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Korval Since: Jan, 2001
Aug 25th 2010 at 3:44:25 PM •••

The Atari 2600 2-shot thing for Space Invaders cannot possibly be a mere glitch. I haven't disassembled the ROM, but here's my argument:

  1. If this were a glitch, why does it stop at 2 shots? Glitches usually aren't so specific. A glitch would more likely remove the shot limitation altogether.
  2. If it is a glitch, why isn't the memory that tracks the second shot being used by something? The 2600 didn't have a lot of memory, and the second shot would naturally use the memory next to the memory used for the first. So what was that piece of RAM used for?
  3. If this is unintended, why is there code to track multiple shots in the first place? If you *know* that you can only have one shot out to begin with, you wouldn't write your shot-updating logic to loop over a list of some length.

The only way I could believe that this was a bug is if that the player was originally intended to be able to fire multiple shots, with a low limit of two, but this was capped at one during development.

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