xkeeper

welcome to my personal hell

dragon warrior iii for the game boy color describes me as "stubborn", and i'm tempted to agree with that assessment


co-owner tcrf.net. i run an old forum, jul.
i've been around the internet since '01.
i generally feel like the internet
peaked somewhere around '07.


private: @xkeeper-PLUS
18+: @xkeeper-TI


plural / some kind of digital therian thing.
still discovering myself.
all of this is new to me.


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signal
Xkeeper.99

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an interesting example of where the code evolved between dian shi ma li (left) and shui guo li (right, older).

there's nothing particularly notable about this screenshot; the biggest changes are below this and involve adding credits. but it's fun to line them up together.


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dian shi ma li seems to have been compiled in one block, from $8000 to $C570-ish. while this isn't all used data, the unused data is still meaningful; unreferenced stuff that was stripped out, or code that was stubbed or never used. code and data smoothly transition over x000-address thresholds.

shui guo li (and jackpot) very much weren't. to start, $8000-$9FFF is entirely* unused, and is actually a copy of $a000-bfff! (the "entirely" part is that technically shui gui li writes to this, but i feel like that is an error on their part.)

all of the code and data in shui guo li is assembled neatly into $1000-byte blocks, often with garbage or other things filling the remainder.

in addition, most (if not all) "external" routines -- that is, jumps to code that aren't in the same $1000-byte block -- are done to fixed points at the start of the destination block; basically, an export table / etc. this is pretty unusual (and completely unnecessary) for a 32KB game that fits entirely within the NES's address space.

mostly, it just means that everything is one layer indirect, which is just enough that i can't really make use of ida's hover-tooltip explorer.


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