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It all started with a soon to be released project I am working on called "Fixing Gran Trak 10" about the first car racing arcade video game from 1974. I had completed the electrical repairs and was trying to interview as many people as possible who were involved with making the game. One of the interviews was with Ron Milner. Ron's an interesting guy. He was an engineer and inventor at Atari's secret think tank in the mountains – Cyan Engineering from 1973 to 1985. Besides coin-op work he was co-inventor of the Atari 2600 video game system and even helped prototype the animations for the robots at Chuck E Cheese. At the end of our conversation we were chatting about other stuff when he asked:
"Did you ever get a Starship 1 game?"
I said "I know that game! I would love to have one in my collection. I remember playing it when I was a kid."
Ron explained how he designed an "axial coil" around the neck of the CRT which would cause the stars to rotate when the player turned the control yoke. A pretty neat trick. Unfortunately that feature was cut to save money in the production version of the game.
Ron continued, "That was the first and only game that I ever programmed and I think it was maybe one of the first games with a backdoor in it. I didn't tell people about this, even within Atari, for at least 30 years, but I had some code in there that if you did a certain sequence of controls it would say 'Hi Ron!' and give you 10 free games."
I was kind of stunned. If this was true it would certainly predate the earliest video game Easter egg that I knew of...
https://edfries.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/chasing-the-first-arcade-easter-egg/
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @03:56PM (4 children)
Thanks for posting, this kind of history is always fun.
Some later Atari games had a unique anti-pirating mechanism -- if certain pins were shorted on the mother board it would start a small program that played with the processor to broadcast a message in Morse code, that could be heard on an AM radio. On this page -- http://www.jmargolin.com/schem/schems.htm [jmargolin.com]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday March 27 2017, @04:18PM (3 children)
Not sure how that works as an anti-piracy feature...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Monday March 27 2017, @04:24PM
It allows you to check the authenticity of a board, but does not prevent someone else from creating a different board that ran the game.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by WillR on Monday March 27 2017, @04:48PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @12:54AM
Exactly. If the pirated game was truly reverse engineered in a "clean room" with no access to the Atari code, then there is zero chance that the AM radio code would be on the pirated board. If the pirated board includes the AM radio (C) message, it's clear that the ROMs were copied.
Details at the link.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Monday March 27 2017, @04:33PM (7 children)
Someone with access to the rom needs to start searching for the Hi Ron! text. It's probably not straight ascii, but rather indexes to specific sprites, but it should be findable. 10 internet points to whomever finds it first.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday March 27 2017, @04:44PM (2 children)
You just need to read the ROM backwards.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 27 2017, @06:40PM (1 child)
Paul is not dead.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday March 27 2017, @11:33PM
But John and George are.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Informative) by lx on Monday March 27 2017, @05:45PM (1 child)
If you RTFA, they did just that and it appears to be straight ASCII.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fishybell on Monday March 27 2017, @06:07PM
TFA? Who got time for that?
...minutes later.
This article is great! Thanks "exec" for sending this in.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 27 2017, @06:39PM (1 child)
"There's more to life than Internet points." -- Some guy at Hacker News.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Monday March 27 2017, @11:35PM
YEAH! THERE'S SEXXX!!!
what's it like?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday March 27 2017, @04:50PM
While the article was interesting what really brings it home is that Ron answers in the comments. The messages exchanged there makes it a whole lot more interesting.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 27 2017, @06:24PM (1 child)
Dave Johnson, my former employer, and Bob were among Atari's first game designers. (That's what they were called, not programmers.). Bob maintains a website [polaro.com] about his work with video games.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @01:11AM
Interesting, Polaro's LinkedIn page (linked from his website) says Atari, Inc. Dates Employed 1978 – 1984. So he was at Atari through the huge boom that ended when Atari laid off ~10K people. Atari Coin Op (arcade games) carried on long after the home console business cratered. Their big hit with Star Wars (arcade) was in 1983 and Hard/Race Drivin' (first with real physics, polygon graphics & force feedback) was 1989-91.