A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

What have you been up to?

Nice! I kinda miss my days of REing Atari coinops (Centipede, Missile Command, and vector games), but you and your colleagues working on MAME seem to be much better at it than I ever was. Though I'm still happy to see a little bit of my vecsim code lives on in MAME.

In recent years I've partially REed the Friends Amis/Matsushita/Panasonic/Quasar/Olympia HHC mainframe ROM and some plugin ROMs. It was NMOS 6502-based and used a token-threaded Forth kernel. Also partially REed firmware of a few Apple II peripherals and some Apple III stuff.

The Apple II Profile interface firmware seems to contain a LOT of dead/garbage code. Parts of the code look somewhat plausible; I'm not sure if they are leftovers or deliberate obfuscation. I should burn an EPROM with that crap omitted and see if it works properly.

Aside from the code that I can mostly confirm is unreachable, there are some conditional calls through an uninitialized zero page vector. I haven't figured out what the purpose of that was, but it must never call it in normal use.

Sweet! Sounds like you've spent a lot of time doing for mainframe and Apple II ROMs what @suddendesu is doing for arcade games. I would love to read up on your findings if you ever get the urge to dig into that code. :)

When I referred to the HHC "mainframe", that was just as opposed to plugins. It's a handheld computer somewhat like the Sharp PC1500 or TRS-80.Pocket Computer 2.