The other day some discussions between friends led to someone posting a faked up Elite status screen with a silly rating instead of “Harmless”. Given what I’ve been spending all my time on recently I thought it would be more amusing to post a playable version with the “Harmless” replaced by patching the Elite code.
I naively thought this would be easy to achieve: I added a quick routine in
jsbeeb to search for a string in memory and looked for Harmless. No joy.
I tried a case-insensitive version. Likewise, no luck. This wasn’t going to be
as simple as I thought.
I next put a conditional breakpoint on the OS write character routine
OSWRCH, conditional on the character being the H of the Harmless I was
hoping to replace.
In jsbeeb (at the time of writing) breakpoints are a little awkward to use:
Add a function to processor.debugInstruction which will be called at
every instruction with the program counter and should return true to stop
the program, or false to carry on. OSWRCH is at $ffee so bringing up the
Javascript console and typing:
processor.debugInstruction.addr(function(pc) {
return pc === 0xffee && processor.a === 72;
});
A quick run and…no joy. Of course, Elite doesn’t use the OS routines to print text — it has its own.
At this point I remembered that Ian Bell, co-creator of Elite, had posted up some old disc images of the source code of the tape version of Elite. It’s not quite the same as this disc image I’m using, but it should be a good starting point. For ease of reading without firing up an emulator, he’s also posted a ZIP of the pertinent files as text.
Opening up the source gives an amazing insight into how the game was made: The
source is a terrific mess. It’s split over several BASIC files which assemble
the code by daisy-chaining each other. The code has very few comments and
whitespace; crams many 6502 instructions per line; and uses many tricks like skipping over the
next few instructions in branches via PC-relative mechanisms like BNE P%+4.
It’s pretty hard-going stuff.
Luckily one of the few comments is \PRINT and so this is the first clue: the
print routine is at the obfuscatedly-named label TT26. There’s no easy way
to tie labels in the tape source to addresses in the disc version. I opted to
search for the opcodes either side of the label, and struck gold: TT26 lives
at address $1d56. I moved my Javascript breakpoint there and was able to
catch the letter ‘H’ being drawn. Lucky Elite uses ASCII or otherwise I
wouldn’t have been able to catch it here.
Here I stepped out (keypress ‘o’ in the latest jsbeeb debugger) and found the
calling routine, and traced its origin to $31ac. Searching in the source I
found this corresponds to label TT27, which sadly has no handy comments. This
routine is the “print a string character” routine, but its input is definitely not ASCII.
The code EORs its input with 35, then interprets the character as a token:
some tokens are ASCII, some are colour and case-changing codes, some refer to
parts of the player’s state and some refer
to one of a list of two-letter expansions, making the strings in general
shorter. The string “Harmless” is actually all caps (the title casing is done
by the code) and is encoded as 6 bytes: H [AR] M [LE] S S where the AR and LE are
two-letter expansions. The string itself is stored at $0769. Capital letters
are left unchanged, so to replace the string with, say, “Monkey” we can patch the code to put
6e6c6d68667a (“MONKEY” EORed with 35) in the relevant place. This can be
achieved with a URL parameter in jsbeeb, adding &patch=@31ac,0769:6e6c6d68667a
to the autoboot URL to yield a handy bootable patched URL.
The “@” sign in the patch URL sets a breakpoint at that location, and then applies
the patch (in addr:bytestopatch) when the breakpoint is hit.
That way, Elite loads up first, then the first time the print routine is called
the patch is made.
Let’s dig into that print routine a bit and see what it’s doing. Here I’m
going to use the label names from the source. To follow along at home, fire up
Elite in jsbeeb, hit the Home key and then go to $31ac by typing into the
disassembly address box, or open up ELITEB.TXT from the source ZIP.
The “print message” routine directly follows the
print character routine, and I’ve annotated the whole lot. Some of the
auxiliary routines are just above .TT27, but to keep things a little shorter
I’ve left those out, and just explained them in the text (e.g. the csh
routine).
.TT27 ; print char routine
TAX ; save A into X, and set flags
BEQ csh ; if zero, print "Cash:" and then
; the player's cash
BMI TT43 ; if negative (bit 7 set) go to TT43
; which treats the bottom 7 bits as an index
; into a token table
DEX ; decrement and set flags...
BEQ tal ; if zero, A was 1; go to tal
; which prints "tally" (a number)
DEX
BEQ ypl ; if A was 2; go to to ypl
; which prints the current planet name
DEX
BNE P%+5
JMP cpl ; if A was 3; go to cpl
; which prints the selected planet name
DEX
BEQ cmn ; if A was 4; go to cmn
; which prints the player name (commander?)
DEX
BEQ fwl ; if A was 5; go to fwl
; which just prints the player's cash
DEX
BNE P%+7
LDA #128 ; if A was 6, store 128 in QQ17
STA QQ17 ; which is a case-switch flag
RTS ; and return
DEX ; (this comes from P%+7 above)
DEX
BNE P%+5
STX QQ17 ; if A was 8, store zero ...
RTS ; in case-switch flag and return
DEX
BEQ crlf ; if A was 9, tab over and put a colon
; (maybe)
CMP #&60 ; NB we are comparing with the original 'A' again
BCS ex ; If it's lower-case (or above), head to ex
; which treats it as a message index to print
CMP #14 ; if less than 14..
BCC P%+6 ; treat as a capitcal
CMP #32 ; if less than 32
BCC qw ; ...go to 'qw' which treats it as message number
; A + 114
; So now we have a capital letter.
