Настроение:	amused
Entry tags:	computing

!Ankh
Ok. I gave up running !Ankh as is.

As I understand &ff8 files have no header and are loaded at &8000.
Unsure about the relocatables though, but ankh's RunImage appear to have sensible ARM there.
I read BASIC games can have inline ARM and machine code, which can be a nuisance.

Ghidra only supports ARM4 (I guess Ankh uses ARM3).
And I was unable to get IDA Pro working on win11.
I don't remember if IDA had ARM3 disassembler.

Anyway, now I need to get RPCEmu compiled and modified to do traces and breakpoints on CD access.
This approach is kinda overkill, but I don't feel brave.

Documentation states there should BLNV instructions (00 00 00 FB), if the executable is not compressed or relocatable, but instead there are movs (00 00 A1 E1)
http://www.riscos.com/support/developers/prm/objectformat.html

So apparently RISC OS C compiler produced non-conforming code?

Also, I'm curious why they haven't introduced Thumb initially? Memory was still expensive in 1987, so instruction size is a thing even today today due to cache sizes.