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......
This is a manually-annotated disassembly of the Taito's Arkanoid game for MSX.
The only aim of this work is educational and because of its historical interest.
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.
This dissassembly is by tiburoncio, 2026.
- 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.