Getting started

A commented disassembly of Hole in One Professional, the golf game HAL Laboratory released for the MSX in 1986: a 32 KB cartridge mapped into pages 1 and 2 (0x4000–0xBFFF). It reassembles to the exact ROM, byte for byte, and every one of its 32,768 bytes is accounted for.

The cartridge is not here

No repository distributes the game. Put your own dump in the root as holeinonepro.rom, 32768 bytes, sha256

99900247abc5cff8f12fed900e4ebf783c7a7ecf8d689b4a5cccd85a8416451e

make comprueba verifies it.

What you need

• Python 3 for the tools.
• pasmo and z80dasm to reassemble and check.
• openMSX, only if you want to repeat the VRAM comparison.

Reproducing it

make comprueba    the dump's sha256
make              trace, listing, byte-for-byte reassembly,
                  coherence checks and tests
make densidad     how many instructions carry a comment
make imagenes     draws the images from the ROM
make vram         and compares them against the emulator's VRAM
make web          regenerates this site

make with no arguments is what decides: if the listing does not produce the ROM byte for byte, it fails.

What is in the repository

src/holeinonepro.asm       the listing, generated
src/holeinonepro.notes     the comments, anchored to addresses
src/holeinonepro.entries   the entry points, each with its justification
src/holeinonepro.nocode    the ranges that are NOT code
tools/                     the tools, all of them measurable
tests/                     what is claimed, tied to the binary

The .asm is generated and regenerated. What is edited by hand are the notes: a file of address-anchored directives, so the comments survive a re-trace.

The VRAM comparison

This is the check that decides whether the images are worth anything. The dump comes out of openMSX:

openmsx -machine C-BIOS_MSX1_EU -cart holeinonepro.rom \
        -script tools/omsx_vram.tcl

and then make vram compares, byte for byte, the VRAM tools/graficos.py builds against the real one. 28,240 of 28,240 match across patterns, colour, sprites and all THREE name tables. The 17 cells that differ are the figures the game writes as it plays: the TOP, the shot counts, the hole number, the distance, the par, the wind and the slope.