Every man and his dog...

It seems Donkey Kong is a ripe candidate for (commented) disassembly - I now know of possibly three (3) disassemblies which would make mine the 4th!

The first as I mentioned is Sockmaster's listing, created when he ported it to the 6809-based TRS-80 Color Computer (aka Coco). The 2nd I learned about only yesterday, Jeff Kulczycki's listing, created when he added the 5th Foundry level. AFAIK this listing hasn't been released in the public domain. The 3rd I discovered today on the Donkey Kong forums; a reasonably comprehensive disassembly from what I've seen so far.

With all these available you may wonder (as do I) why I'm bothering to do my own. You can be certain I will be using all the information from the latter, just as I have Sockmaster's, but even that is lacking in some key areas I've already encountered. For example, the code to draw the levels is relatively uncommented (save for rather pointless comments such as 'subtract 10 from A'). So I will be taking everything available, verifying it to my own satisfaction, and merging it into my own IDAPro disassembly. Ultimately I aim to have the most comprehensive disassembly, and I should be able to generate fully-relocatable Z80 code (alongside my 68K port of course).

For instance, tonight I have been working on the aforementioned code that draws the levels, and thus far have deciphered the routines for drawing girders and ladders. The rest of the draw routines should follow quite easily from here. I suspect Jeff has managed to do as much (as he added a 5th level) but no-one else seems to have done so before.

But enough words and more eye-candy. The attract mode now cycles through all three screens, but of course the game-play demo is currently a static, tilemap-only, rendering.

The Neo Geo cycles through all 3 in attract mode

On par with the disassembly, I have coded the girder and ladder drawing routines, and made use of the ability to specify any level for the attract mode. The results vary from level-to-level, but it's a good indication that I've got these routines working correctly.

The 4 levels, girders and ladders only

And that's about as far as I'm going to get without any sprites. So it's back to my ripping software to convert Donkey Kong's sprites to Neo Geo format; nothing too different than the tiles so I'm expecting that to be a straightforward process. Then I can get Kong rendered on the title screen, before the infinitely more daunting task of delving into the game-play (attract mode).