I’ve been meaning to write a post after releasing the most recent version(s) of my assembly (ASM) tutorials, but never got around to it until now. Here’s a shameless plug of the tutorials in question:
Ersanio’s ASM Tutorial – Assembly for the SNES (v2.3)
Ersanio’s ASM Tutorial – Assembly for Super Mario World (v1.1)
If you’re an SNES ASM hacker, chances are that you’ve heard about these. So yeah, I’m the author (if that wasn’t obvious already, hehe).
Here’s a picture of an outdated physical version which I printed out with the remainder of my high school printer credits before graduating back then. Gotta put that money to use somehow!
History and idea
“Ersanio’s ASM Tutorial” is an idea I came up with all the way back during my highschool years. SMWCentral’s archives show that my very first ASM tutorial thread was made in November 2008. I was 16 back then.
I learned ASM because of people like Ghettoyouth and Bio. They were pumping out incredible ASM work and it really fascinated me. I didn’t know a thing about programming but I was set on learning ASM anyway. However, there was a problem: because the ASM field was rather young, documentation was difficult to find.
After a lot of searching on the internet, as well as repeatedly asking for help from people who knew ASM, I finally learned ASM myself. It was a tough journey but in the end it all worked out. Yet, I was still a bit bothered by how scattered the information was. I saw people who are willing to learn ASM, but had hard times because of how information was scattered. At the same time, I felt bad for people who knew ASM because I’m sure they’d be bombarded with ASM-related questions… including myself. That is how I came up with the idea of making an ASM tutorial. In a way, I wanted the people to experience my passion as well, so this tutorial would be some kind of a helping hand for people who wish to learn ASM.
Writing my ASM tutorials
Writing my ASM tutorial was actually challenging, because the target audience are people who don’t know ASM. It’s very hard to imagine the things the audience doesn’t know because you yourself know ASM already, so some of the knowledge is “common sense” to you as the writer. This kind of tutorial is one which teaches the audience a “skillset” rather than a “utility”; if I were to write a custom block inserter tutorial instead that would’ve been easy, because the tutorial would be about how the tool works. It teaches the reader a “routine”. On the other hand, teaching a skillset such as ASM is like telling the reader that there’s a bunch of abstract concepts and you need to somehow combine them to achieve a result.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but first and foremost, when you write a tutorial, make absolutely sure that there are no mistakes whatsoever. You wouldn’t want to teach the reader false information. This is the most important rule I followed.
When I started writing my ASM tutorial, I simply wrote a bunch of topics as chapters (kind of in the order I learned them), then started filling them with content. I asked for a lot of feedback from people who both know and didn’t know ASM which was a huge help.
There was a balance I needed to keep while writing the tutorial. When I wrote the ASM tutorial, I wanted to exactly explain what happened behind the scenes when you execute a certain piece of code, but this has the risk of making the tutorial extremely verbose, as well as introducing advanced concepts very early on in the tutorial. Here’s an example of seemingly simple code which could suffer from that problem:
LDA #$01
STA $19
RTS
In the context of Super Mario World, this is simply giving the player the Mushroom powerup status. But what happens behind the scenes in ASM is much more complicated:
- A is in 8-bit mode
- The direct page register is $00
- The data bank register is $00
- What is RTS? Return? To where?
- The processor flag ‘zero’ is cleared
This is a lot of information to introduce to a beginner so I had to keep it to the bare essentials, often simplifying such information to things like “when the address is between $7E0000-$7E00FF, you can simpify it to $00 to $FF” because this is the most common use case scenario of direct page.
Another important thing to keep in mind when teaching a skillset is the usage of examples. You could write down a lot of facts, but without examples it wouldn’t stick around the reader. It’s a chance to get the reader involved and make them think about code. Visual aid can also be helpful, such as a visual representation of the stack.
Interestingly enough, having a good vocabulary also helped me improve my ASM tutorial a lot. An extensive vocabulary helps you with conveying information in a more understandable language. In the beginning my English wasn’t the greatest, but that didn’t stop me from writing the initial versions of my ASM tutorial. As my English improved, I found that some of the things I have written were of poor quality. I essentially ended up almost entirely rewriting my ASM tutorial because of this, but I think it was very worth it.
Future
Very recently I came across this online book sort of thing: Model-Based Machine Learning. Machine learning is interesting in itself but what interested me more is the format of this book. I really like how you can just click through the book and how it’s organized. I’m not sure if they used some kind of tool to generate this online book, but maybe I’ll put my ASM tutorials in this format as well one day even if I have to do it manually.
Closing words
I would like to believe that my ASM tutorials were of great contribution to SMWCentral. However, I didn’t expect it to be recommended in other communities as well. p4plus2 and Raidenthequick mentioned how my tutorials are being used in other communities as well and I was really amazed by this.
I think it’s safe to say that both of these ASM tutorials are my proudest work in my hobby of ROM hacking.