I love finding a mysterious NOP in a released binary.

Someone patched this. Compilers don't usually just stick a NOP in the middle of a functional call.

Unless they're MIPS or similar, I guess, but there are very few MS-DOS games that run on MIPS processors

"how do I tell if I've inaccurately marked data as code?"

well, does it ever use the XLAT instruction? then yeah, it's wrong.

@foone not sure if it ends up getting called, but if you're looking at gizmos and gadgets still, it does contain a legit XLAT