z2

i heard that the zzt source has been destroyed.
has anyone tried to decompile it?

funnykoala wrote:i heard that the zzt source has been destroyed.
has anyone tried to decompile it?

It has been attempted by Me, Saxxon, and a few others, But nothing worthwhile has came from it other than Roton and a couple clones based off of Saxxon's Disassembly, which uses the real expensive ''IDA PRO'' disassembler

You can try to make your own comprehensive (and reassemble-able) disassembly, this might require:

1: Lots of studying of 80x86 ASM (ZZT and SuperZZT uses 8086 or compatible CPU types, so anything up to Windows XP or DOSBox can run it!)

2: Lots of Double-Checks for errors regaurding Disassembly and Assembly (Debugging)

3: Permission to Open-Source the Disassembly from Tim Sweeney himself, as well as Epic Game's Approval (Optional, But is actually very nice, even if ZZT has no support!)

Assembly is nice (I do 6502) but it still would not really be the source, the machine code is the compiled result of the pascal source code. Basically Lyon, or rather, the Roton portion of it, is a translation of the ML into a modern language.

Do any of those languages have comments code.
Because that would be lost as well, presumably-- my experience working with Q3VM (simple game modding from the Quake III Arena source code) leads me to believe anything preceded by
//
or between
/*
and
*/
is just dropped off at time of assembly.

Yep. You loose all comments. Unless it is an interpreted language, that is, the written code is executed at runtime like basic or zzt-oop. So a good amount of disassembly is figuring out and writing meaningful labels for sub-routines, variables, etc.