Sunday 2 April 2017

Reverse Engineering

So, having decided what I'm doing, I need to figure out how this game works. There's two sorts of remake ; a precise remake where you remake something that is a clone of the original and those where you just copy the basic ideas but aren't interested in the code.

This is a first type, though I hope to make it look nicer and possibly expand it a bit. Depends on time.

It's mostly written in Apple Integer BASIC.  This has a very novel tokenisation system devised by Woz which is more complicated to decode than usual but interesting - it pre-parses numbers for example, which could be useful for the 1802 Basic that I'm thinking about doing and have a bit of prep for.

Multiplying a 16 bit integer by 10 is a bit slow in a 1802 ... even by 1802 standards.  I wrote a 1k Tiny BASIC for the 1802 for a competition where speed didn't matter.

So I have this analysis done and am part way through decoding the code. Some of it is complete (maze generation) but pretty much all of it is analysed to the extent that I know what each chunk of code does.

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