LDX QQ17 ; otherwise check the case-switch flag
BEQ TT74 ; zero? leave as-is and just print
BMI TT41 ; negative? head to TT41
BIT QQ17 ; bit 6 set?
BVS TT46 ; ...go to TT46 (which prints the character
; as-is, then clears bit 6 of case-switch)
; This prints the char in the A register in lowercase:
.TT42
CMP #65 ; less than 'A' ?
BCC TT44 ; ...then print as is
CMP #&5B ; more than 'Z' ?
BCS TT44 ; ...just print
ADC #32 ; otherwise add 32 to make it lower-case
.TT44 ; TT44 just jumps to TT26 (the character
JMP TT26 ; print routine).
.TT41
BIT QQ17
BVS TT45 ; if bit 6 of case-switch set, go to TT45
CMP #65 ; if less than 65 ('A')
BCC TT74 ; just print, else..
PHA
TXA
ORA #64
STA QQ17 ; set bit '6' in case-switch
PLA
BNE TT44 ; and print as-is - i.e. this character
; will be printed but the next will be
; down-cased
.qw
ADC #114 ; add 114 to A
BNE ex ; and print it as a canned message
.crlf
LDA #21
STA XC ; store 21 in the x position
BNE TT73 ; and go to TT73 (which prints a colon)
.TT45
CPX #FF ; if case-switch was $ff
BEQ TT48 ; ...skip entirely
CMP #65 ; if it's 'A' or above
BCS TT42 ; ...print in lowercase
.TT46
PHA ; save character to print
TXA
AND #191 ; clear bit 6 of case-switch
STA QQ17
PLA ; restore character
.TT74
JMP TT26 ; and print as-is
.TT43
CMP #160 ; is it >160?
BCS TT47 ; print as message number (A-160)
; Else we're going to print it as a one or
; two-character token.
AND #127 ; clear top bit to leave token number
ASL A ; double it to get offset into table
TAY ; put in Y register
LDA QQ16,Y ; read first char
JSR TT27 ; print it
LDA QQ16+1,Y; read second char
CMP #63 ; if it's 63
BEQ TT48 ; ...skip (not that I've noticed any tokens that
; take advantage of this)
JMP TT27 ; else print second char and exit
; We got here if A>160 which means print canned message A-160
.TT47
SBC #160 ; A-=160
; This is the main entry routine that prints canned message A
.ex
TAX ; save A in X
; point zero-page location (V,V+1) to QQ18
; which is the message table.
LDA #(QQ18 MOD 256)
STA V
LDA #(QQ18 DIV 256)
STA V+1
LDY #0 ; init loop counter
TXA
BEQ TT50 ; Skip if this is the zeroth message
; TT51 to TT59 skip to the end of a zero-terminated string
.TT51
LDA (V),Y ; get current byte
BEQ TT49 ; if we found the end, exit loop
INY ; otherwise move to next char
BNE TT51 ; if we didn't overflow, reloop
INC V+1 ; handle overflow
BNE TT51 ; and reloop
.TT49
INY ; skip the zero-terminator
BNE TT59 ; handle overflow
INC V+1
.TT59
DEX ; decrement the message index
BNE TT51 ; and reloop if we haven't skipped to target
; Now we're at the main loop where (V),Y point at the message
; to print.
.TT50
; Printing a char can recursively call us, so stack (V+1)
; and Y (which is enough to preserve our state).
TYA
PHA ; preserve "Y"
LDA V+1
PHA ; preserve (V+1)
LDA (V),Y ; Read a string byte
EOR #35 ; "Decrypt" it
JSR TT27 ; call the print char routine
PLA ; restore V+1
STA V+1
PLA ; restore Y
TAY
INY ; move to next char
BNE P%+4 ; overflowed?
INC V+1 ; handle overflow
LDA (V),Y ; hit the end of the string?
BNE TT50 ; if not, go around again
.TT48
RTS ; we're finished
The token table (at QQ18) maps the following indices to these two-byte
strings:
00 AL
01 LE
02 XE
03 GE
04 ZA
05 CE
06 BI
07 SO
08 US
09 ES
0a AR
0b MA
0c IN
0d DI
0e RE
0f A?
10 ER
11 AT
12 EN
13 BE
14 RA
15 LA
16 VE
17 TI
18 ED
19 OR
1a QU
1b AN
1c TE
1d IS
1e RI
1f ON
So the HARMLESS string was encoded as:
48 'H'
8a reference to 'AR'
4d 'M'
81 reference to 'LE'
53 'S'
53 'S'
Then EORed with 35 ($23) and zero-terminated to yield 6b a9 6e a2 70 70 00
To make your own simple strings you can use this snippet of python:
def encode(msg):
return "".join("{:02x}".format(ord(x)^35) for x in msg)
msg = raw_input("Text to encode: ")
print encode(msg)
The finish up, a quick explanation of the patch URL. As Elite has to load in
memory before we can patch its data, we need to wait for it to start executing
before changing anything. The URL is of the form
&patch=CMD;CMD;CMD...' where each command is an optional@breakpoint,followed
byaddr:bytes,addr:bytes,addr:bytes…’. The breakpoint is a one-time
breakpoint at the specified address, upon which any patches specified will be
applied.
In the case of this patch, only a single breakpoint
and patch address is needed. Once the processor hits the breakpoint address
31ac we know it’s about to run Elite’s string routine for the first time, so
now’s a good time to patch the data. We then patch 0769 with 6e6c6d68667a
giving a patch URL piece of &patch=@31ac,0769:6e6c6d68667a.
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.