Inside Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari Style)
Summary
An Atari 2600 game based on Raiders of the Lost Ark has sparked an archaeological expedition by Dennis Debro and Halkun, who reverse-engineered the classic title. Their findings offer a captivating glimpse into early game coding and hardware intricacies.
Key Insights
What does it mean to reverse-engineer an Atari 2600 game like Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Reverse-engineering involves disassembling the original binary game code into human-readable assembly language, then adding detailed comments to explain how the game's logic, graphics, sound, and hardware interactions work on the Atari 2600's limited 6502 processor and 128 bytes of RAM.
Who reverse-engineered Raiders of the Lost Ark for Atari 2600, and where can the source code be found?
Developer Halkun (also associated with Joshua N. Walker on GitHub) fully reverse-engineered the game, producing commented 6502 assembly source code available in the public repository at github.com/joshuanwalker/Raiders2600.