The Mysterious Origins of an "Uncrackable" Video Game

upstart writes in with a story, submitted via IRC, for SoyCow9427 that was the inspiration for:

The BBC has posted a story, The mysterious origins of an uncrackable video game, which describes the investigation by two Game Archaeologists into the Atari 2600 game "Entombed".

The article is a narration of the story outlined in the abstract: Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game (DOI: https://doi.org/10.22152/programming-journal.org/2019/3/4) and full article (pdf):

The Atari 2600 was an extremely limited device with 128 bytes of RAM, a scaled down version of the venerable 6502 processor called the 6507 which had only 13 address liness restricting it to 8 kB of addressable memory, no interrupt processing, and it had no frame buffer, so each line of pixels to be displayed had to be calculated in real time - racing the beam - so being limited to exactly 76 machine cycles per line. The paper succinctly puts it: "Given that 6507 instructions all take two or more cycles, there was no room for inefficiency."

As if that were not enough of a challenge, there were no libraries in ROM, all code had to be hand-crafted. No programmer documentation meant that to even get started programming, one had to reverse engineer how the 2600 even worked.

The word "uncrackable" in the title is not of the crypto flavor one would normally assume, but instead of the "How did they come up with that?" variety. Specifically: create a scrolling maze that had a path through it, all with the aforementioned hardware limitations.

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