https://web.archive.org/web/20120226202256/https://negativland.com/squant/index.html

Wow, I didn't realize they took that down in 2012. Also, a 700x502 image looks a lot smaller in these days when the smallest common monitor size is 1080p.

The chip that Tengen used is a completely different CPU from what Nintendo used, and can't run the same code. So it is likely that Tengen managed to reverse-engineer the chip on their own without it. It could have been just some legal intern who did this on his own.

That was Accolade. Basically what Sega did was two things. First they put in a 256-byte phantom boot ROM which displayed the "produced by or under license from SEGA" message, delayed for a moment, then started up the external cartridge ROM. The second thing was a watchdog timer that would reset the system a moment later if a new hardware register wasn't written with the 32-bit ASCII code for "SEGA".

Accolade's "workaround" was to literally copy the first few dozen bytes of the cartridge startup code from a Sega game. Then Sega claimed a copyright violation on that code. First, it was dumb of Sega to think that they could win a copyright case for that small amount of code, and which was made necessary by the hardware. But second, it was dumb of Accolade to not simply rewrite it to use different instructions, because the necessary code wasn't that forced.

Also, (going by memory here, it's been a while since I looked at how this works), did you notice the part where the licensing message was put on the screen BEFORE ever accessing the cartridge data? Yeah, totally not Accolade's fault that it was already on the screen. Or I guess you could say "yep, that phantom ROM was produced by Sega, sure was!"

Actual Indians!
(well, okay, Filipinos this time, but it's usually India where this happens)

For quite some time now, various source versions had already been available by leaks. An 8080 Altair version (4K?), an early generic 6502 8K version, a CP/M 5.x version, and an 8086 version. And the labels from the 6502 version apply very well to a disassembly of early 6800 8K versions for Altair 680 and SWTPC, though the 5-byte float support needs to be reconstructed.

Admittedly they were all a bit lacking in that they only hint at the original PDP-10 macro-fied version, which this release seems to be. And this still doesn't fulfill my quest for a clean 68000 version with binary math routines aside from the horribly segmented Mac OS version that's full of all sorts of new-age post-5.x stuff. (There's a 5.x decimal-math version for Tandy 6000 Xenix, but I never found a binary-math Xenix version.) But I'll be happy to look at what this version brings to the whole collection of MS-BASIC source code.

This all has meaning to me because I started on a TRS-80, and I was always disassembling its BASIC, followed by looks inside 6809 and 68000 versions. It's been fun trying to trace the ancestry of all the various bits of it. I sometimes say that I learned assembly language from Bill Gates because I learned so much from the code for BASIC. And I've actually been using this knowledge lately with a project to build a computer around a 68HC11 CPU. It's very convenient to be able to re-assemble it as necessary.

Siri: "It's... one... louder. Prime. Ha. Ha. Ha."

(No, I don't have Siri, that was just a joke, and I'm sure that someone needed that explained to them.)