C64 Sea Wolf Disassembly - Part 2

A video for any folks that want to dive deeper into the innards of C64 Sea Wolf, going through enough detail to make your head explode (and I still didn't cover everything! :D)

[@terryraymond7984]

I have the Rodney Zacks 6502 book very handy for Opp codes

[@terryraymond7984]

very interesting with the Random number generation

[@IshiTheLastYihi]

Yeah, agree, first time I've ever dived into the details of how such things are implemented. I still wonder how the original author concocted it? Did he use some kind of computer science approach with a proof of its performance? Did he just cobble something together that just seemed to do the job ok? Did he borrow it from an existing/established algorithm? I've got no idea, but maybe one day I might get more clues about this :-)

[@terryraymond7984]

thank you for explaining the CIA and the DAC

[@IshiTheLastYihi]

Thank you for appreciating that section, it was one of the most complicated slides I had in the presentation. I think it had over 100 animation actions in it, and took about 5 hours to prepare! :-)

[@terryraymond7984]

so a lot of that stuff is in the C64 programmers reference guide

[@IshiTheLastYihi]

Yeah, I loved the c64 ref guide when I was a kid/teen and read it fervently. At that age, I perceived it as a kind of perfect book that had all the answers, and I was just not smart enough to comprehend what it was saying. Now as an adult, maybe I can assess it with a more critical eye, acknowledge the occasional flaws and mistakes it had that were muddling up my understanding. Ah well, that's ok, we all make mistakes, even Commodore engineers and documenters make them, good to know we're all human :-)

[@terryraymond7984]

Are those like labels the ones that end with a colon?

[@IshiTheLastYihi]

Yeah, at least that's the notation for labels used by the acme compiler. It's possible other compilers use other ways to annotate a label (maybe some use a dot at the start of the label name?)

[@terryraymond7984]

thats the problem with ML it overtakes my brain :-)

[@IshiTheLastYihi]

Hehe, agree, my head was in a mess looking at so much assembly code, glad this journey is over and I can take a break from it! :D