Every exercise so far handed you a function to fill in — the name, the return type, the arguments, all laid out:
int add2(int a, int b) {
// you write this part
}Those were training wheels. When you decompile for real, nobody gives you that line. A disassembly is a pile of instructions filed under whatever address the linker parked it at — func_802c37f8 — and nothing else. Even the "name" is just the address with a prefix on it. It tells you where the function lives and nothing about what it does. How many arguments it takes, what types they are, whether it returns anything at all — that's yours to work out from the assembly, before you write a single line of C.
The sooner you learn to read a signature straight off the machine, the better. From here on, the editor starts empty and the names stop helping. Every exercise now goes by its address, func_ plus eight hex digits — exactly what a real decomp project calls a function nobody has figured out yet. The header hands you that placeholder and nothing more.
The good news: it's more mechanical than it sounds. The ABI — the calling convention — is a fixed set of rules about where arguments arrive and where results come back. Learn the rules once and a signature usually falls out of the first few instructions.
We'll start gently. For now every value is a plain 32-bit int, so the return type is always int and only two things change from one function to the next:
Floats, pointers, and stranger return types have tells of their own, and we'll come back for them later. Get counting arguments down first — after that you're not doing exercises anymore, you're doing the real thing.