Zanac (NES)/RAM map

A preliminary and tentative list of RAM locations and their usage during gameplay. Regions are listed as address, size, then description.

  F  1 Currently swapped-in bank. This is set by the bank-swapping
       routines and is consulted by routines that push it onto the
       stack and restore it later.
 26  1 ROM bank holding compressed data.
 2B  1 Decompression control byte.
 2C  2 Pointer to current position in compressed data
 32  1 Lives. 0 = Game Over, any value up to 255 is valid
 5C  1 Current weapon, 0-7
 5E  1 Weapon timer/ammo. Defaults to $14 (20) on free-fire weapons.
 60  1 Current weapon power (number of times the weapon has been picked up?)
 61  1 Current weapon visage (Increases more slowly than 60, seems to be related to what the weapon's power level looks like when fired.)
 66  1 Selector for graphics in tiles $0F8-$0FF: 0=Illegal; 1=AREA;
       2=TIME; 3=GAME OVER; 4=BONUS; 5=PONYCA; 6-255=blank
 83  1 Frame count, in game time. (Updated by main loop, not VBLANK.)
 FF  1 Desired value for PPU_CTRL. Other logic may alter the actual
       value of PPU_CTRL as needed by that logic, but it will preserve
       all other settings based on this and will restore to this value
       when it is done.
102  2 Magic Number. A fresh power-on is distinguished from a RESET by
       whether or not these two bytes are 35 53. If they are, the high
       score is not reset and the reset count at 19A is incremented.
       If they are not, first-time initialization is done (including
       setting these bytes to the right values).
17A  8 Score. Big-endian, one digit per byte, so a score of 12,300 is
       the bytes 00 00 00 01 02 03 00 00.
185  7 High Score. Works like 17A, but only 7 bytes long and the ones
       digit is assumed to be zero.
19A  1 Number of times you have soft-reset the console since power-on.
       This count is used to unlock Super-Continue and the Sound Test.
200 FF CPU-RAM copy of OAM data
460  1 Number of bytes of data ready to send to PPU.
461  2 PPU address for data, HIGH BYTE FIRST.
463 4D Data to copy to VRAM.

Major open questions:

• Where and how are the non-sprite parts of enemy/player objects held?
• How do weapon selection and upgrades work? Zanac has some unusual corner cases in its mechanics where certain kinds of upgrades "lock" the player's upgrade status unless something dramatic happens.
• The VRAM data for transfer during VBLANK seems to have a number of possible formats, given the complexity of the function that does it. The characterization of 460-49F is almost certainly incomplete.