<story><title>Space Invaders</title><url>http://www.computerarcheology.com/Arcade/SpaceInvaders/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kabdib</author><text>&amp;gt; The code makes some dangerous assumptions . . .&lt;p&gt;In this era, code for games was essentially write-only, by one or two engineers. No one would be confused by the code in later releases because there simply weren&amp;#x27;t any. Code that was common between games was the exception rather than the rule (at Atari, some of the best debugged and well-structured code was the stuff that operated the coin mechanism, because it &lt;i&gt;had&lt;/i&gt; to be right or customers would aggressively exercise the tilt switch mentioned in the article).&lt;p&gt;Code also had to run on really tiny hardware. ROMs cost real money, and marketing wasn&amp;#x27;t going to give you more just to make your life easier. If your code ran in 4K, but Joe&amp;#x27;s code was a complete train-wreck that ran fine in 2K, guess who got the big bonus?&lt;p&gt;One cow-orker of mine had spent some time writing code for pinball machines at Midway. He said that on one project the hardware engineers wanted to save money by half-populating the board&amp;#x27;s RAM; unfortunately the way they sliced it was to only provide the bottom 4 bits of each byte.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The ROM is still 8-bits wide, you can work around the RAM thing in software.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;He only got his full-width RAM by pointing out that the processor&amp;#x27;s stack wouldn&amp;#x27;t work.</text></comment>
<story><title>Space Invaders</title><url>http://www.computerarcheology.com/Arcade/SpaceInvaders/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Joeboy</author><text>What I would like to know is, how come David Bowie uses the term &amp;quot;space invader&amp;quot; in his 1971 song Moonage Daydream, when the game didn&amp;#x27;t come out until 1978? They don&amp;#x27;t seem to me to be words that naturally belong together. Glitch in the matrix?</text></comment>