
Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 (2013) - endtwist
http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
======
hckrplxr
I loved E.T. when I was a kid and actually managed to finish it. I never got
the hate. My guess is that I only saw the movie much later and so had
absolutely no expectation whatsoever.

To me, it was just another Atari 2600 game. In fact, after racking my brain
for hours on games like Swordquest[1], and almost injuring myself and
destroying my controllers playing Decathlon[2], E.T. was nothing. Recognizable
characters! A quest that made sense! Challenging controls, not inhuman
controls!

After seeing Atari: Game Over [3] I now think this game is significant, not
for its reputation but for the story behind it. It is a great case study.

All my admiration to Howard Scott Warshaw[4] for his career as a game
developer, what he went through after the E.T. debacle, and finding his way
out in the aftermath.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordquest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordquest)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Activision_Decathlon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Activision_Decathlon)
[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MT_msVoRAg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MT_msVoRAg)
[4]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Scott_Warshaw](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Scott_Warshaw)

~~~
bostonpete
Here here! My brothers and I played this quite a bit and I never understood
the hate. I don't recall all the details about the game play other than that
you had to go around finding little dots that corresponded to Reese's Pieces
and that it wasn't _too_ hard to beat the game (which is a good thing for a
kid who's not a serious gamer).

~~~
wyclif
I think it's hard for people who came late to the Atari 2600 to understand the
hate, but for those whose introduction to the 2600 was games like Adventure
and Missle Command, it was very much a letdown. I remember it very clearly. My
friends and I gave it a chance but after about a day or so began ridiculing it
mercilessly.

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randall
Man. I've been staring at my screen for a few hours trying to understand some
modern webrtc shenanigans. Then I read these crazy fools (with love!)
disassembling and reverse engineering like this and it makes me just feel like
an idiot.

Kudos guys. This is the weirdest labor of love, but you're awesome.

~~~
_ry9o
don't sell yourself short. I used to crack and patch 6502 and i have messed
around with webrtc. IMHO they can be equally maddening.

dis-assembling without source code can turn you into a pretty good debugger
though.

~~~
asddubs
disassembling on old systems like this, while still a feat, is not as hard as
people often think I find, because the assembly practically is the source code

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kragen
This is awesome. But what's this I see?

    
    
        [Y] Hacker News  new | threads | comments ...
        ...
        2. ^ Autopsy: Lessons From Failed Startups ...
             356 points ...
        3. ^ Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600...
             32 points ...
    

You guys make me so, so sad, some days. :(

It's interesting that still there's no decent 6502 disassembler for 2600 code.
You'd think it'd be a lot easier to write one in Python than it was in 6502
assembler for your Commodore 64.

~~~
boomlinde
_> It's interesting that still there's no decent 6502 disassembler for 2600
code._

Have you tried Stella and DiStella? 2600 oriented 6502 emulator, debugger,
disassembler etc.

~~~
kragen
No! I only know Stella as an emulator; didn't realize it also had a useful
disassembler.

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gcb0
> why it is hated then and today?

because it is a grinding game that only managed to exist today because of
online iterations.

it is single player World of warcraft.

~~~
jonathankoren
As a proud owner of this game since my grandmother shelled out god knows how
much for what was bound to be the hottest video game for christmas 1982, it's
not the grind. Seriously, since when did grinding ever doom a video game? It's
that it's completely random. The map is randomly generated, and whenever you
transition between screens, there's a very real chance that you will
immediately fall down a well, and thus lose power, and thus become that much
closer to death. On levels higher than the first (which is relatively easy, if
not long.) The speed and frequency of the scientist and FBI agent carrying you
back to town makes it unplayable. Seriously. It's unplayable. I thought so
when I was 5, and I still thought so when I was 35.

Best title screen for the 2600 bar none.

~~~
gcb0
going from one screen to another over and over to get candy = grinding

~~~
jonathankoren
I don't understand your comment on multiple levels. First, I didn't say there
wasn't grinding, my points were: 1) The mechanics of the game wasn't the
problem, it was the implementation of them. 2) Grinding has never doomed a
game. It may be annoying, but many popular games -- including ALL RPGs --
feature grinding at their core.

Second, with respect to E.T., if you're spending your time eating Reese's
Pieces, you're doing it wrong. The candy has _nothing_ to do with completing
the game. Furthermore, the game can be completed without going out of your way
to collect these at all.

Third, eating RPs isn't not grinding. Grinding is when the game effectively
pauses because the player can't advance past some point because the player is
underpowered for the new enemies, and overpowered when compared to the old
enemies. It's a balance issue, that gets passed off as "fun". See Pokemon. See
Final Fantasy. See every RPG ever made.

Repetitive game mechanics doesn't doom games. Every party based RPG since
Bard's Tale has features the same Fight-Fight-Fight-Parry-Parry-Parry verb.
90% of all attack turns in these games comes down to that same attack plan.
Hell, these games even configure their controls so that this is accomplished
by just hitting the default button six times in a row. And yet, these games
are beloved by millions.

------
smcl
Some of those defects are hilarious - "Ship Shouldn't Crush Elliott" stands
out in particular :)

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pacomerh
This is relly cool. In a way I feel like you're changing part of my past for
the better. Its weird.

~~~
madez
Yes, they remind me of the people behind the dolphin emulator. They are
working to make old games better than they've been on the original console.
For example they added support

\- to have 60fps in games that had only 30fps on the console,

\- to load custom high definition textures,

\- to play games at higher resolutions (1080p and beyond vs 720p) and

\- to have stereoscopy in games.

And that without access to source code, mind you! Their work is amazing.

Source and recommended read: [https://dolphin-
emu.org/blog/series](https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/series)

