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ASM needs to be more accessible to make hacks more varied

How would you rather hack SMW?

23.6% (17 votes)
8.3% (6 votes)
68.1% (49 votes)
Originally posted by Drex
I bet that if there was a poll for this

Your wish is my command
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation
Just gunna chime in and say that honestly the future of SMW Hacking honestly comes down to Creativity and Motivation.

You can be creative without any ASM.

As for ASM been more accessible you just gotta start and learn at some point. I try to learn more ASM and tweak and edit patches when I can just so I can practice.

It comes down to how much time your willing to put into something and not just give up at the first hurdle.
You don't need to know that much asm to turn smw into a brand new game.
1. Imagination
2. couple hex edits
3. import all new graphics
4. A few basic lines of asm.
5. community the hack is targeted for. What does great on the central might fail at other places, and vice versa.
That's all you need.
Like the rest said doesn't matter how good the disassembley is if you don't understand programming. Programming is something that either works naturaly with your mind or doesn't.
What I sort of meant was remember the old days when people would use Mouser, Thwomp Boss, etc. because they couldn't make their own bosses? Are those days still in effect?
It wasn't that people were not given the ability to make anything else, people just did not want to bother learning how to code their own ones.
People didn't change and people won't change regarding that.
Your layout has been removed.
Most people just want to sit down and make a game, so that means using easily available assets. Can't really blame them for that, though it does lead to some repetitiveness.

It takes an enormous amount of effort to make something user friendly and versatile. Lunar Magic does a good job of it, which is why the community is as big as it is. Making a really good boss making tool that anyone could effortlessly use would be an enormous undertaking, so of course no one's done it; more crappy efforts like the old ultimate noob boss made, well, crappy bosses.
Originally posted by FanofSMBX
What I sort of meant was remember the old days when people would use Mouser, Thwomp Boss, etc. because they couldn't make their own bosses? Are those days still in effect?

What's the alternative? Those resources were made to be used, not not used.
Very very very shortly, this drab, workaday world and everything in it will be changed forever! Follow us into the golden country, into the empire of the senseless!
People still use them.
I accidentally voted without reading... How do I take back a vote?
I mean, right now basic ASM IS accessible in my opinion- there are lots of tutorials on-site for patches, sprites. blocks... , and if you ask some asm question at discord or the help forums you will likely get an answer quickly. Also, we even have blockcreator and a program to make (for now) a sprite's GFX routine, so in my opinion it's just that people are a little "afraid" of trying to get into it at first, especially the ones with no programmkng background.
PLEASE FOR GODS SAKE!!!! TAKE MY VOTE BACK FROM THE POLL!!! I CHOSE THE WRONG ONE!!!!! WHY DOES EVERYONE IGNORE ME!!!!!
Originally posted by FanofSMBX
Yeah, as a player and someone with no personal need for it to be easier, I just notice how so. many. hacks. re-use other peoples' ASM because it's so much easier to add premade stuff than to make it yourself. I feel as though this highly damages the creativity of ROM hacks and makes them feel a little samey to each other. Ik know that there is limited processor overhead with ASM but this problem still bothers me. Thoughts?

I agree that a lot of hacks have a samey feel, but I think this is not because of ASM being inaccessible. I think it's because a lot of hackers care more about cranking out levels quickly and getting their hack done in a short period of time. Few are willing to invest months, or even whole years, into a project.

I find ASM inaccessible but that's because I find programming in general to not be fun. I'm a designer and artist. No doubt plenty of people feel that creating scratch pixel art is an exercise in tedium, while I really enjoy the process.
GANYMEDE

Chapter Two: Land of No Shame
Originally posted by Ladida
while i agree with your sentiment, asm only serves a limited purpose (thats assuming you ever go outside of smw), so even someone who is very dedicated to learning or whatever may lose motivation.

Agreed.
It's not even so much the CPU instructions but the fact code is mixed with SMW routines and it looks like everything is jumping all over the place. "Value 'x' has been stored to register, Jump Subroutine '!@$#'..... what?"
So you kind of need to learn how SMW works while learning the ASM on-top of it. I'd MUCH rather stick to and invest with C++.....
^ Either way you're still learning programming and logistics aren't you? You can apply knowledge from one programming language to literally almost any other and still have a general understanding of how to work with it.
Originally posted by Meirdent
^ Either way you're still learning programming and logistics aren't you? You can apply knowledge from one programming language to literally almost any other and still have a general understanding of how to work with it.

Totally crossed my mind lol. That's true. #tb{:p}
I mean, don't we have literally the whole Super Mario World disassembled and even a tool to reaasemble it again into a 1:1 replica of game cartridge?

I was wondering if in the future we would be able to install patches on ours hacks by replacing the correct routine, and then compiling the code into a binary again (I mean, you add a new feature to your hack and then compile it from scratch, like you would do in a program you are making). That way, not only you would save/optimize a lot of space from not having so many unnecessary long jumps that takes space and processing power and from these few unused bytes scattered around the ROM file. Maybe it would be also easier to acomodate patches that sits in the same ROM places avoid hijack conflicts, etc.

I know our current tools would never support something like that, because they rely on ROM data that is always in the same address. Lunar Magic probably wouldn't recognize level data anymore, because the level data pointer would eventually change. If that ever becomes a reality, I can see modular tools being developed, where you for example design your level, save it to a binary file and include it into a level pointer.

It would be too much work doing something like that, literally all current tools would need to be re-written! Anyways, doesn't hurt imagining how it would be.
Yeah, i guess i'm a bit late to the party, but if you really want to learn ASM then there's only one way, and that's sitting your butt and studying. At least that was how i (and everyone) learnt it.

EDIT: grammar errors
Originally posted by Yan
I mean, don't we have literally the whole Super Mario World disassembled and even a tool to reaasemble it again into a 1:1 replica of game cartridge?

I was wondering if in the future we would be able to install patches on ours hacks by replacing the correct routine, and then compiling the code into a binary again (I mean, you add a new feature to your hack and then compile it from scratch, like you would do in a program you are making). That way, not only you would save/optimize a lot of space from not having so many unnecessary long jumps that takes space and processing power and from these few unused bytes scattered around the ROM file. Maybe it would be also easier to acomodate patches that sits in the same ROM places avoid hijack conflicts, etc.

I know our current tools would never support something like that, because they rely on ROM data that is always in the same address. Lunar Magic probably wouldn't recognize level data anymore, because the level data pointer would eventually change. If that ever becomes a reality, I can see modular tools being developed, where you for example design your level, save it to a binary file and include it into a level pointer.

It would be too much work doing something like that, literally all current tools would need to be re-written! Anyways, doesn't hurt imagining how it would be.


Does the disassembly reassemble with any existing assembler?
We have three different disassemblies.

One of them works in Asar. The others, to my knowledge, don't work anywhere.
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation