Tweet
As a programmer, I thought I should probably make some comments on this topic. Firstly, Mercator is right in that all things can be done in assembly without the source code using assembly language. That being said, anything but the most basic of hacks (hacks meaning thrown together code to achieve a particular result) would be extremely difficult. By extremely difficult I mean it would likely be easier to code Civ 2 again from scratch than go into assembly and do some of the changes suggested in this thread. To put it in perspective, each line of c++ code translates into a large number of lines in assembly (ranging anywhere from ~10 lines to ~100 lines of assembly code per line of c++ code). Also, you get no complex structures in assembly. No loops, no if - then statements, no functions. All of these must be handled by hand. You also must handle all of the memory management by hand, including loading file segments into memory. You also get no data types, everything is a WORD or a BYTE (word meaning a number of bytes totaling the word size of the processor (generally 2 - 4 bytes).
What it boils down to is that I probably could figure out how to do everything you wanted done, but I would need a lot of time and incentive to do so. That doesn't even get me into the legal issues of playing around with software that has a copyright without permission. I probably would be able to do the changes legally if I did it for free, BUT as I have already said I would need compensation for undertaking a project this large.
If I were looking to do this, I would not look into changing the assembly code by hand. Rather I would look into ways of inserting compiled C or C++ code into another executable. This would require some in depth knowledge of both C and assembly, but would likely end up much easier than changing things in assembly.
Before I did anything, I would also make sure I was not going to violate the copyright.
Sorry for the long post, but there are a lot of issues involved in this, and I wanted those in this thread to be aware of some of them. Hopefully I did not discourage you guys too much, because it would be cool to get some of these things done.
StuporMan
What it boils down to is that I probably could figure out how to do everything you wanted done, but I would need a lot of time and incentive to do so. That doesn't even get me into the legal issues of playing around with software that has a copyright without permission. I probably would be able to do the changes legally if I did it for free, BUT as I have already said I would need compensation for undertaking a project this large.
If I were looking to do this, I would not look into changing the assembly code by hand. Rather I would look into ways of inserting compiled C or C++ code into another executable. This would require some in depth knowledge of both C and assembly, but would likely end up much easier than changing things in assembly.
Before I did anything, I would also make sure I was not going to violate the copyright.
Sorry for the long post, but there are a lot of issues involved in this, and I wanted those in this thread to be aware of some of them. Hopefully I did not discourage you guys too much, because it would be cool to get some of these things done.
StuporMan
Comment