NickH93 Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 (edited) So as i get more and more in to this atari scene i stumble upon problems and questions (as i am only 16 and got into it after finding my dads old atari stuff) but anyways, i have been trying to hack games on disk. my question, is there a way to decompile a game written in a different assembly language other than BASIC? thanks Edited May 23, 2009 by NickH93 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 So as i get more and more in to this atari scene i stumble upon problems and questions (as i am only 16 and got into it after finding my dads old atari stuff) but anyways, i have been trying to hack games on disk. my question, is there a way to decompile a game written in a different assembly language other than BASIC?thanks Errrrr... BASIC isn't assembly language, its a high level language. You need a disassembler. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nukey Shay Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 Keep in mind that if you want to disassemble commercial machine-language programs, they may have copy-protection techniques employed to thwart the disassembly process. You may be better off doing this cross-platform. Not only will you have the advantage of using an modern computer's emulator debug menu to aide in the labelling procedure (as the program is executed...so you can keep close watch for changes), but also that disk images of commercial games generally already have such copy-protections defeated. Otherwise, you are basically reinventing the same wheel from scratch. What programs are you interested in? Anything specific? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickH93 Posted May 23, 2009 Author Share Posted May 23, 2009 oh...see Groovybee im still learning lol. but i have a program called sector disassembler...im not too clear on how to use it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 oh...see Groovybee im still learning lol. but i have a program called sector disassembler...im not too clear on how to use it I don't have a problem with learning. Sounds to me like you've thrown yourself in at the deep end. You need to write assembly language programs before you can really understand other peoples work. Especially when all label names and comments are removed from the source (as is the case for a disassembly). You haven't a chance of removing game protection if you only have limited exposure to the language and don't know how the hardware (6502 CPU and supporting peripheral chips) work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 na. na... don't discourage people... first of all great that a 16year guy starts into atari coding... remember how we all started...in changing colours... so... yeah... you can start to play around with existing games with your sector editor and try to mess around... first of all... get atari800win as emulator...you can load exe(xex) files which are stand alone files written in assembly. these exe are hard to edit with sector editors as you would need to copy them to a real disc or virtual atr disc... so... check out atari.fandal.cz and get games you want to mess around... then go to atariarchives.org and get some clue about the atari hardware esp. the antic/gtia graphics chipset... a good sector editor is a tool called happy master quad+... here http://freenet-homepage.de/mrbacardi/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 na. na... don't discourage people... first of all great that a 16year guy starts into atari coding... I wasn't trying to discourage him. Kids just want "instant results" and no hard work in my opinion. Its much better to start learning to write programs and then move on to your own simple games, before hacking existing games. He has the rest of his life to learn how to do the neat stuff . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 f.e. me started in messing around with existing games... going through discs and changing texts... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 f.e. me started in messing around with existing games... going through discs and changing texts... I started learning assembler by writing my own code. This involved writing the code, converting each instruction into a sequence of decimal numbers by hand and poking them into memory and finally executing it. I'm very glad things have moved on since then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickH93 Posted May 23, 2009 Author Share Posted May 23, 2009 na. na... don't discourage people... first of all great that a 16year guy starts into atari coding... I wasn't trying to discourage him. Kids just want "instant results" and no hard work in my opinion. Its much better to start learning to write programs and then move on to your own simple games, before hacking existing games. He has the rest of his life to learn how to do the neat stuff . i am aware that its going to take alot of hard work. I am actually in the process of writing a game...and i wrote a few simple programs like a guitar tuner (useless but still cool) lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 i am aware that its going to take alot of hard work. I am actually in the process of writing a game...and i wrote a few simple programs like a guitar tuner (useless but still cool) lol Are you writing it in assembler, BASIC or "C"? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickH93 Posted May 23, 2009 Author Share Posted May 23, 2009 (edited) i am aware that its going to take alot of hard work. I am actually in the process of writing a game...and i wrote a few simple programs like a guitar tuner (useless but still cool) lol Are you writing it in assembler, BASIC or "C"? i am using BASIC. I dont know what to do with assembler. Any help? Edited May 23, 2009 by NickH93 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 I'm not an A8 programmer, Atari consoles are where I'm at (so our choices are different). Have you looked in the A8 programming forum on here? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickH93 Posted May 23, 2009 Author Share Posted May 23, 2009 I'm not an A8 programmer, Atari consoles are where I'm at (so our choices are different). Have you looked in the A8 programming forum on here? Yeah. what are the choices on the atari because i am doing all this on an atari 800XL Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted May 23, 2009 Share Posted May 23, 2009 Yeah. what are the choices on the atari because i am doing all this on an atari 800XL I'd download an emulator and get that set up first. Then you can code on your PC. The turnaround time from coding to final executable will be much quicker and I think you'll enjoy it more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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