Posting in general as it pertains to NES games in practice by any software in theory. I've been keeping maps between many of the common labels used between my disassemblies and those which came before (thank you!) and have considered formalizing those into some tables on Data Crystal.
Something I've been thinking about which falls into a bit of a grey area is...a few of the titles I've worked through do have source code that has surfaced over time in various forms. Something that could be useful when cross-referencing code by the same developers, especially if some new thing leaks, is establishing what symbols in the original source code correspond with the labels known to folks in various hacking communities with whatever disasms they're familiar with.
For example, the jump table subroutine commonly used in Nintendo titles I've generally called "tbljmp" in my stuff. I've seen a handful of different names out there. In the surfaced source codes that I've seen, this subroutine called "JSRSUB". Knowing this, one can quickly identify in original sources where jump tables are being indexed.
While including such information in the matrix would be quite helpful to those analyzing old source code, I worry that it would add "baggage" to the content. However, it seems that law has generally been lenient to things that aren't directly copying "art" e.g. the opcodes surrounding the symbols. There's also the fact that whatever assembler was in use (HP 64000 at least for SRD) seems to have supported up to 6 character labels, so the names of these things in old sources tend to leave much to the imagination anyway...
Does this seem like the kind of thing that would raise the wrong eyebrows?
Something I've been thinking about which falls into a bit of a grey area is...a few of the titles I've worked through do have source code that has surfaced over time in various forms. Something that could be useful when cross-referencing code by the same developers, especially if some new thing leaks, is establishing what symbols in the original source code correspond with the labels known to folks in various hacking communities with whatever disasms they're familiar with.
For example, the jump table subroutine commonly used in Nintendo titles I've generally called "tbljmp" in my stuff. I've seen a handful of different names out there. In the surfaced source codes that I've seen, this subroutine called "JSRSUB". Knowing this, one can quickly identify in original sources where jump tables are being indexed.
While including such information in the matrix would be quite helpful to those analyzing old source code, I worry that it would add "baggage" to the content. However, it seems that law has generally been lenient to things that aren't directly copying "art" e.g. the opcodes surrounding the symbols. There's also the fact that whatever assembler was in use (HP 64000 at least for SRD) seems to have supported up to 6 character labels, so the names of these things in old sources tend to leave much to the imagination anyway...
Does this seem like the kind of thing that would raise the wrong eyebrows?
Statistics: Posted by segaloco — Thu Dec 05, 2024 9:49 pm — Replies 1 — Views 70