
Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 - tujv
http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
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JoeAltmaier
ET was green in the game, I'm guessing, because Howard wrote it (completed
it!) before the movie was released. The whole thing was on a punishing
deadline, which is why it may seem rough and strange to lots of folks. Howard
was tremendously proud of finishing a whole Atari 2600 game in just a few
weeks; not a single other Atari programmer was willing to take on the
challenge. In fact, Howard had to do it against management's wishes.

~~~
anon4
All this time I thought management had forced Howard to do it under an
unreasonable deadline, leading to a poor game, but this comment made me
rethink things. I'm starting to think Howard had the idea for an exploration
game more or less thought out long before E.T. came to be and just saw an
opportunity to fit his vision in the game.

Too bad he didn't have enough time for testing (I presume), the fact you're
punished for exploring in a game that requires lots of exploring is really
unexcusable.

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mambodog
If you want to compare the original and the 'fixed' version, here they are
running in the browser:

Original: [https://archive.org/stream/atari_2600_e.t._-_the_extra-
terre...](https://archive.org/stream/atari_2600_e.t._-_the_extra-
terrestrial_1982_atari_jerome_domurat_howard_scott_wa/atari_2600_e.t._-_the_extra-
terrestrial_1982_atari_jerome_domurat_howard_scott_wa.bin?module=atari2600&scale=2)

Fixed: [http://jamesfriend.com.au/et2600/](http://jamesfriend.com.au/et2600/)

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tujv
Also recommended is "Racing the Beam" from MIT Press [1]. It is a terrific
tour of Atari 2600 software development by examining several different games,
including another Howard Scott Warshaw cart, Yar's Revenge.

[1] [http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-
beam](http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam)

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jpace121
Stuff like this is personally really cool, and is one of the reasons I learned
to program in the first place/ still play with programming.

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brickcap
If you manage to complete it send it to angry video game nerd. His faith will
be restored :)

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nitrogen
I love reading reverse engineering and ancient game modding stories because
it's like an extreme form of inheriting a messy, undocumented codebase.

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kken
This is insane in a good way :)

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Pitarou
Makes me proud to be a nerd. :)

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millerm
Nice job. It's fun to seem some creative hacking. You could flame bait the
title by renaming it to "Why I stopped using E.T. and started using E.T." :-)

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Theodores
Did anyone have difficulty recognising 'E.T.' in any of the screenshots,
particularly the first one? Or was it just me?

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__m
Well, it still sucks.

