🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <37...@apple.Apple.COM> lan...@Apple.COM (Landon Dyer) writes:
  >[...]
  >Atari's Tempest arcade game used vector graphics; the programmer made up the
  >character set himself, and for Tempest he arranged for the text "Copyright
  >1980 Atari" to also be executable 6502 opcodes.  If a pirate removed or
  >altered the copyright notice, the game would crash.
  >
  >Just after the game was released for production and the engineering team had
  >gone on vacation, the legal department determined that the copyright notice
  >had to be changed to say "1980-1981" or somesuch.  Whoever did the change
  >probably did it with a PROM burner, and didn't know about the pirate trap.
  >
  >Unfortunately the patched game didn't crash, exactly -- but if you
  >managed to stop a game with some magic last digits in the score,
  >amusing things would happen (such as getting 99 free lives...).
  > [...]

This probably belongs in rec.games.video (which we don't get here in
Japan).  I always wondered whether the fun Tempest tricks were bugs or
features.  At least one video game magazine listed all the
two-digit codes that would cause various things to happen (the trick
was to end with a score between 1800xy and 2000xy (xy is the code)).
You could do stuff like get 40 credits (05, 07, 12, 13 17, 18, 19) or
start on the highest levels (green) and thus get an enormous bonus, or
play in attract-mode, etc...  Those were fun days.  Atari fixed the bug
pretty soon after it was discovered, so it doesn't work on many
machines (are there any left?).  We got pretty good at Tempest.

Are alt.folklore.computers readers interested in other old video game
bugs/hacks, or have they already been beaten to death in
rec.games.video?

  >-----------------------------------------  "Mmmph!  Urghurmph!  Grugmph!"
  >Landon Dyer, Apple Computer, Inc.          "What's he trying to say?"
  >Development Systems Group (MPW / DSG)      "I dunno -- someone shoved a
  >NOT THE VIEWS OF APPLE COMPUTER              lawyer in his mouth."

					     -creubank
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Curtis Eubanks                   creu...@crls.sony.co.jp
Sony Corporate Research Labs     creu...@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Information Systems              creubank@crls.sony.junet
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------