reversing famicom maniac mansion

sanguinehearts · Post by **sanguinehearts** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:51 pm

Im posting this in the Junkyard, because at this time it has nothing to do with ScummVM.
Im currently looking for a person willing to take over a project I dabbled with, its for the japanese famicom(nes) version of maniac mansion
which does not use the SCUMM engine instead uses one written by Jaleco Japan specifically for the game.
I can send you all the stuff I have so far,
most of it is thanks to help I recieved from sev

I have currently an Interactive Disassembler file with the
game correctly loaded in, a few known registers (audio joypad etc) commented, and also have an emulator which shows a live view of the memory in hex, which is useful as it shows what is being written to or read from at any one time.
I also have a document in which I have written a little history of the game and a full game credit listing
Im handing over this project because I dont want to lose it, I do not have the technical ability to enable me to do this and I just dont have the time.

An interested person should have
in depth knowledge of 6502 assembly code
knowledge of the reverse engineering process and a
copy of the game is neccesary for this. But I can provide an original cartridge to anyone willing to take it further than I have.
Robert

sanguinehearts · Post by **sanguinehearts** » Fri Aug 03, 2007 8:30 pm

A little more information has been posted here
http://rewiki.regengedanken.de/wiki/Man ... Famicom%29

sanguinehearts · Post by **sanguinehearts** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 8:45 pm

Ok, it appears after some thought about this Im approaching it from the wrong angle, Instead of dumping this on someone
I would like to propose the following

Is there anyone out there who has ever thought, 'I would love to learn to reverse engineer games'
Maybe you felt a little intimidated by the thought of a huge project all to yourself?

If anyone wants feels like that maybe you could join this project and work on it with me? that way we could both learn together? Im sure _sev would be able to offer some support and guidance, as he seemed interested in this project when I started up.
two heads(or more) are better than one. and what better way to work towards learning to reverse engineer than by learning alongside someone else on a real project.

I hope this approach yields some interest as I would love to keep working on this and would also love someone else to be interested, as I know _sev just doesnt have the spare time to work on this alongside all his other duties as a ScummVM developer.

to anyone interested view the above link, I will provide you with all the elements needed to enable you to work on this legally.

As a side note I neglected to mention earlier the hopeful outcome of this project.
It would be to reverse the game to such a state that an engine could be built(coded) to be plugged into ScummVM at some point in the future, allowing playback of this classic rare oddity, and therefore allowing ScummVM to play the entire Maniac Mansion back catalogue.

Thanks for your time
Robert

timofonic · Post by **timofonic** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 8:23 pm

I think the problem is the lack of technical people related to NES scene in this forum.

I found the following information resources, maybe it can be useful for finding people interested in your project.

http://nesdev.parodius.com/bbs/
http://nesdevwiki.org
http://nsrt.edgeemu.com/forum/

IRC: #nesdev at efnet

sanguinehearts · Post by **sanguinehearts** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 1:22 pm

Thanks for the tips, it didnt even cross my mind to point this towards the skilled nes community, even though I frequent the sites often enough
Cheers
Rob

corpse · Post by **corpse** » Thu Aug 09, 2007 7:26 pm

I would be very interested in helping, but I know next to nothing about Reverse engineering. I have a limited knowledge of various programing languages

But on the other hand I am very eager to learn, also a very quick learner. Also this project does sound very interesting.

PsYcO · Post by **PsYcO** » Thu Aug 09, 2007 7:32 pm

i have a question, would the techniques/skill used in RE-ing a nes game be the same as RE-ing a DOS or Windows game?

i assume from The Madventurer's post, that there two very different things

sanguinehearts · Post by **sanguinehearts** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 6:15 pm

well, the assembly language for a dos game would be different to nes, as nes uses 6502 assembly, the process however would be the same.

clem · Post by **clem** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 9:08 pm

sanguinehearts wrote:well, the assembly language for a dos game would be different to nes, as nes uses 6502 assembly, the process however would be the same.

also note that the graphics system is vastly different - NES being tile-based, DOS just having a memory area where you just dump your pixels into, so making sense of the code will need someone familiar with that