> If we look at segment 0800, we see the smoking gun: in and out instructions, meaning that the copy-protection routine is definitely here, and best of all, the entire code segment is a mere 0x90 bytes, which suggests that the entire routine should be pretty easy to unravel and understand. For some reason, Reko was not able to decompile this code into a C representation, but it still produced a disassembly, which will work just fine for our purposes. Maybe this was a primitive form of obfuscation from those early days, which is now confusing Reko and preventing it from associating this chunk of code with the rest of the program… who knows.
in/out instructions wouldn't have a C equivalent. My assumption would be it only translates instructions that a C compiler would typically create.
I would still hope for it to translate most of the code with a couple of asm blocks. But maybe the density of them was too high and some heuristic decided against it?
It would have been an interesting ending to replace the instructions and see if Reko could be made to output code for the function.