Over the past few months I’ve been working not on SkoolKit, but on a brand new disassembly: Skool Daze! Not the Spectrum version of the game, of course (because there would be nothing new about that), but the Commodore 64 version of the game, which was released some time in 1985, after the original Spectrum version.

The main reasons for going through this exercise were twofold. First, I wanted to give sk6502 (the SkoolKit components for 6502 disassembly) a workout by reverse engineering a game from scratch, and see where improvements for supporting 6502-based machines could be made. Secondly, I was curious how well and how faithfully one of my favourite games of all time had been ported from my favourite 8-bit platform of all time to a platform I’d never used before.

On that second point, I can report that the investigation was rather interesting. For one thing, I had to read up on how sound and sprites work on the Commodore 64 in order to understand how the game uses them. (This explains why the annotations for the sound-producing and sprite-animating code in the game are somewhat dry, for which I apologise.) For another thing, in many instances there is a one-to-one relationship between routines and data blocks in the Commodore 64 version and corresponding routines and data blocks in the Spectrum version, which I have pointed out where I noticed them.

The Commodore 64 version also has its own unique bugs and trivia, some of which suggest that the port was made from an earlier cut of the game code than was used for the Spectrum version (because they could easily have been in the Spectrum version too, but apparently were fixed before release).

Anyway, do take a look and see for yourself, and if you spot any errors in the disassembly (or my very recently acquired and very incomplete understanding of the Commodore 64), please let me know. And with that, time to get working on some changes to sk6502 and SkoolKit that were inspired by this experiment.