Turns out if you do this, then hold the up key, it would appear that you avoid collision detection. Also, it appears your X position is preserved between levels, allowing you to hold the up arrow to rapidly advance levels.
I have an ET-3400 on the shelf behind me! I was just playing with it the other day.
After watching Jason Turner's CppCon talk on writing an i386 to 6502 assembly translator [1][2], I started working on a fork that would target the 6800. I only got about 3 instructions working, but that's really all you need for some really simple test code with optimization turned to the max. It also turns out that someone wrote a fantastic emulator specifically for the ET-3400 trainer [3], and I managed to get my application running on it!
There is something special to me about the idea of writing modern C++, and compiling it for such early microprocessors. The 512 bytes of RAM is a pretty big limitation though. I wanted to try and emulate an EEPROM using an Arduino or FPGA, but got stalled out on the project. From time to time I like to browse through the LLVM backend documentation, but I can't seem to commit to trying to build a backend.
About 10 years ago, I met Al Alcorn at an event. Prior to that, I had studied the original pong schematics in school as part of an interesting challenge in a digital design course, where the goal was to figure out what the schematic did, without knowing it was pong.
So when I met Al, I mentioned that I found the schematics fascinating, and had some questions. He was happy to walk me through the whole thing! After that, he told me all kinds of great stories about the different versions of pong that they built, including color support, the home version, and PAL support.
The earliest commits from fabianoriccardi include git messages like:
> replacing "Google" with "Microsoft", removed PressCoverage
Anyway, great code recycling at least right? It's a fun thought that the author of killedbygoogle ultimately wrote most of the code on killed-by-microsoft.
Turns out if you do this, then hold the up key, it would appear that you avoid collision detection. Also, it appears your X position is preserved between levels, allowing you to hold the up arrow to rapidly advance levels.