This is a demo ROM made using a Ruby based SNES build tool I am building (included in lib/snes_builder).
It displays a logo and text on the screen. You can then use the D-pad to draw with a ✨ tile.
Demo ROM: https://github.com/maddievision/sparkles-sfc/releases/tag/v0.0.1
bundle init
rake build
See src/assembly_modules/program.rb as a starting point. There is also a png to 2bpp converter that's used in src/assembly_modules/gfx_core.rb#L76.
The builder is at lib/snes_builder/builder.rb#L64, but it is super messy at the moment. Lots of hacky DSL stuff happening.
Under the hood, a Ruby based assembler is used, Snesasm lib/snesasm. This is a DSL based assembler heavily forked from drbig/c64.
Sample output of the final assembly is at sample_output.log
TODO: write more stuff here
I love Ruby and have used it a lot over the years, and I think there's a lot of potential to leverage some code generation and meta-programming. Its DSL lends to some nice syntactic sugar, though there is the downside of it being opaque and too "magical", as well as difficult to debug.
I first used c64asm to build a NES sound driver, which became a bit of a hassle as I was trying to glue things together in a messy way.
I put together Snesasm very quickly to help with writing assembly patches for ROM hacking work, and after being heads down on this kind of work, I got inspired to try building ROMs from scratch, something I've surprisingly not really done for the SNES.
And so, I spontaneously set out to make a ROM builder that was more robust than my haphazard builder for the NES sound driver, and for utility beyond ad-hoc assembly patches and injections.
But also, why not?
- Add support 24-bit addressing / multiple banks to Snesasm.
- Ruby SPC-700 builder / assembler
- Some common helper macros (setting up DMA, uploading to the APU etc)
- More things