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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 27 2017, @03:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the arcade-flashback dept.

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


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @03:56PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @03:56PM (#484661)

    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]

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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday March 27 2017, @04:18PM (3 children)

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Monday March 27 2017, @04:18PM (#484670) Homepage

    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

      by fishybell (3156) on Monday March 27 2017, @04:24PM (#484676)

      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)

      by WillR (2012) on Monday March 27 2017, @04:48PM (#484696)
      It would make a dramatic courtroom demo. Bring in a Race Drivin' machine and the competitor's suspiciously similar driving game, turn on a radio and attach one jumper lead to the DSP chip in the knockoff, and it starts tapping out "C O P Y R I G H T 1 9 8 8 A T A R I G A M E S" in Morse code.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @12:54AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @12:54AM (#484970)

        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.