CrowleyBluegrass wrote:
Forgive me for making assumptions, but are you expecting the assembler to open into some kind of workspace environment? I believe Nesicide is that sort of deal, but I've never used it myself.
To work most other assemblers, you write your code in a text processing program (I use ConTEXT, but even notepad will work) and give it the .asm extension. When you want to assemble your code, you usually access the assembler via command prompt, for example with ASM6:
Code:
Command line
--------------------------------------------------------------
Usage:
asm6 [-options] sourcefile [outputfile]
Or you can do it the "easier" way (who likes using CMD nowadays right?) you can create a batch file which does this for you. Once again for ASM6 the batch file would contain
Code:
asm6 yourfile.asm output.nes
with yourfile.asm being your code and output.nes being the name of the outputted .nes file, of course. This correlates with what you would otherwise type into command prompt.
If my assumptions are wrong (in which case I apologize) then the reason your code is not outputting a .nes file is because there are errors in it. In some instances CMD will close instantly, without giving you the opportunity to see any errors that were reported. In that case, I suggest you download ConTEXT and setup the macros which allow you to assemble within the program, thereby allowing you to see any problems that may have occurred in assembling your code. If you go this page
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=3783 and scroll down there's a tutorial on how to do this. I'm not sure which assemblers it works with exactly, but I did everything as described in the above thread and it worked fine for ASM6.
Good luck!
I can't find a place to download Nesicide. It looks awesome, but all the download links seem to be removed. I'll try running it from a batch file tomorrow (I have notepad and notepad++, if that works)
tokumaru wrote:
People these days are used to double-clicking programs expecting some sort of graphical interface to show up. Well, in the old days, a lot of programs didn't have graphical interfaces, and even today, a lot of programs simply don't need one. An assembler is a simple program to interface with: you give it a text file containing source code and it spits out a binary ROM... do you really need a graphical interface for that? The answer is no.
You either have to use the command line or a batch file, in order to call the program with text commands instead of mouse clicks. The simpler assemblers (ASM6, NESASM, etc.) only require the name of the text file containing the source code in order to produce a binary file (and optionally, the name of the output file). In this case, the simplest solution is the following:
1- create a new folder;
2- put asm6.exe in that folder;
3- put your source code (for example, game.asm) in that folder;
4- create a new text file in this folder called assemble.bat; (make sure there's no .txt in the end)
5- write this inside that file and save: asm6 game.asm game.nes
6- double-click the assemble.bat file and you should get a game.nes file as a result.
If you there's no game.nes file after double-clicking assemble.bat, there were probably errors in your source code. In order to be able to see the error, add a pause command to your assemble.bat file (just type "pause", no quotes in the second line). This will prevent the window from immediately closing, so you have time to see the errors reported by the assembler.
I don't expect Graphical User Interface, but I expect it to at least run. It shows up for a quick second, and then the program ends.