Game Boy Zelda Comes With Source, Sort Of
Jamie found a fun story about a 90s Zelda Game Boy ROM that shipped with the source code- not so much on purpose, but more because the linker padded out the last meg of ROM with random memory contents, which happened to include game source code.
Now the site is Wordpressed (like Slashdotting, only the other way around) and you can't get to it, but one of the last posts before it died pointed out that this was from a trainered version. That's where someone adds cheat code to a ROM. As it turns out, the original doesn't have any of the code in question. Dissassembling for the purpose of adding cheats is a completely sensible explanation of the code that was found.
The moral of the story? Start with a known clean dump (look for the "[!]" tag) before assuming that the introns were in the original game.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
thats what calloc is for, it'll clear it for you, malloc just gets it.
When you're a ROM developer, you don't think in such terms. It's all about mapping this and interleaving that.
Rather than writing the extra few lines to calculate the padding required, set up a 0-filled buffer and truncate the first (or last) buffer, rounding up the fwrite call to 2mb requires 0 extra lines.
Besides, they don't expect many people to actually look at the ROM code. This emulation craze is fairly recent.
-Billco, Fnarg.com