User blog comment:Velt211/Gakuen Drifting Story 2 Translation/@comment-31720212-20200316090122/@comment-31720212-20200428070707

Thanks to your help working out the character set, I've been able to extract Gakuen Senki's code! It definitely is a System 1 game after all.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/9q0u9jx7jmg2145/Gakuen_Senki_Code_%28First-Pass%29.zip/file

There are some caveats and notes:

1. The code makes extensive use of "junk code," hoping around EOF characters multiple times per file, and sprinkling NULs everywhere. I haven't cleaned any of that up yet. Because of this issue, I haven't been able to compile the code to see if it's valid.

2. The AG00 file, which defines the verbs and objects, included some of the characters that caused crashes when you were experimenting with them in game code. As a result, I've had to guess at them using the MSX table you linked. Many of the results seem to be correct, but without a full understanding of Japanese, I can't be certain.

3. The game doesn't include any Alicesoft-formated audio archives, nor does the code have any calls to use any. I assume the music is built-in to the executible. To run the game on a modern system, we'd have to manually implement the music at all levels, including recording the music from an emulator. You've played more than me, so maybe you can answer a quick question: does the same music track play throughout the entire game, or does it change?

4. The game uses several Z 1 commands with various parameters. I'm not sure what they do at this stage. The Y commands are thankfully standard.

While I'll probably keep poking around in this, my success here makes me curious about the PC88 games, especially Rance 1 and 2. They're a bit of a bigger problem, since they use a distinct archive format - I'm quite probably going to have to copy and paste them directly from hex, compiled page by compiled page. And of course the character set used by the MSX probably doesn't work on PC88.

Anyways, that's what's going on.