Pooyan
Disassembled by Karl Stiefvater
Pooyan (Konami, 1982) is a single-screen shooter in which a mother pig defends her piglets from a pack of wolves. Mama rides a lift up and down one edge of the screen and fires arrows across it, while the wolves attack by floating on balloons.
The game alternates between two boards. On the descent board the wolves drift down from the top of a cliff on balloons toward the piglets waiting below; you pop a balloon with an arrow to drop its wolf before it lands. On the ascent board the wolves rise up the cliff on balloons and you must stop them before they reach the top. A wolf whose balloon bursts falls away; wolves that get through press the attack, and the pack lobs rocks at the lift. Between the ordinary arrows you can launch a large piece of meat that sweeps several balloons at once. Clear every wolf to finish the board; the boards then repeat, faster and more crowded.
Navigation
- Hardware — CPU, memory map, I/O ports, the LS259 control latch, tilemap/sprite layout
- Work RAM — the named work-RAM cells (0x8800–0x8FFF)
- Main CPU code — the annotated Z80 disassembly
About this disassembly
This disassembly, RAM map, and game description were produced by AI and are verified against the original ROM and against MAME. The recovered code was checked to reproduce the ROM's own execution frame-for-frame, and the game model was confirmed by observing the real game running under MAME. It is offered here transparently, as AI work, precisely because it is machine-checked rather than hand-asserted — so verify it against that evidence. Project: https://github.com/qarl/arcade-js.
The disassembly covers the code reached from the two entry points — the reset vector (`0x0000`) and the vblank NMI (`0x0066`); ROM data tables (tilemaps, lookup tables, sprite and layout data, text) are shown as data.