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I’ve been plugging away at a couple of side projects lately; though both in the same general domain as Archaos. One of them is to get to grips with the original game’s mechanics a bit better, I’ve been using the wonderful Skoolkit by Richard Dymond to extract and annotate: https://www.archaos.co.uk/chaos-disassembly/

A lot of the heavy work has been via the use of AI (Claude in this case). I’ve been using it both as a learning exercise in agentic workflows, and, honestly, just because it’s a lot of fun! I really wish I’d learned Z80 assembly back in the day, but I never got round to picking it up before I’d moved on to higher level stuff. Now, I can work with a game I’m super-familiar with, and see the code that drives it, and that’s a really cool way to get into it.

Anyway, hopefully the disassembly is as useful (or just interesting) to everyone else as it has been to me. It’s not finished yet, but lots of good stuff is there now. I’ll be putting the source for it all on Github soon, once I’ve tidied things up. If anyone’s interested I’ll even write about the process. A lot of it was setting up the tools and reference materials, and finding concrete known places to start in the code to then work back from.

Props goes to other people’s work in starting to crack the code open in Skoolkit, such as https://github.com/ZXGuesser/chaos-disassembly – this one especially proved invaluable as a reference guide to keep things on track.