This is a great little collection of classic Namco games - Pac-Man, Rally X, Dig Dug, Mappy, Galaga and Xevious. Not only are the original games faithfully recreated, there's an 'arranged' mode for each with new graphics, music and gameplay. Oh, and there are bunches of debug tools leftover...

It's a little late but... Happy New Year!

To start the new year off, I've been going over old articles looking for improvements and fixes to make. I decided to tackle Tinkle Pit and its stage select that I discovered three years ago but just couldn't get working. Along the way I found a bunch of other stuff too. The article has been completely rewritten with all the new findings, so go check it out!

I've also set up a Patreon for the site. If there was an article that you found particularly interesting or helpful, consider a donation. Income helps me justify spending weekends staring at bytecode from 30+ year old arcade games to my wife. :)

Thanks for being a reader! Here's to another year of disassemblies!

Platformer arcade games were a bit rare, so it's a shame that Recalhorn (that's ree-cal-horn, according to the katakana) never got past the location test stage. The graphics are quite nice, even beautiful in some backgrounds, and while the gameplay isn't ground-breaking, it's classic and solid. But other people have written better reviews than I ever could, so let's just jump into what I found...

Phantasm is a creative take on platform shooters, where as a ghost you can posess the bodies of enemies on screen as your person avatar. It's a well-made game, definitely 'hidden gem' status. It also has a very nice selection of debugging tools!

Just a  quick  article this time around after Zerochan, who is writing an exhaustive Raimais guide, asked me to take a look at the game and see if I could find any debug leftovers. Do level select and invulnerability count? Yes they do! I'll even throw in a bonus (probably-)never-before-seen game ending!

Ah, Rod Land, the colorful and popular JALECO platformer from the 80's, mostly known for its home computer (especially Amiga) ports. The arcade version is the original, though, and has the most content and best graphics.

It's been more than two years since I first started taking the game apart. I was new to disassembling arcade code at that point and was making pretty slow progress on understanding what I was finding. Every few months I would pick it back up and chip away at it some more, but never formalized anything into an article.

Well, I decided to finally power through it about a month ago, and here we are. This is the most thorough disassembly I've done to date, and this article covers the interesting bits.