Looking at the stuff I posted yesterday, I noticed that around 0x17f5f8 in the SLPM652.77 file are the following strings:
shstrtab debug line strtab symtab comment reginfo
I can only assume debug is just that, debug information, strtab has to do with a string table of some sort, and symtab is something rather exciting, that is, a symbol table.
If that is the case, call me excited - as this would change everything in my progress.
Symbol tables, for those of you who don't know,
are created when an assembly file is actually assembled into a
functioning executable. Basically, it consists of where a label occurs -
for a function OR variable - and the address where it is located.
During the assembly process, as the assembler parses the file[s], it
will find the first instance of a symbol, record that and its address,
and then as it parses further replace every occurrence of the name with
the recorded address.
It isn't too often, if ever, that this information is retained... but when it is, it makes reverse-engineering much easier.
I noticed that every version of DDR from MAX to EXTREME, JP OR US, has this information tacked on at the end of the executable [SLUS###.##, SLPM###.##, etc] - I would bet that includes Dancing Stage mixes from that era.
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