An interesting read; there's something really nice about the way older games do things (like this saved state encoding, or anti-cheat by referring to certain pages in the manual. In this age of cloud save (and I say this having worked on a cloud save product!), we've lost a level of connection here.
I was intrigued as to how one would even figure out the sequence of operations used to encode progress into a 'phone number'; a quick search turned up an in-depth report (http://www.dougbabcock.com/mtpo-passwords.txt) which doesn't appear to be credited in Allan's article. It looks like Doug used a password archive to figure out the steps as an exercise in cracking, which itself sounds jolly fun.
Amusing how the three busy signal codes correspond to Nintendo's customer service lines for Japan, the US Toll Free, and Washington State. 135 792 4680 is obvious, but it makes me curious as to significance of the show credits and direct to Tyson numbers. Especially in that era, hard-coded numbers were rarely completely random. It's a bit interesting and amusing how 30 years later, these games still have stories to tell.
I was intrigued as to how one would even figure out the sequence of operations used to encode progress into a 'phone number'; a quick search turned up an in-depth report (http://www.dougbabcock.com/mtpo-passwords.txt) which doesn't appear to be credited in Allan's article. It looks like Doug used a password archive to figure out the steps as an exercise in cracking, which itself sounds jolly fun.