GSoC: Michael Madsen

Hello, world!

Hi! I'm Michael Madsen, I'm studying computer science at Aalborg University in Denmark, and I've been accepted as a GSoC student to work on ScummVM.

My task is to create a generic script decompiler, such that it allows adding support for new instruction sets without too much work.

Readers familiar with ScummVM GSoC projects might think this project sounds familiar - and that's probably because it's already been attempted twice, in 2007 and 2009.

So why would my attempt fare better than the previous ones, apart from the old proverb "Third time's the charm"? Well, there is of course no guarantee that it will - but I believe I have a skill set which is suitable for this task. I enjoy working with low-level stuff, I have good logic skills, and I have some experience with writing compilers from the semester project we did at university a year ago, which should be useful when writing a decompiler.

Over this next month, I will be preparing for the coding process by studying documentation and the instruction sets I'll be working with, looking for things that stand out as a potential source of problems and otherwise getting familiar with the engines, maybe prepare a few tools which I expect will help me.
I've already prepared (very) rough sketches of the algorithms I need to use, and I will spend some time refining them a bit more to get them ready to implement.

I don't really have much more to say, so if you have questions, you can e-mail me, leave a comment, or catch me on IRC (where I go by the name of Pidgeot). I look forward to working on the project, and I hope you will like the outcome.