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6502bench/docs/sgtutorial/suggestions.html
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<title>Suggestions - SourceGen Tutorial</title>
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6502bench
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<h2>A Few Suggestions</h2>
<p>The hardest step in a journey is often the first. Here are a few
suggestions to help you on your way.</p>
<ul>
<li>Start with a small project (&lt; 1KB). If you haven't
disassembled code before, this is the time to play with different
conventions, like whether to use MixedCase or underscore_separated
or SCREAMING_CAPS for labels.</li>
<li>Use the program thoroughly. Understand all of what it does.</li>
<li>Remember that SourceGen works by tracing through code from marked
start points, rather than treating everything as code and requiring you
to mark all the data items.
Begin each project by finding the code. Identify external
entry points, format tables of addresses, and find JSRs that are
followed by inline data. Use an extension script to handle the
inlines so you won't keep tripping over them. If parts of the program
are relocated to a different address, set the appropriate address
overrides.</li>
<ul>
<li>Code start tags are rarely needed, and code end tags are almost
never needed. You shouldn't have to spend a lot of time manually
tagging things. If a piece of code isn't being found, it's usually
best to figure out why the code that calls it isn't being found,
instead of trying to tag it and forge ahead from that point. It might
be dead code that's never called, or it might be called from a table
that you can format to add code entry tags for multiple addresses with
a single operation. Taking the time to find the table and format it
is faster than hand-formatting dozens of little handlers, and it's
something you'll need to do eventually anyway.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Start with easily identifiable pieces. If a chunk of code is reading
from the keyboard, you can make reasonable guesses about the purpose of
the code that interacts with it.
The start of the program is often the hardest place to begin, because it
usually just initializes a bunch of stuff you haven't identified.</li>
<li>Expect to figure out little pieces. Use what you learn from these
to figure out other little pieces. It's a jigsaw puzzle, not a book.</li>
<li>Don't get discouraged if there's a ton of code that you can't make
sense of. It won't at first. Keep chipping away.</li>
<li>Read <a href="https://6502disassembly.com/on-disassembly.html">On Disassembly</a>
for additional thoughts.</li>
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