la serie/

The series database

The forty-eight MSX disassemblies in the series and the two patches, gathered into a single record that copies no figure: it measures them. Every number on this site comes from datos/serie.json, and that file comes from running the tools over the repositories and the binaries.

Why measure again, when each repository already says so

Because published figures age. Each game's card was written the day it was published; if someone later goes back to the listing and comments another pass, the site keeps quoting the old one. Building this turned up five: Trailblazer published 30.7 % when its listing gave 30.8 %, and the same held for Hole in One, Hyper Rally, Hyper Sports 2 and Nemesis. In Trailblazer the history showed why: the listing was touched in a commit later than the README's. All five are fixed, and the front page no longer lets a figure through that is not the measured one.

What came out of looking at all of them together

• The same routine goes by twelve names. The joystick-and-keyboard read is thirty-six identical bytes across eighteen cartridges, and every repository named it its own way. What they share.
• Seventeen cartridges carry Konami's hidden mark, and all seventeen give the same catalogue number their card publishes. The mark.
• 13 cartridges defend themselves, all 13 of them Konami's. They write inside their own space: from ROM it never lands and looks like dead code, but in a copy loaded into RAM it breaks the game. The protections.
• Demonia is signed by Claude Sablatou, and Trailblazer carries the full list of its authors inside. The credits.
• Konami's cartridges fall into families, and not by year or catalogue number: Hyper Olympic 1 and 2 share 67 % of their code, and Athletic Land and Cabbage Patch 44 %. The families.
• Not one of the forty-eight has a single routine below 10 % commented. That is the bar for the series, checked here in one go over today's listings.