Neil Baldwin, chip music composer and director at Eurocom, dropped in for a Q&A session in #NESdev@EFnet last night for a few hours; hosted by yours truly Sean W. (a.k.a. B00daW.)  A lot of people, including Neil and I, were getting a bit “loose” to unwind during the event.  So to protect the innocent, the transcriptions below are selectively abridged.

The evening started out with everyone discussing the differences between today’s assemblers and those of yesterday.  Assemblers are the programs that translate the assembly code to hexadecimal; the output being called “binary form” or “a binary.”  Paraphrasing what Neil had said regarding this:

“We actually wrote our own assembler eventually.  We used it on NES and then later we added SNES support.  [The company at that point consisting of 5 people in the early 1990’s.]  We had no interactive debuggers, etc.; but it was a rudimentary IDE in as much as it was an editor with a built in assembler/disassembler.  I actually got [the old environment] compiling; but had to use DOSBox as it wouldn’t work in anything else.”

I had asked the question if the environment would ever be available to the public to which he responded that it would have to be brought up with the other directors at Eurocom.  Perhaps we’ll get to see some of the old techniques used.  Time will tell.

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