News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game. Parent comment

Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by vardump on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @07:24PM (#21065795)
Now try to create a routine that generates mazes with no dead ends on a system with 128 bytes of total RAM.

That 128 bytes includes stack. No graphics memory at all.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by pubby on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @10:11PM (#21066894)
That's what I did :)

I coded my maze generators in 6502 assembly - the same CPU the Atari uses. Mine was for the NES, which is more powerful than the Atari (2KB vs 128B of RAM, for example), but I think I know what I'm talking about.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by vardump on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @03:36PM (#21074456)
Programming these old constrained 8-bitters is great fun.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by lowtolerance on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @08:22AM (#21070029)
I haven’t seen the actual code they’re discussing in this article, but the interesting part isn’t that this was done on a system with very little RAM. From the sound of things, it works like a finite state machine. You can represent a whole lot of possible states with 128 bytes of RAM. Like, an astrologically large number of states - 2^1024, to be exact. The ability to work within the Atari’s memory constraints isn’t what’s so interesting about this algorithm, it’s that the lookup table driving the algorithm is inscrutable.
[ Parent | on HN ]