Archon

(A request piece for one of my Twitter mutuals, in re: an OT3 meme that's been making the rounds.)

I definitely need to work on packing the house for my ever-impending move, but between that and everything else going on I seem to have fallen back into old habits and, uh... started setting up a SNES development environment. Because I'm the sort of nightmare human who thinks writing assembly code is a reasonable stress response.

I don't really have a goal with it, to be honest; I just really enjoy fooling around with old consoles where I can get down and dirty with the processors. At work I'm twelve dozen layers removed, so it's oddly reassuring to strip all the nonsense back and have my finger directly on the pulse. Just me and the registers, fiddling bytes around.

Compared to the snatches of Gameboy dev I've done in the past, the SNES' processor is actually a standard chip and 65816 docs are usable outright (unlike the GBZ80's custom architecture, which means that you can kiiiiinda reference I8080 and Z80 docs, sometimes, but not all of their registers and opcodes line up with Nintendo's chip). On the other hand, man has it been a pain trying to find the info I need for SNES programming. I mean, that's not a terribly uncommon problem in general, since most dev resources focus on either the absolute programming beginner or jaded experts, but it's especially rough for an older architecture like the 65816 which doesn't seem to have had a whole lot of popularity outside its use in the SNES. When it comes to useful intro posts I've done a lot of squinting at things trying to work out who's actually knowledgeable enough to trust and who's just talking like they are.

The Gameboy family seems to be a bit better documented on that front. I remember it being pretty quick and painless to find lists of dev resources, and you can pretty much just grab RGBDS and go, whereas getting things set up for the SNES has so far involved a lot of hoop-jumping and also setting up a WSL instance of Arch.

Not sure if I'm gonna keep that one around yet or not. I might fool around a bit in test projects and see if the libSFX framework is worth the cross-OS hassle, and/or if I can coax it into building for Windows without having to deal with cygwin. That might be the least painful option, unless there are goblins lurking in the framework somewhere, but from a quick glance through the source I think I should be able to modify it without too much extra agony. Guess we'll find out sometime this week.

God it's been ages since I wrote a proper blog post. At least a decade, probably. I kind of early-adopted myself straight into The Algorithm™, and most everything from before all of that is just... gone. Ash in the wind. Half of what came after is too, because I jumped between any alpha/beta site I could get my hands on back in the mid-to-late 'naughts when social networking was first taking off outside of universities, and most of those never even bothered to renew their domains after the first year.

Archon • USA

AO3: AugustArchon
Twitter: @AugustArchon

Artist, author, and absolute madman behind a keyboard. Capable of breaking a codebase in ways you've never before seen or imagined. Also, surprisingly, capable of putting it back together again with only a couple screws left over.

One time in college my mentor told me I should stop drawing Final Fantasy boys, presumably because one of the characters I was working on concept art for had hair too long for his manly sensibilities. Joke's on him, because now I only draw Final Fantasy boys.