Weird programming in Roms?
Posted: 09 Jun 2022 22:51
Hi.
I was wondering if any one have analyzed the code in the Roms of the Memotech Computer. I asked Andy some years ago, if he discovered any diffirence between the code in the Roms, as I remember he said there was no diffirences in the roms, so I guess the Roms was more or less bugfree, and Memotech did not have to change anything.
They patched the roms with hardware, for other countries like Danish, Finish etc by Like solder an extra rom chip on the exsisting one in the Computer.
I was also wondering have seen some weird code, like code that could be optimized, or some very clever optimized code we could learn from ? Back in those days, a lot of dirty tricks was used, and it was quite common, to do somethin that was not good programming, but it got the job done, and even faster than make good clean code. Thats why some dissassemblers get confused sometimes, when looking at that code. It was also very common in Arcade games. I was told there also was put in traps in Arcade games, not sure why maybe to foul others with the code so they didn steal the code. I an Colecovision game I saw something, where they detect if the game is running in RAM, if so the game overwrites itself and crash. I guess that was to prevent ColecoVIsion games to be copied to Disk/Tapes and run on the Adam in CP/M. But if you know how to transfer a Cartrigde to Disk, you might also know how to remove that check
I was wondering if any one have analyzed the code in the Roms of the Memotech Computer. I asked Andy some years ago, if he discovered any diffirence between the code in the Roms, as I remember he said there was no diffirences in the roms, so I guess the Roms was more or less bugfree, and Memotech did not have to change anything.
They patched the roms with hardware, for other countries like Danish, Finish etc by Like solder an extra rom chip on the exsisting one in the Computer.
I was also wondering have seen some weird code, like code that could be optimized, or some very clever optimized code we could learn from ? Back in those days, a lot of dirty tricks was used, and it was quite common, to do somethin that was not good programming, but it got the job done, and even faster than make good clean code. Thats why some dissassemblers get confused sometimes, when looking at that code. It was also very common in Arcade games. I was told there also was put in traps in Arcade games, not sure why maybe to foul others with the code so they didn steal the code. I an Colecovision game I saw something, where they detect if the game is running in RAM, if so the game overwrites itself and crash. I guess that was to prevent ColecoVIsion games to be copied to Disk/Tapes and run on the Adam in CP/M. But if you know how to transfer a Cartrigde to Disk, you might also know how to remove that check