Logs [Solo]

Day 7 (Feb 2023)

Have been going through Atari Assembly to ease myself into SH2 and hardware knowledge. Did a multi-regional checksum. It shed some light on where most differences lied with the Japanese and English releases of the first disk. I had come across some interesting videos e.g. the Gamehut youtube video about the difficulties of programming for the DSP.

I had a dead link, and old archived link and as I updated to remove it, I chased what it was about and found that it was a core necessity for translation jobs on Saturn, that it used Shift-JIS character encoding.

All documentation I collected was also linked to this project as I believe I may need to refer to them again in the future. I can't chase all avenues alone but I can store where I last ended up.

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Day 6 (July 2022)

This was essentially the result of two broken up sessions so it could have been Days 6 & 7, let me digress!

Found first read file in Sega Saturn, stated in the Disc Format Standards Specification Sheet document. Found a way to convert PCM files to WAV but am faced with the effort to convert all files, although I am relieved I possibly found my way through all the PCM bytes, but yet to fully confirm a 'dual-monos-in-stereo' dual dialogue issue I came across, where different files are stored in each of the two stereo channels. SND files may be resolved along that path...

I did not expect to find even more info in CD-Drive documentation tbh, it was highly undermined. Should be the first starting point in hindsight! The three *.TXT files in the disc with the ABS, CPY & BIB have now been fully decrypted and I am proud to say that I have the least important files fully understood and decrypted. They will however not be counted on the Progress section of my repo for now >_<

I am in the process of having an anomalies page, so that I can share interesting phenomenona, but they may be useful in correlating triggers in the game code, till I can certainly prove they are certainly causal. This will be shared soon. I might have found a Command File Execution within the strings e.g. <MPDRAGON.MCB in file MENUEN.PRG@0000647b as seen in the SEGA SATURN Address Checker Reference Manual doc.

I also discovered that the PRG file format is an almost mythical file format, still too early to tell.

To be continued...

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Day 5

I think "BTL" prefixed PRGs may be Battle config scripts... From UI frame sizes to prompts, maybe even controls... Raised issue #7 whilst scanning 'BTL_A3.PRG'. Also learned architecture is one-to-one with a processor or specifically it's ISA (Instruction-Set-Architecture) but have yet to prove mnemonics '??' vary with multiple components e.g. DSP & VDP in the same binaries...

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Day 4

Made Wiki, adding progress.md assembly.md and other docs. Found assembly mnemonics were missing '??' in Ghidra for SH-2 decompilation...

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Day 3

Found all the 62 CPU instructions from datasheets. Also found missing instructions in Assembly Code, must be related to bad data in functions from disassembly...

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Day 2

Ghidra disassembly extracting functions, first c file.

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Day 1

Binary files extracted with prg files which seem to contain string data. Have an index of all files/file-types in ROM.