Getting started

This repository does not carry the cartridge. It carries what you need to regenerate everything from your own copy and check that what it says is true.

What you need

• Python 3 for the tools.
• pasmo for the reassembly (make verify).
• openMSX only if you want to check the pictures against the VRAM.
• Your copy of knightmare.rom, in the root. Exactly 32,768 bytes, and

  sha256  6e7a8a2d2fadc078ec9043deee804cfa5efcf2eb64f2fb6291a5161776220cf6

make comprueba tells you whether it is the same one.

The four steps

make comprueba     # is your ROM this one
make               # listing, reassembly, sanity checks and tests
make imagenes      # draws the stages, the sprites and the screens
make vram          # checks those pictures against openMSX's VRAM

make is the one that matters. It chains four things:

1. listado traces the flow from the entry points declared in src/knightmare.entries and generates src/knightmare.asm with the comments from src/knightmare.notes.
2. verify reassembles that listing with pasmo and compares the sha256 with your ROM's. If they differ, the disassembly is worthless and it stops there.
3. sanity checks what the reassembly canNOT catch: that no area declared as data comes out as code, that no entry point falls inside a data block, and that not one byte is left unassigned.
4. test runs the 23 checks in tests/.

How the listing is organised

The listing is generated; it is not hand-edited. What is edited is src/knightmare.notes, and out of it come the labels, the line comments, the block headers and the data ranges with their name and description. Every comment is anchored to its address, so it survives a re-trace.

src/knightmare.entries holds the entry points the trace cannot deduce on its own — the interrupt hook, the addresses pushed onto the stack so they run on return, the tables that sit behind a call — each with the reason it is declared. If we cannot say WHY it is code, it is not declared.

The numbers, measured

make sanity        # the bytes of code and data, which add up to 32,768
make densidad      # the routines and the share of commented lines

Not one number on this site is written by eye: they all come out of those two commands, and there are tests watching them.