Since the begining of the year I'm disassembling some retro game on my free time, just for fun and curiosity. And wow, this is quite a long and tedious task, which I expected, but facing it is another deal.
But I am learning so, so much! Especially about what writing code in assembly implies. The game clearly was written in assembly, which is a family of language I never wrote.
@KekunPlazas " The game clearly was written in assembly "
Ce serait vraiment très étonnant !
I think I'm starting to get where some of the performance gains from writing in assembly come from, and I believe once factor is using and reusing registers rather than using the stack for function arguments and return values. Of course, it makes you much more limited with what you can do with your code, which registers you can use, and it makes your code oh so much more brittle. I also learned how switch statements are implemented, before that I had not idea they simply are jump tables.
And just learning about the process of disassembling and "decompiling" code, finding what is code, what is data, what kind of data…
It really is an interesting process, one that I wanted to try since many years, but that I never really started because I always had more important things to do. But sometimes, you have to take some time for some silly, useless, but soul and mind enriching tasks.
No idea if I will ever complete this silly little project of mine, for the moment I just want to tear this game appart and understand what makes it. Maybe some day I'll publish it, and port it to another system, just because I can. Or I will abandon it and never talk about it again.
Regardless, I'll have learned a lot and had quite some fun with this silly giant puzzle. 😄
