SUDDEN DESU

disassemblies・digital archaeology・data preservation

Recalhorn - Object Debugger and Unused Strings

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...

Rod-Land and R&T - Prototype, location test code, stage editor, and more...

Ah, Rod Land, the colorful and popular Jaleco platformer known mostly for its home computer ports, especially on the Amiga. 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 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 all the interesting bits.

SUDDEN DESU Mk.5