Home Alone 2 (NES) source code found/made available

[koitsu]

https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status ... 7161255938

Briefly skimmed it -- very messy, IMO. But hey, 1992, what can you do.

[rainwarrior]

If you think code isn't messy in 2016 I strongly beg to differ.

[freem]

It's always neat to have more examples of what commercial NES game code looks like; thanks for the heads up.

[M_Tee]

Saw a bunch of exe files in that. Think any are development tools? I've often been curious as to what programs were being used for development then. I'm certain not every game had a guy that took colored-pencil sprites on graph paper and transcribed them to hex, haha.

[freem]

Saw a bunch of exe files in that. Think any are development tools? I've often been curious as to what programs were being used for development then.

Most likely; here are some results after looking through the files in the "UTL" directory:

• A65.EXE looks to be a 6502 assembler.
• CMATCH.EXE and CMERGE.EXE are probably dev tools, but I'm not sure what they're for.
• CNGNIN.EXE: "This utility replaces the color palette information in dest.nin with the palette information from source.nin"
• CSM.EXE: "merge part of font from source to destination."
• DL.EXE, if I had to guess, seems to be used for downloading data to a development cartridge...
• L2G.EXE: "LBM2GRP - LBM to GRP Converter Rev 1.0 (1/22/92)" (as a USA company, that'd be 1992/01/22 under YYYY/MM/DD)
• L2N.EXE: "LBM2NIN - lbm to nin Converter Rev 1.0 June 7, 1991" (Probably the main tool used for graphics conversion, given the number of LBM files in the archive)
• LOD2BIN.EXE: Converts .LOD to binary files, presumably.
• LOD2RAW.EXE: "LOD2RAW - .LOD to .RAW File Conversion Utility Rev 0.0"
• MW.EXE: "MakeWorld" graphical program (uses a mouse)
• NIN2LOD.EXE: Converts .NIN files to .LOD files, whatever each of those are.
• NIN2OBJ2.EXE: Converts a .NIN to assembler source?
• NIN2RAW.EXE: Converts .NIN files to a .RAW file.
• TXTCMP.EXE: "TXTCMP - Text Compression Rev 1.0"
• RAWMRG.EXE: "RAWMRG - Raw Screen Map Merge Rev 0.1"
• RLCMP.EXE: "RLCMP - Run-Length Compression Rev 0.1"
• TXTCMP.EXE: "TXTCMP - Text Compression Rev 1.0"

[Drew Sebastino]

I don't even know what I'm looking for: it's just a bunch of file folders with even more file folders inside with a bunch of unrecognizable files inside of those.

That's a ton of unnecessary files, as they could be combined, but I know I'm not the best one to be saying that.

[nesrocks]

I find it insane how he asked "does anyone want it?". Man... How many source codes and tools were deleted because people thought nobody wanted them.

[thefox]

Pretty cool.

I got it to compile... kind of. Had to hack around a bit in some of the BAT scripts and Makefiles, and to remove some code/data (randomly) to avoid bank overflows. But at least it got past the title screen. Maybe there's some other way to get it to compile cleanly.

By the way, even without compiling, in directory PUB there are files B3PROG1.BIN (128 KB PRG-ROM) and B3CSET.BIN (128 KB CHR-ROM). The checksum of the CHR file matches the retail ROM that I have, but PRG doesn't. It seems to run fine when converted into an iNES ROM, but I didn't notice any differences.

[lidnariq]

The only major difference between the (U)[!] PRG and the one in the zip seems to be the insertion of two bytes at file offset 52105 ... or, I guess, more precisely, changing something that's 10 bytes in B3PROG1 with something that's 12 bytes long.

There's a few other things that appear to be changing pointers to compensate.

[psc]

Saw a bunch of exe files in that. Think any are development tools? I've often been curious as to what programs were being used for development then. I'm certain not every game had a guy that took colored-pencil sprites on graph paper and transcribed them to hex, haha.

I've talked to some devs from back in the day, and they said that Deluxe Paint was the typical art program used.

[3gengames]

Phew, that code has all the right ideas, but organization+comments looks to be a disaster. Pretty awesome to see a source, though. I also like how they used the incorrect startup code instead of an indirect pointer slower method that takes less space. Also, Potato Technologies is a great name for a company. This is awesome.

[GradualGames]

10 PRINT "I EXPERIENCED NOSTALGIC FEELS JUST FROM THE CAPITALIZED SHORTENED FILE NAMES."
20 PRINT "I GREW UP ON QBASIC."
30 GOTO 10

[ccovell]

?SN ERROR LINE 10: "FEELS" INVALID SYNTAX; PROUST WOULD DISAPPROVE.