Item — HN Reader

Okay, replying to my own curiosity... The above byte sequence can be found in a dump of Centipede's ROM.

    00001280  a2 13 a9 ab 5d 20 21 ca  10 fa 85 fe 60 02 bb 5a  |....] !.....`..Z|
    00001290  30 5f ee 7d a8 20 b3 21  85 ae b9 c0 21 85 b0 a9  |0_.}. .!....!...|

The entire arcade game is contained in 12 kilobytes of code, BTW. (!) The amount of imagination and fun and replayability that this era of gaming delivered under such constraints (by modern luxurious standards) is mind boggling.

3 comments

Spent a little time decoding this...

  02       BB       5A       30       5F       EE       7D       A8
  00000010 10111011 01011010 00110000 01011111 11101110 01111101 10101000
        C. ..O..P.. .Y...R.. I.G..H.. .T1....9 ....8... .0....A. TA.R..I.

*edit: formatting

Did you use the source code for this?

Nah, I just did a little manual pattern-matching on the bits looking for "ATARI" (morse code : "0110101000") and working backwards from there.

12 kilobytes isn't much of a constraint. Before 1979, few computers had that much room. Check out this Mario Brothers game written in only 10 lines of Atari BASIC on an Atari 8-bit computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmpBZrfk1w8

That's super impressive!

The Mini Bros game is 2.5 kilobytes of high level source[1] so a fair resource comparison should either include FastBasic 3.4's runtime footprint (if interpreted?) and/or a compiled standalone executable size (if FastBasic is capable of it). i.e. ROM + RAM requirements to run on bare metal, including libary/runtime dependencies.

But my byte-counting pedantry aside ;-), you're exactly right to celebrate authors of such tight works that are still actually fun and attractive. I enjoyed the author's line-by-line walkthrough and dev journal. I know some modern programmers may not see the point in these apparently arbitrary competitions targeting old platforms but I really think there is wisdom and magic in this frugality!

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zj7u96etduyq6bv/AABfTzwMu3pqoNSNA...

Could you expand on this a little for the uninitiated amongst us?

Today, to keep people engaged in a game you need to have 50-100GB of graphics, 1GB of sound, some sort of AI, half naked cartoon ladies on the cover, 100 different weapons/races/etc.

But if you think of Centipede, Donkey Kong, PacMan, etc, their simplicity is that make them so great and timeless.

I remember I had BubbleBobble on the PC (back in the Amstrad PC 1512 days) and I would start and finish that game between 45-55 minutes no-matter-what.

Not so with Nintendo. I think I read somewhere that "if the game isn't fun with circles and squares, all the graphics in the world won't make it fun." Or something to that effect.

Exactly the kind of reason that a game like factorio can be wildly popular, it's not pretty by any means, but it does what it does very well

I don't know how I feel about the condescending tone of this comment, especially the "half naked cartoon ladies on the cover" dig.

It's a shame your refined senses can't appreciate the fidelity to game designer's artistic visions modern technology has brought to video games, the rest of us will enjoy them in your stead.

The sexism dig isn’t about refinement. It’s something that’s rife in all popular media from music videos through to movies and computer games. However that has always been the case in gaming. There’s nothing new there. Even 8bit games for the C64/Amstrad/etc would often feature highly embellished cover art.

Things are getting better though. Before it was just the accepted status quo but at least now those clichés are being challenged.

> The sexism dig isn’t about refinement

Didn't imply it was?

Bubble Bobble's PC version was a really bad conversion though. A lot of powerups appeared under completely different conditions, white ghosts didn't shoot, even the mechanics of some levels (72 I think) were different.