The complete story is that I wanted to do it couple years ago. I looked into game code then little, and concluded that it will be pretty much hard. So, it was put aside, waiting that I have more free time. What is not rare case, actually all larger projects went that way:
Uridium waited some 2.5 years after disassembling it's code, then took about 2 months of intensive work - what means some 20-30 hours/week. OIDS was less, but still over 100 hours of effective work .
What waited most is TOS impriving. I disassembled TOS 1.04 some 10 years ago, used it for game adaptations. But I seen then some interesting things in code, had idea why TOS hard disk FAT16 is not well solved. and that it should be improved. And that it will be very hard.
Yes, finally, at beginning of this year it was that I had time, winter was good for sitting at home, so I went in it, being not sure that it will be possible doing in ASM, without real source code (C) . I made first some early tests, to see is code able to handle clusters with more than 2 sectors. What is the key of whole thing . And yes, it is able, up to 32KB size . After it, all was on changing 16-bit variable to 32-but, signed integer to unsigned .... etc. I made over 300 changes, took over 2 months of full time work. And with it have much better FAT16 filesystem,
what takes only little more TOS ROM space, can access 1 GB partitions, 30 of them, even with less RAM used for buffers. I think that it was worth of effort. Especially because doing same in TOS 1.62 was easy - they are practically same.
Yes, I talking here about something what is not game
But it will have influence on game playing too. There are many other things planned, solved already for improved TOS . I posted about it on exxos and atariage forums. Not on 'great AF', because they care not for developers, only for ego of some circles.
Back to Day of the Viper: in June, I finally decided to finish it. Went deeper into code, and realized that I can not make not only keyboard movement control, but even doing usual Gamex/HAGA statesaves and exit to Desktop is not possible without complete rewrite of game's keyboard input handling code. And this is very first case that I did not it - after about 1000 games, 10 years. Need to properly disassemble whole code, what self can take days , then understanding many things about input, developing new code ... Just too much time for one, really not outstanding game.
So, we may consider this as finished, as is. Chances that I will go back to it later are minimal. There are many other games, doable in much shorter time - like 100x shorter. Not to mention need to work on TOS improvement, new hard disk driver versions etc.
Life is short, can not do everything - we need to choose wisely what is real worth to deal with.
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the keyboard omission for the movements is a bad move, kills the gameplay a bit. 