Donkey Kong hacking kit

About

The original is Nintendo's 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong hacking kit is an in-progress, commented disassembly of the arcade version of Donkey Kong, intended to make the game's Z80 and i8035 code readable and hackable without modifying the original game itself. As of this README the project is still incomplete ("we've still got quite a ways to go"), documentation lives on the project's GitHub wiki, and its state is marked unplayable/not very usable yet.

Getting started

The authors describe the kit as "not very usable at all" for end users at this stage; the available documentation lives on the project's wiki and is aimed at people wanting to build hacks or ports rather than just play the game.

History

The disassembly began on the Donkey Kong Forum, then moved to an entry on the Donkey Kong wiki -- together the project's "first phase," during which the purpose of most variables and routines was worked out. A "second phase" then moved to GitHub, replacing raw memory offsets with descriptive labels to make the code more readable and portable to other systems.

Licensing & legal

• The README jokingly lists the code's license as the "© 1981 Nintendo" license, and suggests that anyone distributing a hack do so as a patch file (e.g. .ips) rather than a full copy of the game.