Hi, I just started tonight reading 6502 Assembly and how to use it to put together an NES game. But I already hit a road block. I have Windows 10 and a Macbook with Windows 7 and I cant get NESASM to run on either, saying the program is not compatible with my machines. How do I fix this? Is there a version of the program that will run on newer WIndows machines?
Did you find a really old DOS build of NESASM?
Try this version for Windows instead:
http://nespowerpak.com/nesasm/NESASM3.zipThat one's a little old (2011?) but someone else might be able to point you at a newer version of NESASM. For now though, try that and see if it at least runs for you.
Most people have moved onto ASM6 and CA65.
NESASM is hard to recommend these days.
Unfortunately, the most comprehensive and newbie-friendly tutorial there is requires it. Until someone writes another tutorial that's just as easy to follow using another assembler - or maybe even one that's mostly assembler-agnostic, with tips here and there for different assemblers - NESASM will keep being the go-to assembler for beginners.
Did no one notice the "hidden text" in the guys' signature? Look closely. Mouseover, copy-paste select, etc.. This is a spammer.
I'm getting a little tired of repeating myself around here, guys. As I've said time and time again: these are HUMAN BEINGS that work at a company hired to do this type of thing. These aren't "bots". That's how all forms of anti-bot captchas are defeated, and exactly why there are coherent posts. The posts are on-topic to make them look as legitimate as possible.
Am I the only one who has good gut intuition like this? I'm baffled.
I have a feeling I know what may be going on, as the spam greatly increased after the semi-recent server migration/upgrades that WhoaMan did. But as before, I'm not going to talk about the technical details of "how" this stuff was filtered previously, because the spammers obviously read the board; you don't hand your enemy information they can use against you.
Holy shit, I honestly hadn't noticed!
I'm fairly confident you hadn't noticed because it wasn't there at all when the post was first made.
So as tired as you may be, Koitsu, of repeating yourself, realize the tell you're chastising people for not noticing may not have been there when they were replying.
Edit: To elucidate further, I saw this post last night and feel it wasn't there, then. Others who did that, maybe didn't carefully recheck on replying later. I'm actually pretty curious if it really was added later or not. I dunno if there's a log of such matters or not.
One thing that we may have talked in another thread but I do not remember about it but why do we need signatures? It so useless, not seen when logged and maybe this is why it was added later since logged user never saw it when replying..
Kasumi wrote:
I'm fairly confident you hadn't noticed because it wasn't there at all when the post was first made.
So as tired as you may be, Koitsu, of repeating yourself, realize the tell you're chastising people for not noticing may not have been there when they were replying.
Edit: To elucidate further, I saw this post last night and feel it wasn't there, then. Others who did that, maybe didn't carefully recheck on replying later. I'm actually pretty curious if it really was added later or not. I dunno if there's a log of such matters or not.
There is a log server-side, but it isn't detailed enough to say "user XYZ added a signature"; "user XYZ changed something in their profile" is about all you'd see.
Again: I cannot talk about the specifics of those intuitions because the spammers would benefit from it. All I will say is that there is a "style" to the accounts being made and the data being posted.
It's not just the signature. Even if it wasn't there at the time of the posting and added later (which we've seen before), that isn't the only hint. I surely can't be the only one who's figured it out, can I? Hard to talk about it when I **can't** talk about it. :-)
Banshaku wrote:
One thing that we may have talked in another thread but I do not remember about it but why do we need signatures? It so useless, not seen when logged and maybe this is why it was added later since logged user never saw it when replying..
While I don't see the purpose of signatures on a forum either, disabling them wouldn't relieve this problem. The spammer could accomplish the exact same result/goal by making a post, then later, editing the post to contain content that would normally be in said signature. Sure, the edited post would say "edited" (if done within a certain amount of time), which doesn't get us any closer to solving the real problem. :-)
The only 100% reliable way to solve the problem is (if even possible) to make the forum like the wiki: new accounts are read-only until "approved" by an administrator. For the forum, I'm not particularly a fan of this idea (while for the Wiki, I am a strong supporter of it). When I helped run/admin the forum (that included direct access to the server), I used several tactics to greatly limit chances of spam from the same company/organisation. Like I've said in the past, I can't talk about those tactics because the spammers understand English/read the forums, and I resigned from being an admin/moderator here many years ago.
Captchas or signup questions (like what's on the forum here) don't really help when
actual human beings are being paid to make accounts and post on forums. The questions could be rotated monthly (it's a manual process by an admin and takes ~15 minutes to do), new ones replacing the old, but the questions are answerable by anyone who is smart enough to use Google.
Hm. Why post about it at all, then? You believe you have knowledge or intuition that will help people mentally filter spammers, but you can't post it because the spammers would benefit. Fair enough, but then who is helped by posting about this unknown technique? "If only you guys knew what I knew you wouldn't have replied, but I can't post what I know." Is the public post an invitation for everyone to PM you for the secret?
If you have a plan for a sieve that the admins can put into place, then the admins can benefit from a non public document, sure. I just don't understand the goal of the public metapost about the plan, basically.
