Stratigise: Argonaut Strategy Language Reverse Engineering and Tools

This is a work-in-progress assembler and dissassembler meant to aid in understanding what strats are doing in games created by Argonaut Games. There is a general bias towards the first Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, but we welcome contributions that benefit any game.

It is not currently meant for serious use.

Argonaut PSX reversing Discord:

Disclaimer(s)

Warning: This project does not always produce vaild disassemblies at time of writing. If you see CommandError, __unknown_operation_0x[...] or anything suspicous, that means something went wrong and you can't trust anything written after or slightly before that instruction.

Note: Our reassembler is currently only designed to handle Croc 1 and is in general quite messy code. In fact, the entire project is quite messy.

Usage

To disassemble a single strat, put it as decompile.py's first argument:

$ ./disassemble.py path/to/the/STRAT.BIN

It will output two files with the original name plus the .DIS and .AXX extensions.

To reassemble a strat, use assemble with the first argument as the original strat name (witohut .BIN) and the second as the output bin file name:

$ ./assemble.py path/to/the/INPUT.BIN path/to/the/OUTPUT.BIN

Example

There are some examples strats from Croc DE in the strats folder:

$ ./disassemble.py strats/croc-de130/CROC.BIN
Processing "strats/croc-de130/CROC.BIN" with spec "croc1" ⋅⋅⋅

Part of the example output:

Label_b55:
	TurnRight { PushExternGlobal 10 ReturnTop }
	If { GetAVar 12 PushInt32 8 BitAnd ReturnTop } Label_ba9
	If { PushExternGlobal 10 PushInt32 747110 CmpTopGreater ReturnTop } Label_b80
	LetXGVar 10 { PushInt32 747110 ReturnTop }
	Else Label_ba6

Label_b80:
	If { PushExternGlobal 10 PushInt32 2621440 CmpTopGreater ReturnTop } Label_b9d
	LetXGVar 10 { PushExternGlobal 10 PushInt32 85196 Divide ReturnTop }
	Else Label_ba6

Label_b9d:
	LetXGVar 10 { PushInt32 2621440 ReturnTop }

Label_ba6:
	Else Label_bca

Label_ba9:
	If { PushExternGlobal 10 PushInt32 229376 CmpTopLess ReturnTop } Label_bc6
	LetXGVar 10 { PushExternGlobal 10 PushInt32 6553 Divide ReturnTop }
	Else Label_bca

Label_bc6:
	LetXGVar 10 { ReturnZero }

Label_bca:
	EndProc
	

Advanced usage

You can pass in multipule files and use --spec to set the disassembler:

disassemble.py --spec gamename1 file1 file2 ... --spec gamename2 file1 file2 ...

Scripting language

There are several tools that support translation of Croc 1 strat disassemblies into some higher level scripting language (a.k.a. C1S) and compiling them back.

reconstruct.py dis_file output_c1s_files_prefix
compile.py c1s_file1 c1s_file2 ... output_bin_file

More info about the language and features here

Health check

To perform a full health check against all Croc 1 strat files, run this:

specs/croc1/health_check.py croc1_strats_dir strats_csv_path result_dir

It runs the following stages for each strat file and prints the stats:

• Disassebly
• Re-assembly
• Comparison of original and reassembled binaries for differences
• Reconstruction of C1S code from disassembly
• Compilation of reconstructed C1S code

Todo

Documentation

• Reverse engineer opcode arguments and fill in the rest of the opcode list (close to done)
• Also, stEvaluate (good progress)
• Documenting other strat functions/the C API would be a good idea too

Disassembler

• Cleaner parsing and an actual intermediate representation
• Re-assembling dissassembled files
• Clean implementation, possibly in C

Assembler

• Make it more generic, currently only doing Croc 1 properly

More Info

Make sure to read things in the doc folder if you want to know more.

You can also read more info about strats on my modding notes, which also links to other resources.