Fishing Derby Disassembly

[DEBRO]

Hi there,

 

Another David Crane Activision game. Enjoy.

Fishing_Derby.zip

[Dionoid]

This is the first time that I'm looking at a disassembled and labeled game, and I'm really impressed by your analysis and detailed comments.

Are there other games that you disassembled and analyzed/labelled/commented? Do you keep them together somewhere?

 

About the game: Fishing Derby is an amazing piece of work in only 2K! I like how the water shimmer works with a pseudo-random number; pretty clever.

 

Btw which encoding did you use for the fishing_derby.asm file? I'm seeing characters like this: � throughout the comments.

 

[DEBRO]

Hi there,

 

On 7/18/2019 at 7:19 PM, Dionoid said:

This is the first time that I'm looking at a disassembled and labeled game, and I'm really impressed by your analysis and detailed comments.

Are there other games that you disassembled and analyzed/labelled/commented? Do you keep them together somewhere?

 

Thank you. My hope is that it makes sense and that the comments come close to what the original engineer had in mind. These can never replace original source code with the original comments but hopefully it helps.

 

There is a list of disassembled games done by me and others on Bjars.com. I have plans to have an archive site of all my work one day...one day.

 

There is also this list in the  "Disassembling 2600 Games?" thread that I update and edit. The crossed out items point to links of threads.

 

On 7/18/2019 at 7:19 PM, Dionoid said:

About the game: Fishing Derby is an amazing piece of work in only 2K! I like how the water shimmer works with a pseudo-random number; pretty clever.

I agree. Not something I had in the '80s but it is actually a fun game. It also looks to be a nice game done in AtariBASIC for the A8. It would have made for a really great type-in game / clone in magazines like Antic, ANALOG, or COMPUTE!

 

I like how Dave used HMOVE values and NUSIZ  to construct the shark. I also like the use of slope or linear equation for the fishing line. I guess its touches like this that make his projects stand out.

 

On 7/18/2019 at 7:19 PM, Dionoid said:

Btw which encoding did you use for the fishing_derby.asm file? I'm seeing characters like this: � throughout the comments.

I use an encoding of ANSI. Those may be the 3 exponent used in the kernel for branch instruction cycle counting.

 

[Sknarp]

This was really interesting, not ashamed to say I sat down and read this disassembly like it was a book. Comments very clear and the original code being so tight means it's a good learning exercise. Thank you for posting this.