New Tutorial: T2Demo WHDLoad

[Crackersixx]

Hi all,

My tutorial of T2: The Arcade Game (coverdisk demo) is available in the zone and also on my website at www.reversers.net (under amiga->tutorials)

Feedback, corrections, etc... appreciated

-C6

[Galahad/FLT]

I liked the tutorial, easy to read and well explained.

1). Could have gone into more detail as to how you know how to convert the sector values given by the game to be converted into something WHDLoad understands, otherwise you run the risk of people not understanding how you got to get WHDLoad to correctly the data correctly.

2). Is it enough to simply look for that one MOVEM.L header for the RNC loader? By giving people other clues such as looking for code containing $55555555 (in ascii as 'UUUU') or $dff07e, $dff020, $dff024, you give people a little more understanding as to how to find a loader. Remember not all loaders are RNC, but by giving a little more information you help others to find other loaders in other games. After all, a tutorial is a step toward doing another game

All in all though, a good tutorial that wasn't too 'techy' in its writing and was written so most people with even a basic grasp on coding could achieve.

Perhaps commenting the slave code more would help others to understand.

[Jerry]

Nice tutorial Crackersixx. Had a good read.

[Anubis]

Links where to find/buy tools needed would be helpfull in tutorial. Took me couple hours just to find couple of tools.

[Joe Maroni]

tell me what you are missing..

[Crackersixx]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'll be updating the tut with further info from galahad about how the disk layout translates to whdload (which I intended to include in the first place)

I may also host the needed tools on my site as well and just make mention of that in the tutorial.

[Codetapper]

You should also add the code I sent you about detecting the quitkey while you're at it!

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by x_to

tell me what you are missing..

Even stuff I found is not the same version like tutorials. (ReSource I have is version 4.0)

Can you put in the zone all of it?

[Crackersixx]

Codetapper: I still havent gotten the quitkey functionality to work... Maybe I am hooking a bad location, i dunno, but when i press a key with a breakpoint at my location, the BP does break in.

I've just gotten a new HD for my 1200 and I am installing os3.9 so I have to wait a few more days until I can get back to trying to figure out the rest of the issues on this slave.

[Wepl]

some comments

there is a macro in ReSource which called 'Disassemble BOOT sector', it directly reads the 2 sectors from disk in df0: and disassembles.
requires that a physical disk is present but would save some steps in the beginning of your example.

in the whdload slave structure you use:

                dc.l    $80000                  ;ws_BaseMemSize
                ...
_expmem         dc.l    $80000                  ;ws_ExpMem

but later:

_MemPatch
		move.l	#$80000,d0
		rts

I think this is buggy and must be:

_MemPatch
		move.l	(_expmem,pc),d0
		rts

cause you have no mem at $80000, you have only chip upto $80000 and expmem somewhere of the length = $80000
or is maybe the expmem anyway not used within this game?

it should be noted, that for sequences like:

		lea	$70000,a0		;Rob Northen Patch
		move.w	#$4ef9,(a0)+
		pea	_RobNorthenLoader(pc)
		move.l	(sp)+,(a0)+

there are macros in "whdmacros.i" defined which will create the same code by using:

		patch	$70000,_RobNorthenLoader	;Rob Northen Patch

if you dont use these macros you also dont need to include whdmacros.i
and new whdload versions provide the feature of patch list (resload_Patch) which will make this even more compact

but really nice to see such tutorials hope to see more new slaves soon...