lwiest

There you go! Find instructions in the ZIP. Enjoy! -- Lorenz AssembleItYourself.zip

Yes, I spend a couple of years on this, on and off. With regard to assembly with MAC/65: I actually assembled the entire reverse-engineered STAR RAIDERS source code (including the comments) with MAC/65 on an AtariWinPlus 800 emulator with 64K. MAC/65 is able to assemble programs larger than the available memory of the ATARI - as long as they are stored in MAC/65 tokenized format. What I did was to split my reverse-engineered source code in 23 parts, loaded each part in MAC/65 and saved each part as a tokenized MAC/65 file. They won't fit on an (emulated) Atari floppy disk but the emulator provides an "H" device, which lets you access folders on your hard drive. Finally I wrote a short MAC/65 program that chained togther all the tokenized parts. Assembly worked fine. The output, both the assembly list file and the binary object file, was written to the hard drive folder. Final technical detail: The object file that MAC/65 produces is not a contiguous block of binary data but a list of binary segments. I had another program automatically combine these segments into one big segment, which I eventually compared with the reference ROM.

Actually, I started with the reverse-engineering effort first (quite some years ago) in order to make sense of the cartridge's bytes, then came documenting the source code. Think of it as a very long-term sudoku or crossword puzzle . I'm glad you like the result.

(This is an update of my previous post http://atariage.com/forums/topic/243904-star-raiders-source-code-to-be-released/page-9?do=findComment&comment=3422364, starting a new thread.) During the last years, as a hobby afterhours project, I reverse-engineered a complete, extensively documented assembly language source code of STAR RAIDERS for the Atari 8-bit Home Computer System. I created it directly from the binary file of the ROM cartridge, finishing it in September 2015. It is available on GitHub (http://github.com/lwiest/StarRaiders). You may find it useful if you are curious about the internals of STAR RAIDERS or if you are planning to make your own, modified version. After very positive reader feedback on the initial release of my reverse-engineered source code I reviewed it again, resulting in a minor update. Enjoy -- Lorenz PS: I was absolutely thrilled to learn that in October 2015 scans of the original STAR RAIDERS source code (https://archive.org/details/AtariStarRaidersSourceCode) re-surfaced. To my delight, inspection of the original source code confirmed the findings of my reverse-engineered version and caused only a few simple corrections. Even more, the documentation of my reverse-engineered version adds a substantial amount of information - from overall theory of operation down to some tricky details - to the understanding of the often sparsely commented original (quite expected for source code never meant for publication). So, if you are interested in learing how STAR RAIDERS works, my reverse-engineered source code could be of help to you.

It's thrilling to see the huge amount of responses the re-surfaced STAR RAIDERS source code generated! During the last years, as a hobby afterhours project, I reverse-engineered a complete, extensively documented assembly language source code of STAR RAIDERS directly from the binary file of the ROM cartridge. It is available on GitHub (http://github.com/lwiest/StarRaiders). IMHO, the extensive documentation of my reverse-engineered version seems to complement the original source code quite nicely, making it useful for you if you are curious about the internals of STAR RAIDERS or if you plan to make your own, modified versions. Enjoy! -- Lorenz