Quote:
Those were the days..
Sounds like those
weren't the days.
Nowadays you have a lot more information. More accurate information. Better tools, etc.
As for the question.. I first started learning 6502 assembly in 2000. I think I did some crappy ROM at the time that played NSFs (though it only worked in Nesticle), but that was about it. It wasn't until 3 years later that I took a more serious stab at it and began writing my own NES emulator, and I also wrote a few small things for the NES itself in the years that followed.
What I remember from those days was the hassle of testing stuff on HW, since I didn't have any kind of dev cart myself. So I used to send ROMs to Bananmos (we went to the same school at the time) and asked him to test them on his NES since he had an EPROM-emulator. And he would say "yeah it works" or "no, it doesn't work", and I would have no idea what it looked like when it ran. Not exactly the best way of doing things
Nowadays I do very little NES development, but I've done a lot of SNES development over the past year, and I still find a lot of the threads here interesting to read.