Omnimaga
Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: DJ Omnimaga on October 22, 2009, 05:32:22 am
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In 2003, there was a TI-83 and TI-83+ RPG project in the works by Timendus, who used to frequent MaxCoderz forums. It was called The Core Of Light, a grayscale RPG in the style of Final Fantasy and Zelda. Unfortunately, it went dormant ever since and was never released. Today, the game has been released as it is now, on Ticalc.org (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/422/42266.html), as the author has long since moved on in real life.
(http://www.omnimaga.org/images/screenshots/tcol.gif)
The game comes with no readme, but it is compatible with Ion and if you use a TI-83+ or TI-84+, after installing Ion, you must delete everything from your calculator, including the entire archive, then delete prgmION and prgmIONZ, as the game fits very tight in your RAM and archived programs still takes a dozen of bytes of RAM. The game is not compatible with MirageOs. I ran it only once from there, on my second attempt. On the other 3 attempts, the calculator froze, so you have to use Ion shell.
Controls are 2nd to confirm, ALPHA to cancel, MODE to enter the menu and arrows to move. If the game runs very slow, press MODE then go into settings to change the interrupt frequency. Generally, at the highest settings, the game will run faster, but grayscale quality will be poorer. It may be the opposite on certain calculator models. Do not keep the contrast at its default setting, increase it more, else you'll see nothing anymore after applying grayscale changes.
The game is also extremly hard. It is my fourth attempt at trying to pass through the guards, to no avail. As a result, I am in the impossibility to tell you the battle controls.
Anyway, enjoy an old unfinished game that many people back when I joined the TI community were looking forward.
We will probably add the file in our archives in the near future (along with a few others).
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Hmm, interesting, any idea on it's DCS compatability?
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This seems interesting... Do you by any chance know how far he went to? Like, was it 80% complete... etc?
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only one chapter out of 4 was done. 4 movie-only chapters were supposed to be done too, making it 8 parts, but were never done either.
There was also a 2006 trailer while the project was shortly revived. It was posted as wmv file on Maxcoderz and is still avaliable over here:
http://timendus.student.utwente.nl/~tcol/downloads/TCOL%20teaser.wmv
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Damn D: Looks nice, a shame it didn't get finished /:
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Looks cool! But very difficult at the same time :P should be fun though. Shame it was never finished, although its cool it was released.
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Heh that looks pretty good. Tis a shame that i was never completed. Is there anyway to get the source code so that maybe somebody could add on to it or something?
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From what I can gather, the source code is most likely lost (maybe hard drive failure), as the author would probably have included it with the game. It's probably the remnants of the projects. I don't remember what happened, though, because I didn't check MC forums as much after 2006 and before that, from 2003 to 2005, when I was very active there, I saw no news from the project, just kept hearing about TCOL and wondered what it was. Good ol' memories :P
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You could always de-compile it. :P Anyways, that game looks nice. Really tis a shame that he stopped
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As a somewhat experienced z80 reverse-engineer, I can assure you that decompiling a project of this size is supermegaf*cking hard. Even if it's assembly. You'll spend more time trying to understand the code than actually coding yourself.
I sometimes have trouble understanding even my own source files, when I haven't touched them for months.
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If you decompile a project, they don't contain the comments, right? I don't know, since I never touched assembly program and morever decompiling :P
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I remember trying Dwedit dissassembler 5 years ago, but it didn't even ran :(
Idk if there are any others, but first, comments will be missing, and secondly, the code might not be decompiled correctly and if it is, I think stuff like label names or variable names will be changed to other stuff, but I could be wrong. I heard disassemblers are better for use with smaller programs.
An average BASIC game can be between 3000 and 10000 bytes huge and code will still be easy to understand because to do something you generally only need one command, but in ASM, you need like 10 lines of code to do the simplest things sometimes and code is extremly long.
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Comments, labels, and variables (variable names are nothing but pointers) can not be recovered from a disassembly. Another issue is that everything is considered code, so data, which is usually specified by a .db or .dw, is converted to assembly instructions. Not only is this confusing, but if one of the bytes (for example $CB) indicates the start of a two (or more) byte instruction, it could try and read the next byte (which is actually a separate instruction) as a two-byte code, thus seriously screwing up the code.
Labels can sort of be recovered though. In the disassembler I wrote, whenever it encountered a jump or call instruction, it would add in a "lADDR" (where the ADDR is the two-byte location of the label) at the correct spot in the code. For example
Label:
jp Labelwould be disassembled as
l9d95:
jp l9d95
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Most disassemblers handle opcode prefixes correctly, and moreover, if you have a clever disassembler, it can distinguish most data from code by branching analysis. (everything is considered data except for the entry point, which is then analyzed for jp/jr/call/... instructions, etc. etc.)
I remember trying Dwedit dissassembler 5 years ago, but it didn't even ran
lol. I can even run it under wine ;D
EDIT: <ad>I've written a guide about this: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/421/42169.html</ad>
(and by the way, comments on it are much appreciated (send by email or PM))
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I got an error about missing dll files or something. (when trying Dwedit disassembler). However, it seemed to be missing files which back then I couldn't find online, so maybe today I would be able to run it. But it doesn't matter much because from what I remember on the old MaxCoderz forums (back when they were still using Ikonboard, not PhpBB) it didn't dissassemble correctly all the time and some other people were unable to run it fine either. It seemed pretty dependent on many files (it was a VB6 app, IIRC)
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Yeah, true. I've seen mistakes too... Which is why I'm designing my own disassembler ;D
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I hope you finish it ^^
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Funny, I found this recently, and I asked the author the sprite sheet. Since, no response, I will "inspire" in his sprites.
I knew that nice 8x8 sprites in gray could be achieved. But I didn't had time to mess with them. I want to do my own RPG in gray someday. ;D
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I actually got a reply. No sprite sheet available but I can go ahead to rip them... I still need other sprites, though.
mapar007, do you know any dissembler that can help to grab the sprites data? Output in .bin file or just some hex, I just need that and I am able to put in .bmp or other image format.
If you currently don't know, leave it to me. I ask because you seem to have tested some dissemblers.
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Usually, I just use print screen several times when playing the game on emulator then resize then convert to black and white, but the issue is that if a game is really hard (like this one) it takes ridiculous amount of time to rip all sprites. That said, I have some other sprites somewhere that I will post soon, but most are either 16x16 or they are monochrome 8x8
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Usually, I just use print screen several times when playing the game on emulator then resize then convert to black and white, but the issue is that if a game is really hard (like this one) it takes ridiculous amount of time to rip all sprites. That said, I have some other sprites somewhere that I will post soon, but most are either 16x16 or they are monochrome 8x8
That is why I am going into dissemble the game and find the data for the graphics. Generally graphics come last in the program. Also you can easily (somewhat) find pointers to the graphics.
And I already know programs and ways to convert the hex text into image files. ;)
Most sprites I rip is from eye. I haven't tried the print screen method...
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Ah ok. Btw you might want to try Dwedit dissassembler on Ticalc.org. I myself couldn't run it the last time I tried it (got an error about missing ocx or dll files but that was back in 2004 or 05) but other people had no problem with it. Idk if it dissassembles everything correctly, though, like the sprites data
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Ah ok. Btw you might want to try Dwedit dissassembler on Ticalc.org. I myself couldn't run it the last time I tried it (got an error about missing ocx or dll files but that was back in 2004 or 05) but other people had no problem with it. Idk if it dissassembles everything correctly, though, like the sprites data
That is what I needed, thanks DJ. Great dissembler, it guesses the data for me! Nice... In some minutes, I will have the sprite sheet.