Reverse engineering Amiga software

When I was young I had to walk to school, and it was ten miles both ways, in bare feet, always raining, with snow coming at me sideways on gravel roads. Oh, and everything was a lot more interesting then, because nostalgia hadn't been invented yet.

Living in New Zealand, television shows and movies made their way over here quite a while after they had debuted wherever they originated from. And so did computer games of course. Unfortunately, the only way to get access to software in a manner that didn't require a lifestyle consisting of yacht ownership, smoking jacket wearing or coke sniffing through one hundred dollar bills, was buying pirated disks through the mail.

Reverse engineering

One of the most interesting parts of the pirated software, was the material added by the groups which had originally pirated it. Take for example this video taken from the first disk of Pools of Darkness.

The Amiga console supported an extended range of ANSI commands, some of which allowed moving the cursor an arbitrary number of pixels. By printing a character, then moving the cursor so the next printed character would overwrite some of the last, and repeating this, an image could be rendered in the console. The slow rendering of the image is also a nice effect.

There was one commercial disassembler available for the Amiga, named ReSource. Like IDA Pro, it is an interactive disassembler, an environment where code can be progressively reverse engineered over time.

Here's a screenshot of the SKID_ROW program disassembled in ReSource:

Interestingly, the slow rendering effect is the maximum speed of the console, as the screenshot shows that the complete text to be displayed is written to the console as one lump.

A wiki

In any case, there's a wealth of interesting material preserved from the early days of the Amiga when it was still a contender. If you share my interest in examining it, the most convenient way to do so is by running WinUAE, and perhaps running ReSource within that. But there is also domain knowledge in the tip and tricks to being able to access some of the data, and also what tools can be used in which ways.

I suggested that it would be nice to collect this knowledge on a forum and someone responded by suggesting I start a wiki on one of those sites that are around these days. On a whim, I decided to do so, but in order to make it both easier and more appealing for others to jump in and add their own content, I seeded it with all the information I could find or recall.

It is all very well to start a wiki and throw some information in it. But there must be some level of required information to be present, before others with an interest will consider it a viable place to participate. Or before the effort required on their part to add whatever they may have a whim to, is sufficiently reduced perhaps. I spent a day and a half filling this wiki, before announcing it. It will be interesting to see whether anyone jumps on board.

Link: Reverse engineering for the Commodore Amiga

On a related note

The effect of the text rendering shown above, reminds me of the demo DOS by Andromeda. Embedded Youtube video follows..

Let's face it, AmigaDOS in Kickstart v1.3 just looked plain cool with its blue background and white lines.