A fellow retro enthusiast by the name of Miro expressed interest in the porting (transcoding) of Sean Riddle's Galaxian dissassembly to a higher level language and asked if anyone was willing to collaborate. Given that the codebase is very similar to Scramble, and the hardware identical, I thought I'd be a decent candidate for the job. I know the Scramble starmap isn't finished on the Neo Geo, but I figured since I'd need to do it for Galaxian anyway, there would be no harm starting this new project.
I'm going to try to document more of the process this time around, rather than focus on progress. I'll still write about any interesting aspects of the code, or issues with the transcode, but I'm hoping this will serve as a reference/instruction for Miro and anyone else interested in giving something like this a go.
Miro's expertise is not in Z80 assembler (the point of the exercise for him) or C, so he will be porting/transcoding to Javascript. Given I know very little about Javascript, I'm hoping my process is compatible with what he needs to do. It'll certainly be an interesting experiment.
I'll be able to start with the bones of the Scramble project. In fact, for me it's pretty much a case of renaming a few files and high-level functions, ripping new graphics, and replacing my monolithic transcode of Scramble with that of Galaxian. And tonight I did just that. My makefile now builds both Scramble and Galaxian executables; it's just that Galaxian looks very much like Scramble atm - I'd even go as far as to say identical! ☺
In my next post I'll talk about ripping the graphics and the format I've chosen.
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