Arkanoid

THE ERA AND TIME OF THIS STORY IS UNKNOWN. AFTER THE MOTHERSHIP "ARKANOID" WAS DESTROYED, A SPACECRAFT "VAUS" SCRAMBLED AWAY FROM IT. BUT ONLY TO BE TRAPPED IN SPACE WARPED BY SOMEONE......

About

This is a manually-annotated disassembly of the Taito's Arkanoid game for MSX.<br> The only aim of this work is educational and because of its historical interest.<br> The third reason can be found in the Queen's It's a Hard Life song: I did it for love :)

Start reading from file disassembly.asm.

Commercial use is strictly prohibited.

Arkanoid is (c) Taito.<br> This dissassembly is by tiburoncio, 2026.

Interesting findings

• Aliens won't come out of just any of the two doors, but from the farthest away from Vaus
• Not all bricks are worth the same number of points. That depends on their color.
• There are two cheats, but no surprises - they've already been documented
• The code doesn't use many optimizations. It tends to use LD A, 0 instead of XOR A, for example.
• The number of hits to break a gray brick is not always 2. It depends on the currrent level and specifically it's int((level+1) / 8) + 2.
• The ball's angle changes after it bounces 40 times
• It seems that the programmers had planned than when you can shoot, after getting the red capsule, the ball would accelerate. But in the end, they didn’t implement it.
• There's a variable which controls the type of level transition: go to the same level (when a life is lost), go to the next level, or do some action after Vaus goes through a portal. The last one goes to the same code that performs a transition to the next level. This means that probably the programmers had planned something special after Vaus goes through the portal, but finally they didn't implement anything.