My pal Joe points us at this entry in Chronogamer, regarding the 1980 Atari VCS port of Space Invaders. It caught Joe’s eye because of its explanation in the comments (by “supercat”) of the game’s “double-shot” exploit — a very early example of an undocumented game-console cheat, and a possible side-effect of Space Invaders’ pioneering two-player co-op mode.
This post also serves as my discovery of Chronogamer. This weblog documents the quest of atariage.com user “Mezrabad” to play every single home console game commercially released in the United States, in chronological order, starting in 1972 with the Odyssey. The blog appears to have entered hiatus in 2010, but only after five years of writing and eight years’ worth of retrospective, so that’s quite a lot of cartridge-cobbled ground covered.
Chronogamer’s writing style can get rather breezy at times, but if that helps the author keep pushing through the games, I approve. I’m very happy someone is doing this, really, since it reminds me of the original concept behind Jmac’s Arcade, before that ended up sailing off its own thematic direction. It’s not impossible that I’ll return to Arcade with a more general goal of historical documentation, rather than personal memoirs (a much shallower well). But if some other halfway decent writer wanted to pick up that flag for coin-operated arcade games in the meantime, I’d applaud it.
When I had a VCS, I produced this effect by rapidly turning on and off the console -- a good way to break the machine. With double shot enabled, I felt like I had a gatling gun mowing down the aliens.
But as an adult, the technical post illuminates how difficult low-level hardware programming can be. It's amazing any software works at all.
Thanks for the comments! I agree, my breezy style can get in the way of actual information about the games. I'm working on getting back from my hiatus. When I started I was a stay-home dad, now I'm a full time tech support advisor. It changes things a bit. Anyway, nice to find this. :)