Kasumi wrote:
Hm. Why post about it at all, then? You believe you have knowledge or intuition that will help people mentally filter spammers, but you can't post it because the spammers would benefit. Fair enough, but then who is helped by posting about this unknown technique? "If only you guys knew what I knew you wouldn't have replied, but I can't post what I know." Is the public post an invitation for everyone to PM you for the secret?
A forum admin/mod can PM me for details. The thing I notice about the accounts is something that anyone could notice, and it doesn't help in blocking them, but it *does* help in identifying them.
As for blocking them: there is a separate board for forum administrators where some years ago I outlined how I went about blocking spammers (and what exactly got blocked every time I would add a new entry). Where the block is done and how its done is different than where most folks would do it.
Kasumi wrote:
If you have a plan for a sieve that the admins can put into place, then the admins can benefit from a non public document, sure. I just don't understand the goal of the public metapost about the plan, basically.
The point of my first reply was to say "why do I feel like I'm the only one who notices this stuff?" (the details that make the poster a spammer). We've had several (at least 3) recent occasions of folks responding to spammers.
But now that I think more deeply about what you've said, you're right -- essentially there is no point in me saying anything about the subject at all, on any level. Going forward, I will be taking exactly that approach. Thank you for the insights, always appreciated!
koitsu wrote:
Did no one notice the "hidden text" in the guys' signature? Look closely. Mouseover, copy-paste select, etc.. This is a spammer.
I'm getting a little tired of repeating myself around here, guys. As I've said time and time again: these are HUMAN BEINGS that work at a company hired to do this type of thing. These aren't "bots". That's how all forms of anti-bot captchas are defeated, and exactly why there are coherent posts. The posts are on-topic to make them look as legitimate as possible.
Am I the only one who has good gut intuition like this? I'm baffled.
I have signatures disabled, because they're an entirely useless forum feature, so if you want to know why
I didn't notice the signature that's the reason. Without a signature it looks like a very normal first question for this board.
koitsu wrote:
Even if it wasn't there at the time of the posting and added later (which we've seen before), that isn't the only hint. I surely can't be the only one who's figured it out, can I?
If you think there's something visible here that should lead me to treat this person like an asshole instead of a legitimate noob, I honestly can't see it:
Attachment:
post_appearance.png [ 13.62 KiB | Viewed 2040 times ]
(Note: there is no signature included here, because I have them turned off, so even though it would be "invisible" text, it actually doesn't appear in the post at all for me.)
The post at first looked genuine but there must have been a hint somewhere. The best is to ask Koitsu in PM for his tricks. We don't want to help the spammer get's stronger, don't we
The signature is crystal clear. I couldn't say if that was later edited or not, but I don't think that even matters. Even if it wasn't edited, it's easy to miss in its "invisible text" state. Hardly something I'd be "baffled" that someone else didn't notice.
If koitsu wants to educate me privately about what he thinks is suspicious here instead of responding directly, whatever, but that screenshot is how it looks from my terminal, and I see zero reason not to treat what I can see as if it was posted in good faith. (It's actually a pretty legit question if someone got here from the "patater" tutorial, which does indeed link to an old DOS version of NESASM.)
User banned, sig neutralized.
No matter how many red flags you see I don't think you can know for sure though.
And acting like an asshole to a newbie just in case is of course out of the question.
Should we, whenever people make their first post, ask them to elaborate on their questions in a second post, to see if the two messages are coherent or if they're just copying text from somewhere else? If there even is a second post, that is.
It's true that the OP's message wasn't their own question, but I don't really see any harm at all in a few of us having accidentally answered it. ...and I do kinda see some harm in proactively treating every noob as if they need to prove their humanity to you. (Silent scrutiny of a first poster is probably OK, if you're interested in that, but TBH I'd rather take a minute to write a useless reply than try to riddle out a user's origins from the scraps of information available to a non-mod.)
The actual spam content was entirely within the signature. As soon as that was dealt with by a mod, IMO problem solved. If you spot the spam, just flag it, post in the thread to say "hey this is a spammer, don't bother", and I think we're done. Everything beyond that is an admin's job, nobody else has the information or tools/permission to really do anything else.
Administrators can decide what approach they want to use to try and prevent spammers from getting accounts in the first place, but that's a different matter.
Even if answering didn't help the person asking because it wasn't a genuine question, who knows? Someone with the same question might come across this topic someday when searching for an answer, so I don't see any real harm in answering.
Often, if I see a first post that looks suspicious, I'll copy the subject line or most/all of the message body into Google. Doesn't happen too often in the NES posts (though sometimes we've seen earlier posts from the same thread copied..), most often it's in the general section and you'll see the same post appear on forums of other sites, too.
I've joked about it before, but if we can make a spammer learn 6502 assembly to post here, then we can declare victory, haha. But yeah, usually the fake posts are just other people's posts copied/pasted.
But don't assume that all questions copy-pasted from another forum are spammers. If they're copied within a couple days, it might be the same person asking in good faith in multiple places. This goes double for things like release announcements.