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Programing "archaeology," an article about the secrets lost in old code

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This came across my desk this morning. It is surprisingly well written for a general population piece on these kind of efforts. It's an article about old programming tricks in old video games and the like, that are being rediscovered (and are still in fact useful) today.

Specifically, it's about "Entombed," an Atari game that was capable of generating completely random solvable mazes using a simple 5x5 number matrix that no one really knows how/why it works. To this very day, it remains unexplained, and the best explanation for the code working at all they could get from the devs that they had a team member work on it while "not entirely sober" until it apparently, "just worked." Today, the programmer who wrote it cannot be contacted so it's means of functioning remains a mystery lost to the ages. They can find no mathamatical pattern or reason the code should work either, it's actually a trick they cannot replicate. Pretty cool stuff.

I'm a bit involved in this idea (the reverse engineering as "archealogy" aspect), if only in hobby. I used to be big into the NES reverse engineering and programming scene. Different animal, same cause. I also used to help in the early days of minecraft with deobfuscating the class files. It was fun too, but completely different. Still the same idea, you are uncovering secrets that either no one else knows anymore, or they don't want you to know.

If mods feel this is not appropriate section, they may move it where appropriate. It seems more serious than lounge stuff though...

 
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Consider we human have only been programming with electronic circuits for less than 100 years, this is quite impressive.
 
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Neat.. been on a retro game kick and even working on one right now
 
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