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Author Topic: The Mysterious Origins of an Uncrackable Atari Game  (Read 5075 times)

app103

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The Mysterious Origins of an Uncrackable Atari Game
« on: September 23, 2019, 07:29 PM »
Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it’s largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game’s source code to investigate how it was made. An early maze-navigating game, Entombed intrigued the researchers for how early programmers solved the problem of drawing a solvable maze that is drawn procedurally.

But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn’t explain. The fundamental logic that determines how the maze is drawn is locked in a table of possible values written in the games code. However, it seems the logic behind the table has been lost forever.


mouser

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Re: The Mysterious Origins of an Uncrackable Atari Game
« Reply #1 on: September 24, 2019, 10:52 AM »
Here's the pdf of the paper they wrote.  Looks like some fascinating, detailed info about the code, including a discussing of a bug in the pseudo random number generator, etc: https://arxiv.org/ft.../1811/1811.02035.pdf

I've downloaded it to read.