
A History of Reverse-Engineering Game Cartridges - jamesbowman
http://tedium.co/2017/03/09/video-games-reverse-engineering-tengen-accolade
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sehugg
Activision was the first third-party Atari 2600 developer, but they didn't
have to reverse-engineer the system from scratch -- they were all defectors
from Atari. They did invent plenty of nifty tricks, though.

One podcast talks about Imagic, another VCS third-party developer: _One guy,
Bruce Pederson, was amazing. Without any documentation whatsoever, he attached
an in-circuit emulator to a VCS and reversed the entire video architecture -
including the special registers that doubled or tripled the sprites along with
the requisite code timing issues. Took him two days to do it._

Parker Brothers used existing carts to inform their efforts: _The 2600’s zany
graphics chip was the key thing there. My first contribution was to write a
disassembler for already-published cartridges. When analysis of the circuitry
presented ideas for how the sprites and background worked, I wrote small test
programs on the 2600 to verify our assumptions. With these combined efforts,
we figured out how everything worked in a few months._

[1] [http://2600gamebygamepodcast.blogspot.com/2014/02/q-with-
ima...](http://2600gamebygamepodcast.blogspot.com/2014/02/q-with-imagics-
michael-greene.html) [2] [http://www.retrogamer.net/retro_games80/the-making-
of-star-w...](http://www.retrogamer.net/retro_games80/the-making-of-star-wars-
the-empire-strikes-back/)

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hammock
Not the same, but I still remember reverse engineering Game Genie hex codes
for Battletoads to warp to different levels or get powerups.

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some-guy
Growing up with an NES my religious parents (at the time) would be very wary
of what games they would purchase for me. There was a Christian bookstore that
would sell unlicensed Widsom Tree [0] Christian games and they were all kinds
of jank, had distinct cardridge shapes and colors [1], and in most cases, had
very little Biblical accuracy.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_Tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_Tree)
[1]
[http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/2538/290022-b...](http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/2538/290022-bible_adventures.jpg)

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teddyh
Review of Super 3D Noah's Ark, including quite a bit of history of Wisdom
Tree:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FKEg2__57c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FKEg2__57c)

~~~
voltagex_
And if you want a reproduction cart:
[http://www.wisdomtreegames.com/store.html#!/Super-Noahs-
Ark-...](http://www.wisdomtreegames.com/store.html#!/Super-Noahs-
Ark-3D-SNES/p/56111432/category=0)

I'm hoping they're not destroying original carts to create this, though.

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voltagex_
Fantastic. Sachen are another "well known" bootlegger of cartridges. I first
encountered their gameboy carts, but they did NES too (which are now $300+ on
eBay!)

Edit: is the site broken, or is the author blocking archive.org?

~~~
shortformblog
Author here. Sorry about that, the site went down unexpectedly. Back up again.

