Difference in how retro and pc games and programs were made.

[Killingbeans]

No 'ultra powerful' computer is required to assemble assembly language, each assembly language instruction directly relates to one machine code instruction. Its not that processor intensive to translate it into raw machine code.

That's true. Don't know where I got that whole "super computer thing" from. Brain fart!

I remember reading somewhere that assembling code was expensive and time consuming back in the days.
I guess I'm just remembering completely wrong. Can't really see the logic in it when I think about it either

When I developed for 68k platforms (same CPU as Megadrive, Amiga) we used a ROM emulator, this was a little box that sat on the ROM socket where the cartridge/game board would normally go. You then wrote your code in assembly language or C, compiled it using a cross-compiler (a compiler that knew the instruction set of the 68k chip) and downloaded it to the ROM through a parallel cable where it would run. You then tested the results and tweaked accordingly.

More advanced development kits go further, and let you see an actual CPU's registers (on board memory) and freeze the program for debugging.

That's very interesting. I had a feeling they would be using some sort of hardware to make the testing pseudo real-time. But I couldn't imagine how it would work.

[BuckoA51]

Well in the very early days of computing there were no assemblers, so somebody wrote assembly code and then this had to be translated by hand into binary. So something like

MOVE $200,D0

you would look up the opcode for MOVE and it might be 0100 or whatever. It didn't take long for people to realise a computer could do this more efficiently of course.

[shotblue]

Writing a code consists of creating and setting what?

Check out this link which is a walkthrough of a Famicom game:

http://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/week ... puter.html

It could be written on any computer. This link may explain that aside of assembling, programming for nes was done on these kinds of computers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_64000

[Killingbeans]

Well in the very early days of computing there were no assemblers, so somebody wrote assembly code and then this had to be translated by hand into binary.

I think that actually explains my confusion. The book i read, stated that "self assembling code" was the thing that finally made programming fast and affordable. I just thought: " what the #¤#¤ is self assembling code?!" I guess it was merely referring to the introduction of software assemblers. I makes sense now

Writing a code consists of creating and setting what?

Don't quite understand the question. Do you mean writing a piece of software for the NES?

I've only written some simple stuff for the Master System. But it's not that different from programming the NES. It's very much down to basics. You just move bits and bytes around between registers, ports and memory addresses and do a bit of Boolean algebra. There's a lot of things to keep track of, and it takes a lot of work to make a functional piece of software.. that is if you don't cheat and use a high level language like C