Disassembler

Pukka had been working long on the disassembler, and we were finally able to get first version of it integrated with the emulator. Below is a simple partial disassembly of Tetris audio mixer VBL, executed from Xcode debugger command prompt:

Partial disassembly of the Tetris 6-channel audio mixer VBL handler

Although the disassembler itself still has some minor quirks to fix, there were some interesting bits we found about the Tetris mixer code in this disassembly:

  • Unlike Sound Driver, which has 4-channel mixer, Tetris uses a 6-channel mixer
  • The audio is downsampled from 22256 Hz to 11128 Hz by writing each sampled byte twice (the $7000(A6) at 00030C18 is supposed to be 2(A6) in disassembly)
  • The division of summed samples by 6 is done by pre-calculated lookup table (which has 6×256 = 1536 entries)
  • The pitch of channels is controlled by directly writing the fixed-point pitch into mixer code at addi.l instructions from 30BAA to 30BC8