Nothing new, all at once
From here to the end of the tier: complete functions made purely of idioms you already own. Your job shifts from learning shapes to recognizing them mid-sentence. Here's xorAll(s), which XORs together the bytes of a zero-terminated string:
u32 xorAll(u8 *s) {
u32 x = 0;
while (*s != 0) {
x ^= *s;
s++;
}
return x;
}
0: lbu v0, 0(a0) # peek the first byte
4: or v1, zero, zero # x = 0
8: beqzl v0, 0x28 # empty string? return…
c: or v0, v1, zero # (likely slot) …x
10: xor v1, v1, v0 # ── loop: fold the byte in
14: lbu v0, 1(a0) # peek the NEXT byte
18: addiu a0, a0, 1 # s++
1c: bnezl v0, 0x14 # not the terminator? go around…
20: xor v1, v1, v0 # (likely slot) …folding as we go
24: or v0, v1, zero
28: jr ra
2c: nop
Name the pieces as they pass: sentinel walk with the tested byte peeked one ahead; guard with the accumulator's init in its likely slot; bnezl back-edge carrying the fold; lbu because the elements are unsigned bytes. Four chapters, twelve lines.
The target is the same walk computing a real string hash — the kind used for name lookups. One upgrade to expect: the body multiplies the accumulator by a constant each trip, and inside a rotated loop IDO doesn't spin up the shift-and-add chains you saw in straight-line code. It hoists the constant into a register before the loop (one addiu) and spends a multu/mflo per trip. A constant materialized above a loop is almost always this — a loop-invariant pulled out once.
Your task
Write func_8018dd34 to reproduce the target assembly.