Games Exposed

[luny]

By the way routine_09 clearly seems to be the spell casting chance function, for a CHAOS/LAW spell.
It;
- calls random
- compares with casting_chance
- determines success or failure based on comparison (updates spell_success_flag)
- Updates Law (CH_LAW) based on Spell type (spell_chaos_law)
- returns the new CHAOS/LAW in register A

Suggestion for function name: RollSpellChanceAndUpdateWorldChaosLawState

NOTE: That variable CH_LAW, should probably include CHAOS in the name too.


The MPRINT Routine is missing the BC = coordinates in the input parameter list.

Blooming 'eck, this is like being at work. A blasted code review.

[RMartins]

Blooming 'eck, this is like being at work. A blasted code review.

Sorry if it felt like that.
Intention was to help.

[luny]

no, no. Just joking. It's that funny thing you get when reading comments, as they lose emotion and that one felt very dry. But the main joke is I enjoy home coding because you don't get code reviews unless you ask. They just remind me of work were everyone has an opinion. I hope it didn't come over as a criticism, as your comments were polite and just suggestions and helpfulness. I've had those code reviews where others tell you how to do something or decide your approach is wrong (even though there is no justification) and you should do it their way.

[RMartins]

no, no. Just joking. It's that funny thing you get when reading comments, as they lose emotion and that one felt very dry. But the main joke is I enjoy home coding because you don't get code reviews unless you ask. They just remind me of work were everyone has an opinion. I hope it didn't come over as a criticism, as your comments were polite and just suggestions and helpfulness. I've had those code reviews where others tell you how to do something or decide your approach is wrong (even though there is no justification) and you should do it their way.

Well, I think most coders comment in that "dry" mode exactly to avoid triggering emotions on the original coder.
Some people are very touchy, when it comes to their code

To be efficient, comments should stick to facts and/or provable/demonstrable things.
In my view, personal opinions have no place in professional code reviews, because they are just that opinions

Fortunately, Assembly doesn't use curly braces {}

On the other hand, this was not a review, but something new that I found out while taking a peek at the already disassembly/decoded part.

I could eventually participate, if you guys would accept it (submitting PRs), since I enjoy disassembly and have a particular interest in Chaos, since I played it a lot back then, and even to this day ( the PC version).

But time is scarce, and I'm in the process of disassembly something else, in the mist of a lot other side projects, I won't be of much help immediately.

[szeliga]

I've been pretty much offline since July 2022 after buying and renovating a dilapidated house in Wales so am interested in knowing how far Guesser has got with building the Spectranet multi-player version of Chaos.

Does anybody know if he has finished it yet?

[Guesser]

I've been pretty much offline since July 2022 after buying and renovating a dilapidated house in Wales so am interested in knowing how far Guesser has got with building the Spectranet multi-player version of Chaos.

Does anybody know if he has finished it yet?

Um, I've been waiting for you to finish rebuilding your house and plug your raspberry pi back in so I can merge the .ctl files I didn't download...

[Morkin]

The pair of you need to sort yourselves out.

I'll be expecting a Chaos disassembly along with a playable multi-player version of the game on my desk by September.

Now hop to it....

[Guesser]

The pair of you need to sort yourselves out.

I'll be expecting a Chaos disassembly along with a playable multi-player version of the game on my desk by September.

Now hop to it....

September? That's ages away!

/me puts his feet back up for another month or seven

[szeliga]

Um, I've been waiting for you to finish rebuilding your house and plug your raspberry pi back in so I can merge the .ctl files I didn't download...

What, all that stuff from 2020?!

The SSL certificate is out-of-date and refusing to update for some reason but it should all be available at:

https://szeliga.zapto.org/stuff/Chaos/chaos.html

[szeliga]

Hmm, there's clearly still a problem somewhere between my new Sky SR203 router and the Pi. [The firewall's inbound services are set up and pointing at the router's reserved address for the Pi and the NoIP client is running to make sure the domain name/external IP match...]

Anyway - Guesser won't be happy as he is busy but I've put the rest of the CTL files in Dropbox. The "Chaos.html" file contains links to each of the files that still need to be debugged & merged into the rest of the project.



https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r9ixly1x6hu0 ... YNVKa?dl=0

[szeliga]

It seems I can't edit my previous two posts (sorry!) but it looks like the new camera security system was messing up ports 80 and 443 and on my network.

