Uncle DT's Random Image Thread

[Kruger]

The book I'm currently reading dives into the 2600 and the hoops that the programmers had to jump through to get it to do their bidding.  A couple of the chapters cover some of the Activision games.  One thing that consistently stands out is how much they had to do to cram the code into the space they had available.  One example (I think it was David Crane) found that he could save one byte in one of his games because a block of data started with a 0x60 and that happened to also correspond with opcode RTS.  So he could place the subroutine to end with that byte of data also acting as the return.  One other bit of trivia (pun intended) is that the 2600 doesn't have a random number generator.  So that safe zone static in Yar's Revenge and the explosion at the end of the level is actually the code of the game represented as video...