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Contribution guidelines

Rule #1

master must never introduce code changes that change the decompressed program image, or the unordered set of relocations, of any original game binary, as compared using mzdiff. The only allowed exceptions are:

different encodings of identical x86 instructions within code segments
padding with 00 bytes at the end of the file.

Other branches are, of course, free to experiment with mods or refactorings.

Taste issues

Use tabs for indentation.
Spaces for alignment are allowed, especially if they end up giving the code a nice visual structure, e.g. with multiple calls to the same function with varying pixel coordinates.
Don't indent extern "C" blocks that span the entire file.
Always use { brackets }, even around single-statement conditional branches.
Add spaces around binary operators. for(i = 0; i < 12; i++)
Variables should be signed in the absence of any ASM instruction (conditional jump, arithmetic, etc.) or further context (e.g. parameters with a common source) that defines their signedness. If a variable is used in both signed and unsigned contexts, declare it as the more common one.

Code organization

Try to avoid repeating numeric constants – after all, easy moddability should be one of the goals of this project. For local arrays, use sizeof() if the size can be expressed in terms of another array. Otherwise, #define a macro if there is a clear intent behind a number. (Counterexample: Small, insignificant amounts of pixels in e.g. entity movement code.)
Documenting function comments exclusively go into C/C++ header files, right above the corresponding function prototype, not into ASM slices.
New structs or "sequence of numeric equate" enums defined in ASM land should immediately be reflected in a header file in C/C++ land, with the correct types and calling conventions.
Try moving repeated sections of code into a separate inline function before grabbing the #define hammer. Turbo C++ will generally inline everything declared as inline that doesn't contain do, for, while, goto, switch, break, continue, or case.
These inlining rules also apply to C++ class methods, so feel free to declar classes if you keep thinking "overloaded operators would be nice here" or "this code would read really nicely if this functionality was encapsulated in a method". (Sometimes, you will have little choice, in fact!) Despite Turbo C++'s notoriously outdated C++ implementation, there are quite a lot of possibilites for abstractions that inline perfectly. Subpixels, as seen in 9d121c7, are the prime example here. Don't overdo it, though – use classes where they meaningfully enhance the original procedural code, not to replace it with an overly nested, "enterprise-y" class hierarchy.

Naming conventions

Macros defining the number of instances of an entity: <ENTITY>_COUNT
Functionally identical reimplementations or micro-optimizations of master.lib functions: z_<master.lib function name>