The Shrine

<div style='font: 10pt georgia; text-align: left; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~kenth/metroid/ ... oid.asm</a>

Fucking awesome: Metroid source code, disassembled, reconstructed, commented.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>I'm sure to many people here that stuff actually makes sense...still, pretty neato. How do you go about doing something like that?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Well, the assembley code anyway. Or does anyone know if it was originaly written in a higher-level language (most likely C)?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Jesus...how the hell did this guy get the variable names from an already compiled program? Surely the debug symbol table was removed before it was shipped out.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Given some of the tricks listed in the code, probably not.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt georgia; text-align: left; '>I doubt it. I imagine NES programmers (and in-house Nintendo programmers in particular) would like to have written as close to the bone as possible.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Even if they wanted to, could they? That is, was the Nintendo architecture one that even had a C compiler? I have no idea.

Which also brings up, to me, questions about the SNES. By that point, I thought they'd be writing games in C. But again, where would the compilers come from? Or are the architectures common enough that compilers exist for them? I have no idea what internals they had, or what instruction sets they supported.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://www.zophar.net/tech/snes.html">h ... es.html</a>

Then again, the code for Metroid looked a lot like what I remember 68000 assembly code looking like when I took it in college, so it's also possible that they just made their custom language close enough to the mainstream that any old compiler would be able to handle it.

Anyway, while looking for information on exactly what processors the S/NES had, I found this page with a whole bunch of SNES technical docs, if you're interested.

<i>-57</i></div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I imagine Nintendo would want to provide that sort of thing so to encourage third party development. But I don't know if they did. I might try to search for that kind of stuff if I have the chance.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Back in the NES/SNES days, it was mostly assembly, though I wouldn't be suprised if there's a C compiler for it around somewhere.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt Arial; text-align: justify; '>This guy is effing insane!!! How do you do something like that?</div>