For the hoardes now working on the disassembly, the aforementioned https://szeliga.zapto.org/stuff/Chaos/chaos.html should now be working. There you go, Guesser!

[Usuallydavid]

Guesser and szeliga - I think I can help with your Chaos disassembly effort! I'd been trying on and off over the last few years, but I ended up burning out. I was very happy to see your work linked from the Skoolkit site - you've identified some areas that mystified me for months! In turn, I've documented some areas you might not have got to yet, at least on the files currently hosted on ZXNet.

e.g.
7D03 seems to be the round counter
8324 CHANGE_WIZARD_GRAPHICS
834B LOAD_CURRENT_WIZARD_STATUS
8357 CAST_WIZARD_BUFF_SPELL (e.g magic items, wings, shadow form)
9166 Whether the spell currently being cast is an illusion.
96F3 Computer wizard choosing and casting spell.
97A3 Display spell success/failure message.
E2A0 This table contains the wizard's ID if he's hiding in a magic tree or castle, or on a mount.
... and more.

Here's the HTML for a quick look (free hosting, it'll disappear by 8th March 2023) https://chaos-disassembly20230301.tiiny.site

And here's the .skool file (last Skoolkit version I used was 8.1): https://pastebin.com (slash) XeHmzq9y

Copy anything and everything that is useful to you, I don't mind at all.

I barely knew what I was doing and I didn't expect anyone else to ever look at it, so please forgive any mess or ridiculous comments I might have left in there. I've never programmed in ZX Spectrum assembly, so I've no understanding of labelling conventions. A lot of it won't be 100% accurate, but most things should be roughly sensible. I know there are inaccuracies where I've documented something as doing just one thing, when it actually has multiple uses I've not got round to discovering.

It was fun reading over your work! Hope this helps.

[szeliga]

Brilliant stuff! Guesser is going to be inspired to get back in the saddle, I am sure!

I will download your links before they disappear and take a look (when I get chance )

Thanks!

[szeliga]

It was fun reading over your work! Hope this helps.

It was great to see somebody else take an interest. Guesser was so excited earlier that he banned me from #zx on IRC

Just in case I don't get chance to look at the files before they expire on your temporary hosting, I have put copies at https://szeliga.zapto.org/stuff/Chaos/UsuallyDavid/ but let me know if I have missed anything!

[Morkin]

Re: Chaos - I always wondered why TURMOIL would cause you Speccy to crash if you had too much on screen.

Does anyone know?

I think it's this routine:

https://zxnet.co.uk/spectrum/chaos/asm/8741.html

But I can't get my head round it without a commentary (hint, hint )

I would've thought there should be enough space to move things around (as each thing isn't taking up an extra one).

[worcestersource]

My son’s favourite game on the Speccy is Chaos. We’ve even taken my laptop down the pub for him and his mates to play it. Keeps ‘em quiet whilst we enjoy the football and a few beverages.

If someone gets Turmoil, I found we can get it to work if I rocket the emulator to some ridiculous percentage speed of an original Speccy (10,000% or something).

[SteveSmith]

If someone gets Turmoil, I found we can get it to work if I rocket the emulator to some ridiculous percentage speed of an original Speccy (10,000% or something).

It would be interesting to calculate how long it would have taken a real Spectrum to complete the spell!

On this subject, does anyone know if other details of Chaos are detailed anywhere, such as the chance of gooey blob spreading?

[marenja]

Many years ago I spent A LOT of time disassembling The Sentinel, in the hope that I could make heads and tails of the landscape generator.

Same with me. No success with landscape generator. No success with pass-code generator either.
Game idea is very original but gameplay is too slow if you play hardware speccy.

[lexi]

My son’s favourite game on the Speccy is Chaos. We’ve even taken my laptop down the pub for him and his mates to play it. Keeps ‘em quiet whilst we enjoy the football and a few beverages.

If someone gets Turmoil, I found we can get it to work if I rocket the emulator to some ridiculous percentage speed of an original Speccy (10,000% or something).

great to hear it's still got an active player base! do they have any ideas for features or improvements? i'm collecting some here: https://github.com/spontificae/ChaosCE/tree/RC1

[worcestersource]

great to hear it's still got an active player base! do they have any ideas for features or improvements? i'm collecting some here: https://github.com/spontificae/ChaosCE/tree/RC1

Looks good. I liked some of the extra spells that was in Lords of Chaos, like tangleweed, flood and giant spiders.

