I'm interested to hear what the non-experienced ASM hackers would like to see covered in a document. Specifically, what are YOU wanting to do with ASM? What do you think ASM is? What parts confound your efforts to effectively use it?

Nightcrawler's posts in the other thread got me thinking, and I want to share the knowledge I have. I've worked now with at least 4 different systems at the assembly level, and I think, with sufficient feedback, I can craft a document that covers not so much the how but the WHY that can hopefully assuage the transition from reading an instruction set to actually USING it to accomplish a specific task.

I'd never really considered that people have a difficult time bridging the gap between the seemingly random gibberish they see in notepad to the magic on the screen. At least, I don't think of it at all now, but I struggled with a lot of it at the beginning as well. It would be a grave injustice if the dinosaurs do die out and the knowledge that they have is lost, and while I doubt I qualify as a dinosaur or even a high profile hacker, I am competent enough to know how to utilize ASM and available tools to further my own ends. I want to do my part to share that.

My intention is two fold: one, explain the inner workings of the MIND of the hacker as he goes about trying to accomplish a given task (I'll be the primary test subject for this, but I fully intend to get feedback from those others who know what they're doing); and two, do so by accomplishing meaningful tasks on multiple platforms to show that the hardware doesn't matter at all as the concepts truly are universal.

I'm going to be going back through the threads in the next couple of weeks and see what I come up with on my own. In the meantime, I'm interested to hear what you guys think. I'm particularly interested in those people who know ASM but aren't entirely sure how translate a certain concept into code. That's what I want to know: the concepts. Compression obviously is going to be the major one, but what else? I'd never thought about altering palette related data until Con's thread, so I'm sure there's other less common things people have trouble with. Let's hear 'em!

Honestly?

How to use the damn debugging tools.

Seconds that.

I can pull of simple things like DTE/MTE and I even pulled off a VWF for a game that used OAM sprites for each character, but what I would like to know how to do is mainly anything which requires actually drawing graphics, like a "true VWF". Also, DMA is a bit confusing to me.

I'd like to know how to add an intro, like Nightcrawler suggested. Music and graphics, hit a button after X seconds have passed to go to the game's normal intro + menu. More importantly though I'd definately like to know how to find and work around compression. Can't really think of anything not mentioned.