Hi! |
A|A
(n n)
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For those that knows me, yes, I have been away from the Net
for a long time. But not away from MSX. For those that don't
know me, I'm Cyberknight, Unicorn lover and MSX programmer.
First, the "serious" thing: I have just created an MSX
disassembler. Before someone asks "and what's new about it?",
I'll say. It is written in C and is public domain. It was
inspired on "dasm.c" of fMSX and has many options to make
disassembling easier, including the R800 instruction set,
label exchanging, character offset and many more. The package
also includes a complete I/O Map and lots of BIOS and system
addresses (all directly usable with the disassembler). Even
if you are not a programmer, the documents are worth reading
(I even found the explanation of why MSX was not supposed to
use I/O ports for disk-driver access, as was done in Brazil).
The program is called "Gremlin" (don't ask why) and can be
found in my Page:
http://www.fee.unicamp.br/~claudiom
Now, the "fun stuff": for many times I had asked if
anybody knew how to reach the happy ending of the game "Penguin
Adventure" ("Yume Tairiku Adobentchya-", in Japanese). I have
made a music player for the game some years ago but had no
chance to analyze it better and find out how the ending is
chosen. Now I had. I could be "bad" and say you to check my
Home Page to know what I have discovered, but I'll be a "nice
guy" and tell the secret: pause the game once and JUST ONCE.
That's it! The program will increment a counter that is later
decreased; if it becomes zero, the Happy Ending of Penguin
Adventure is shown. This is certainly the most strange trick I
have ever seen in an MSX game. For those that want more details
about the game (there is now an exclusive Page about it), its
music player (a new version is on the way) or MSX trivia, check
my Page. By the way, once the secrets are undone, there is
TWO passwords for the game: NORIKO and KAZUMI. Both give you
"F5 Key Continue", but with "Noriko" you don't loose your items
("Kazumi" is for those that want to make it not too easy...)
I have to thank the Korean fMSX Team for having made a so
versatile version of fMSX. It is the only I have found that
allows state saving/restoring, screen shot saving and visual
step execution, all in the same emulator (it was not practical
to use my turbo R to analyze the game). By the way, the emulator
I use is a 1995 version. Does anybody have a newer version of it
or there were no further releases? For that matter, is there any
better emulator, I mean one even more versatile, not one that
can execute faster than a NEC supercomputer, not one that have
Thud Sound System, not one that can make a PC talk, but one
that emulates VDP correctly (including its timing), that has
on-screen emulation status (register values, memory dumps etc.),
that can correctly emulate the CPU timing and so on? Thank you
all in advance.
Well, anyway, remember the next time you are playing Penguin
Adventure, pause the game and take a little rest, but only
once...
... Cyberknight...
<Over>
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