I always thought the graphics would benefit from being tarted up a bit, although that could be part of the charm.

[lexi]

Looks good. I liked some of the extra spells that was in Lords of Chaos, like tangleweed, flood and giant spiders.

Same - and those are great ideas! Would tangleweed kill or just immobolise wizards? Would flood spread out all at once then evaporate, or spread over several turns?

I always thought the graphics would benefit from being tarted up a bit, although that could be part of the charm.

I'm torn on that question really - how much (if any) can you add to a classic without destroying the essence of what you claim to love?

Poring over the zxnet disassembly these past few months eventually led me here - so thrilled to find even more disassembly here as well!

Played this game setup the last few nights with my kid:


The javascript inputs a file like MagicalWoods.txt:

Code: Select all

1-T---T7--T---2
T---T---T---T--
--T---T---T---T
T---T---T---T--
4-T---T---T---5
T---T---T---T--
--T---T---T---T
T---T---T---T--
--T---T---T---T
6---T--7T---T-8

and outputs a .pokfile for each item which updates the map_object/properties and frame tables. Also discovered through incompetence that setting the player index to the ninth player brings up the (ASLEEP) string since it comes right after Wizard 8. So the poke also includes a couple lines to overwrite that string with 'nature'.

No crashes, but a few new unintended, um, features like being trapped in a magic wood till it gives you a new spell. Haven't looked into the fixes for that yet.

Simple enough change, right? Really fun, but it plays soo differently to vanilla Chaos.. my first 2 games the computer wiped me out in the first few turns.. and both the 3rd and 4th games ended in draw

[worcestersource]

So I’d say tanglewood would be like wall but ultimately destroyable and flammable. It’d just be a mechanism to slow things down as they’d have to fight their way out. I suppose you could cast it and it’d throw down x amount of squares in its vicinity. Just like LoC.

Flood wouldn’t grow but would be a barrier to fire. I guess it’d be just like wall or maybe even it’s traversable?

Thinking about the forum thread on teleport, a teleport spell would be cool. You could teleport your wizard or teleport away another creature.

[lexi]

It seems I can't edit my previous two posts (sorry!) but it looks like the new camera security system was messing up ports 80 and 443 and on my network.

For the hoardes now working on the disassembly, the aforementioned https://szeliga.zapto.org/stuff/Chaos/chaos.html should now be working. There you go, Guesser!

Thanks so much for this! Great stuff!

starting from the git repo, i've got a patchfile which (as separate commits):

• updates the macros to work with latest skoolkit
• adds some unix/mac .sh script replacements for the .bat files
• imports all the work i could find on your site
• adds some of my own edits

it's about 80k, which feels impolite to try uploading here.. and i should prob check with copyright holders and scrub my email before adding to postbin or somesuch - i'll keep working on it though and adding any more suggestions i find in this thread

[Morkin]

Nice work everyone, I'm glad that we might eventually see a full Chaos disassembly, as it's the best game on the Speccy.

Here are some life-long questions that I'm hoping to have answered (though someone might know the answers without the disassembly):

• Are illusionary creatures tougher than real ones? I swear any time a giant rat survives one of my attacks it turns out to be illusionary about 90% of the time
• Exactly how does the manoeuvre rating work? Under what circumstances can you move away from an engaged enemy/undead? Does it just depend on your own/your creatures's manouevre rating, or does it include that of the creature you're engaged to, or other factors, as well
• You can see physical/magical resistance, attack strengths etc. How can I work out the % probability of being killed by something (e.g. creature/magic bolt)
• How come some dead creatures get 're-animated' when they get absorbed by a gooey blob, and then that blob gets destroyed?
• What are the criteria for randomisation of spells? What's stopping your spell list containing, like, 8 x dire wolf spells?

[SteveSmith]

There is this c.s.s. post from 2002 which answers some of those questions:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.si ... yB3qSj3D4J

It's hardly authoritative, but I used it as one of my sources for my remake. And I always assumed that Illusions had exactly the same "toughness" as real creatures. I think only a disassembly (or Julian chiming in) will tell us for certain.