Another World VM Tools

• Toolchain for software development targeting the virtual machine originally designed for Eric Chahi's Another World game.
• The scripts in this repo are Licensed under the GPL version 2 or later
• All scripts require Python 3.
• There's a MAME fork with an implementation of the Another World VM available at https://github.com/felipesanches/mame/tree/anotherworld which can be used to run any "romset" compiled with the assembler provided by this toolchain. (Note: Do not forget to also copy the text-string and font ROMs from the hardcoded_data directory to your MAME rompath when running the driver - See also: issue #15)

Scripts Descriptions and Use

The simplest way to use this to get bytecode disasm listing (assuming you have a copy of the game files for MSDOS saved on the msdos_release directory) is to perform the following commands:

./banks2resources.py msdos_release/memlist.bin resources/

./resources2romset.py resources/ romset/

./AWVM_trace.py romset/ disasm/

Below is a more detailed description of each individual script:

banks2resources.py

• Reads compressed game data files such as "msdos_release/bank*"
• Outputs raw binary files called "resource-0x*.bin"
• These are the files used by the MAME driver at https://github.com/felipesanches/mame/commit/1b943d2264b8d536b1815d8d21ef6234bb586b13

resources2romset.py

• Packs together resource files into ROM files.
• This is also useful for https://github.com/felipesanches/AnotherWorld_FPGA

AWVM_trace.py

• Disassembles ROM files and generates an assembly source code tree.
• Includes data files extracted from the resource files.

AWVM_assembler.py

• Assembles a source tree into bytecode binaries (with embedded data).
• We expect perfect round-tripping of a source tree, meaning that AWVM_trace.py should generate binary outputs absolutely identical to the inputs of AWVM_trace.py.

build_and_run.sh

• Helper shell script that builds an assembly source tree, copies the generated ROM files to the MAME rompath and executes the emulator.
• This script needs to be tweaked to use the directory paths of your project files, MAME executable, etc...

Development

Create and activate your virtual environment

• virtualenv venv -p python3
• source venv/bin/activate
• pip install -r requirements.txt