Game port progress

My last post about Curse of the Azure Bonds was at the beginning on November, and that was quite a productive month. In December I didn’t touch the code at all and I have been doing some work in the last week.

During my holiday in Gisborne I found a copy of the original Forgotten Realms: Azure Bonds book, and seeing this lying on my desk has encouraged me to keep working. So far it appears to be a lucky charm. The evening I started work again on this project, I decided I was going to have a brake through, and that’s just what happened. I worked out how three blocks of functions where related and the shape of the underlying data structure used to manage sprite animation. All max five frames of it.

Sunday evening I was working of the layout of the interrupt structures, and once I had most of those correctly identified I started using the Ralf Brown Interrupt List to decode what the function where doing. I then used the Visual Studio 2005 refactor tools to rename variables/functions so the code made more sense.

Tonight I was working mainly on another memory structure that purpose I have yet to decipher, but it removed a lot of errors once the related variables became Struct_XXXX (which is a class) verses byte[]/short[]/int/object. I also went on a rampage fixing “Cannot implicitly convert type ‘type1’ to ‘type2’. An explicit conversion exists (are you missing a cast?)” type errors.

Currently there are 14,403 Lines of Assembly to translate, 1,066 Errors to remove and 2 Warnings to solve. Thus at the last three months rates, it will take another year to complete this project.