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The Arcade Game that Crashes Itself for Anti-Piracy Reasons (sneak peek) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-07-27 05:12:21
Imported:
2023-08

Content

A small anecdote of mine turns into a half hour of finding anti-piracy checks in Atari's Tempest. There are four of them, and they all check for different things and sabotage the game in different ways!

Files

The Arcade Game that Crashes Itself for Anti-Piracy Reasons

Did you know that Atari put cruel anti-piracy checks into its arcade games that would cause them to purposefully crash and reset? It's all explained right here. LINKS Support the channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rgmechex Support the channel on SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/rgmechex Join the RGMechEx Discord Server: http://discord.rgmechex.com Follow RGMechEx on Cohost: https://cohost.org/RGMechEx INLINE LINKS Atari Quadrascan Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smStEPSRKBs

Comments

Anonymous

Nice video! One question: at 24:29, you show an `LSR #4` instruction to shift A right four times, but I didn't think that the 6502's `LSR` supports immediate addressing like that? Did Tempest use some 6502 variant, or is that just a shorthand for four `LSR A` instructions in a row? (And similarly for the `ASL #4` below.)

rgmechex
>>113853874

Yeah it's just shorthand (to save space mainly; I got it from the Asar assembler syntax). If you look at the bytecode for that bit of code, you'll see the same byte repeated four times, since each one is assembled as four separate instructions.