[Wiz]

According to Hivebrain, the Sonic Retro Mercurial instance could be used host disassemblies of Shining Force games. Yay !

But how does it work exactly ?
I'm not talking about Mercurial, I'm talking about the methodology of team-working on a disassembly.

Currently, our IDA disassembly is far from finished, we still have a lot of stuff to figure out in the ROM.
However, we already can re-assemble it to get a bit perfect result, using the same tools as sonic games :
- 5MB ASM File produced from IDA
- split.bat which extracts data chunks in bin files
- build.bat which assembles ASM file and bin files
So I guess we could already share this ASM file on Mercurial like you guys do for sonic games, but isn't it a bit too early to leave IDA and it's convenient reverse-engineering features ?

The problem is that you can't team-work on the IDA disassembly, as it's a binary file.

So I'm starting to guess that sonic disassemblies can only be the result of :
- a single man effort in IDA
- once the disassembly is complete enough, produce ASM file and share it on SVN/Mercurial
- only now, people can team-work on it to polish the content, refactor stuff in macros etc ... Erm now that I think about it, maybe they use an ASM 68K editor for it ?

No idea how to continue my post, I'm a bit lost in my reflexion, but well :
I just want to know how a team can share their discoveries in a disassembly. Help !

[MainMemory]

Well, I'm probably not the best example since maybe two other people have done anything with my disassemblies once, but I just have IDB files for all my disassemblies. Sonic 3D Blast though has both an I64 db and an IDC file that can be diffed and used to recreate the database. Also I think there might be an IDB diff tool somewhere?

[Wiz]

Awesome,

I didn't know that you could produce such an exhaustive IDC file !
I've just taken a look at an example (Sik's Sonic 3D disasm) and I see that I can do the same thing on my SFII IDA disassembly.
So ideally, as long as using IDA seems necessary, we might share this single IDC file on Mercurial and that should do the trick ...

Thanks a lot for your input MainMemory, I think we'll give this a try on SVN first, and if it's our solution, we'll ask for a new repository here