It sounds a lot when put like that, but it's not 512 pages of dense text, but in terms of typical presentation, perhaps four hex character address, a three character instruction and an operand of <10 characters or so - he could've fit the entire thing on 64 double sided pages easily, maybe less.

Lots of people printed out games and other programs in the 32K-64K size range all the time and studied them for months. It's what we did to work with "large" code bases. I've written perhaps a dozen pretty printing programs for asm (including ones that would painstakingly download narrower fonts to our dot matrix printer to fit more columns....) exactly because I wore out large number of printer cartridges, printing out code and kept trying to get things printed faster and on less paper, and that was a pretty common pursuit.

Again, it's a lot of effort, and some of what he did shows a quite impressive level of dedication (such as dumping the eproms, building his own clone of the game, and fixing bugs the designers hadn't found), but actually printing out a code base that size and studying it to learn was quite normal.

I'm all for recognizing this guys effort, but not for the most mundane part of what he did.