Articles by Retro Ports

I’ve decided to put Vulgus to bed. After a fruitless session, I’ve exhausted my interest in finishing the RE. Given that I don’t have plans to transcode it at all, the ROI for the remining sections is miniscule. The few remaining ‘free-standing’ variables are flags and timers for spawning various …

Another session, another few variables decoded (RE’d). Most of the ‘free standing’ variables have either been decoded, or I have at least some idea of what they do – just not the specifics. A surprising number of seemingly unused variables in the code; initialised but no cross-references to code that …

Just a quick one… still progressing on Vulgus, chipping away at the unknown variables. Indications are that the letter ‘S’ does… ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I can’t find any cross-references to it in the code, other than initialisation and updating a counter (max=4) when one disappears off-screen. A watchpoint in the MAME …

I haven’t posted in a while but I have been making quite a lot of progress on the RE. I would say 90-95% of the code has been commented now. Most of the unknowns have to do with the gameplay ‘AI’ – variables that affect the difficulty of the game, …

Back from holidays (boo!) and although I haven’t posted again, I’ve made quite a lot of progress over the last couple of weeks. First I’ll admit I haven’t gone back to look at the map decoding – there was plenty to do in the rest of the disassembly that kept …

Long time no post! Truth is I haven’t had the time or the motivation to work on any Retroports projects for the last few months as work and Real Life have both ramped up significantly. The good news is that although work has been a lot busier, I have been …

I’ve been chipping away at Galaxian as updates come from jotd. It’s all-but-finished now, with a few sounds to implement and/or debug on the Neo Geo, and the mystery of randomly disappearing bombs. I’ve just finished implementing the starfield, although I realise now I made one mistake that I may …