An "Atari 7800 - Under the Hood" companion by Abysmal Games. We ran every official 7800 cart we could find through an emulator that logged every byte the game used, then pulled out all the readable text. Here is all of it, cart by cart, with notes on what our runs did and did not reach.
This won't be everything. What follows is what we found, and our best guesses about it. Some games store text in their own letter codes or compressed. We couldn't read all of it, so there may be more hiding.
"Never read in our runs" is not the same as "unused". "Never touched" means our runs never used it. A level we didn't reach looks the same as text that was cut, so some of these are educated guesses. "Read" means the game's code read those bytes; a read for a checksum counts too, so read text was not always on screen.
The ten finds we liked best, ranked by general interest, then confidence. We are not claiming to be the first to find any of this: fans and researchers have been digging into these games for decades. Where someone documented a find before us, we credit them.
Human-written text that players rarely or never saw, plus notable text that is reachable. Quotes are short; the full strings are in the archive below.
Which carts share code, graphics or text. Code links are identical runs of code that ran on both carts (64+ bytes), or the same instruction sequence with only its addresses changed; text links are identical strings of 12+ characters; padding and repetitive fills are left out. Code that never ran in our runs is not compared, so every link is a lower bound.
Every cart, grouped retail / prototype and sorted by title. Open a cart for its details and its strings: ROM offset, our tag, a short class and the text as stored (spelling as in the ROM, sic). Garbage runs and repeated copies are left out; long fixed-width blocks are split at wide gaps.
Findings are our best interpretation of the ROM data. This isn't the final word. If you know a secret we missed, or we got one wrong, tell us and we'll correct the record. Corrections welcome: info@abysmal-games.com.
