There are Grobdas, and then there are Grobdas...

Sunday night update. Ploughing through plenty of code, including most of the code for the Andor Genesis (mothership). Mostly straightforward and I've tended to leave unexplained snippets for now, just to get the bulk of the code commented.

A quick scroll through the MAIN CPU listing would suggest around 80% of the code has been commented now. I think the only ground-based enemies that I haven't finished are the Domograms (vehicles that move along paths). I have some idea how they move now, I just haven't dug down into the code yet.

I just hope the law of software development doesn't apply to software reverse-engineering; that is, the last 20% of the code takes 80% of the time!!! 😵

I've also done a few of the airborne enemies, although I'm still unsure of how those enemies are spawned. No doubt buried in some AI, as these formations are somewhat random and as detailed on the flyer itself - depend on how well you're doing in the game. A few details that don't gel with the Namco Wiki information, but I'll get to the truth soon enough.

There are also a few enemies that appear to be unused; not just defined in the object table, but with partially complete handler functions coded, or are functional equivalents of other enemies. Some differ only in the parameters of their behaviour (eg. firing frequency), I'll try to document those in detail when I've finished the RE.

I've been updating my map tool to generate statistics for objects and handler functions. Aside from interesting totals on the numbers of various enemies, it has also aided in identification of unused code. One example is that there are no less than 108 Domograms throughout the 16 areas in the game. Another is that there are a staggering 12 different types of Grobda (tanks) defined in the code (generally with different behaviour).

I should probably press on and comment the remaining sections of the code that can be done with little further actual RE, just to get it out of the way. Then I might take a bit of a break before diving in to try and unravel the AI - maybe update the map tool to graph all the ground-based enemies, and maybe try to get to the bottom of the missing Sol Tower.