Ah, this is great. I first learned assembly programming to modify one of my favorite video games, Earthbound. To my surprise, the game was a cult classic, and e

Ah, this is great. I first learned assembly programming to modify one of my favorite video games, Earthbound. To my surprise, the game was a cult classic, and extensive efforts had been made to develop tools to modify every aspect of the game. As part of that effort, I learned 65816 assembly, a 16-bit descendant of the 6502. The day I modified the code to add a run button, thereby eliminating one of the most annoying aspects of the original game, I was ecstatic. I checked back on the community, PK Hack, a few months ago. The level of development was amazing. Virtually the entire game was mapped, byte for byte. There's a sophisticated visual map editor, and a cross-platform data editor. The coolest part was to see a tool I envisioned, for which I developed a lackluster proof of concept, come to full fledged fruition. Earthbound, as it turns out is a rather uniquely developed game. The second game in the Mother series, which is enormously popular in Japan, ran into severe difficulties. Co-developed by HAL and Ape, the coding was rather schizophrenic from the outset. Eventually large parts were rewritten by Shigesato Itoi himself, as the legend goes. The end result is a spaghetti soup of code generated by some type of macro system, compiled from some variant of C, and written in assembly itself. To manage this complexity, many of the events in the game used a text scripting language that abstracted away the underlying routines. This scripting was a series of in-line hex sequences, each its own set of instructions for how sprites, character entities, etc. were supposed to act when the code appeared, which we termed "control codes." 12-year-old me, supremely confident in his abilities and utterly lacking in all technical knowledge, suggested we build a scripting language on top of the control codes so that manual text editing would be eased. The result was a slapdash Visual Basic job that used a BASIC like syntax for simple substitutes for control codes. Of course at the time, I had no knowledge of parsers, DSLs, language design, or really basic computational knowledge. The result was a wreck. But that wreck stuck in someone's mind. Years later, after obtaining his computer science degree, one of the hackers with whom I had worked implemented a full-fledged language on top of the control codes. In retrospect, I don't remember the vast amounts of time I ostensibly wasted learning an obsolete game's design and building tools with which to modify it. I remember the heady moment when you suddenly knew how a data field worked, or after a whole night of hunting with a hex editor the data you wanted appeared, and the sheer giddy thrill of discovering new knowledge and seeing it implemented right there, like a physical mark on the world. I recognize this has been a long and tangential exposition, so if you've read any of it thank you for indulging me. Another glimpse of that low level assembly, like the smell of home after a very long time away, brings back so many vivid memories.