings of a game ever.

Why did the E.T. game such public backlash though?

The E.T. movie was popular among kids and parents. One would think a game about it, would be popular too, if it worked recently.

Bad collision detection with respect to the character appearance, and the game not being understandable if you didn't thoroughly read the manual.

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

When I was six, a cousin about to leave for college gave me his 2600, my first console.

With it came not one, but two (!) copies of E.T. So I had a backup in case I accidentally dropped one in a pit or sinkhole…

Or double the pleasure of intentionally throwing it in a pit or sinkhole...

I’ve performed many experiments using AI to reverse-engineer old games like this one, and it looks like the newest generation of models has no trouble with it. They’re actually awesome.

Even with the current models, we might be able to automatically reverse-engineer all those old games, decode all assets, and even rewrite them in a more sensible language than assembler.

For the Atari 2600, Assembly is almost a necessity because of the very tight "racing the beam" timing required to draw things correctly on the screen. Your argument applies to some other platforms and games, though (not that many among the oldest ones, to be honest).

For the uninitiated: 78 clock cycles per horizontal line (Y coordinate), minimum 2 clock cycles per CPU instruction, 3 if it accesses memory.

There’s a small misunderstanding here. Reverse engineering by annotating a disassembly file is fine. However, the next obvious steps would be to write a sensible, high-level documentation of the internals of the game and then port it to a high-level language. Indeed, whether this would run on the original hardware might be questionable for such an Atari Game. But have you seen modern C compilers like Oscar64 [0] for such old hardware? Never say never …

[0] https://github.com/drmortalwombat/oscar64

"Racing the Beam" is a great book by MIT press that covers the specifics of the Atari 2600 platform. The 2600 sparked a number of innovations _largely because of_ the limitations of the platform forces you to think outside the box.

> I’ve performed many experiments using AI to reverse-engineer old games like this one

Do they generate camel case by default? While the long, friendly names are nice, I looks weird because source code back then was all uppercase.

that's awesome. it was a deeply mysterious game to me as a kid. the first mysterious game i ever encountered really. hell of a vibe.

Awesome game. Winning was HARD. I don’t think I ever got the max score. Maybe time to try again!

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