Case study

Boulder Dash: an NES disassembly and C/SDL2 port

Boulder Dash reconstructs an annotated disassembly of the USA NES game and translates its routines into a native C11 and SDL2 port. A local ROM supplies game data and generated assembly; recording tools capture original RAM changes and hardware accesses for routine-by-routine comparison with the C implementation.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-06
Evidence class: C2 code & docs, no demo or download

Stars: 0
Last commit: 2026-10-27
Language: C
License (GitHub): MIT

GitHub data as of 2026-11-10

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Evidence

Observed: Code and documentation observed; no download method or demo found.
Checked: 2026-11-08

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: A legally owned Boulder Dash USA NES ROM; other releases and modified ROMs are unsupported.
Prerequisites: CMake 3.20 or later, a C11 compiler, SDL2, Python 3, and cc65 for the disassembly build.
Testing evidence: The author reports that approximately 144,000 recorded calls matched on the author's machine.
License: MIT license.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{boulder-dash-nes-decomp-case,
  title = {{Boulder Dash: an NES disassembly and C/SDL2 port}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/Kryyto/boulder-dash-nes-decomp}},
  url = {https://github.com/Kryyto/boulder-dash-nes-decomp},
  urldate = {2026-11-06},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/boulder-dash-nes-decomp-case/}}
}

Plain text

Boulder Dash: an NES disassembly and C/SDL2 port. https://github.com/Kryyto/boulder-dash-nes-decomp (accessed 2026-11-06). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/boulder-dash-nes-decomp-case/

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About this entry

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Primary sources

README.md GitHub · Kryyto/boulder-dash-nes-decomp · Revision 206dcca
port/README.md GitHub · Kryyto/boulder-dash-nes-decomp · Revision 206dcca