What got you into making ASM?

Inspired by Hooded Edge's thread, if you've made ASM, what got you interested in it?

For me, it was carol. I saw what he did with Brutal Mario and I decided that I should try to learn programming to try to do things like he did for my hacks. I then took a computer science class and learned quite a bit of stuff, which helped me get started with ASM later on! It ended up taking me like 7 years since then to start a hack for reals though. Nowadays, I've added many other people to my list of inspirations, and I hope to reach their level someday!

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Hack・Ports・ASM・"Uploader"

I've messed with a couple sprites/patches here and there. The two inspirations that come to mind for ASM would be Ersanio and Sonikku back when I was first getting into romhacking, as I was always astounded by their creations. Can't even count the times I watched their YouTube videos on repeat. Don't have a lot of time at this point in my life to dedicate to a hobby like this, but very soon I would like to get back into sprites again!

I forgot what made me want to learn ASM - it was probably curiosity in general, not a concrete goal or single source of inspiration - but what did make me learn it is Schwa's ASM Tutorial, back in 2008. It all felt very foreign but also very reasonable and I had a lot of fun learning the mindset, and it's served me well for all the computer sciency things I've come across since.

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When I started hacking by 2010 or so I was amazed by ASM with Brutal Mario and such and seeing people who weren't much older than me make impressive stuff was quite inspiring. 5 years forward I still had a lot of free time and decided I'd finally try and tackle some tutorials. Some custom blocks came out of that.

This year quarantine gave me 6 or 7 months of a lot of free time, so I returned to SMWC's Discord. I kept tabs with the #asm channel since I thought I had some ability to help out in a minor way, and started learning a lot of new things. I learned how patches worked in theory and started putting patch making to practice. SMW started to interest me a lot and I started making assorted ASM for fun, eventually learning sprites and making another handful of things.

My free time is now gone and I don't think I'll ever have it again the way I had it this year, and I hardly can devote myself to ASM programming without that free time.

Mainly through hacks like Brutal Mario (come on, everyone was inspired by it), the VIP series, , A Strange Mission, etc. and by various people like Ersanio, Roy, Yoshicookiezeus, Sonikku, etc. which inspired me to do SNES ASM (and programming in general).

I don't remember when I learned ASM, though, but I think it was with Ersanio's ASM tutorial where I made my first advancements + tutorials such as Iceguy's tutorial.
The second advancement was to read the SNES Developer Manual but I don't know when I read that. It must be either by learning how CC-DMA works (where the SA-1 readme redirected to) or by the second ASM Workshop (which contributed to my ASM skills a bit as well). That made me learn about stuff like about Mode 2 which made me realise how certain games managed certain effects (everyone talks about Yoshi's Island but the train stage of Tiny Toon Adventures makes use of Mode 2 as well).

Starting a couple years ago (when I started to used BSNES+ as my primary debugger), I was interested in how games handle certain effects which is why I investigated them with a debugger (and still do). The result: I learned how Yoshi's Island handles its colour gradient and parallax HDMA (which brought birth to "Scrollable" HDMA Gradients and Parallax HDMA Toolkit), I learned how SMB3 (SMAS) handles transparent water graphics (colour half-addition on layer 3 and sprites and layer 1 are both on mainscreen and subscreen) and how Super Metroid handles dark rooms (though I have speculated that it used colour subtraction especially since I noticed those rooms use two foreground layers years ago).

That's really interesting. Guess you like set a register as a breakpoint (or its mirror) and step through the code. I'll try to keep that in mind.

Personally Modes 2-6, I learned from IsoFrieze/dots' video on the subject in Retro Game Mechanics Explained. Mode 0, I found out about it through Lightest.

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Hack・Ports・ASM・"Uploader"

I don't have an exciting story.
I learned ASM just to be able to fix some blocks or create some blocks I wanted back in the BTSD days well before blockreator.

I saw DKC2 K. Rool Boss Fight (from DKC2, not brutal mario) and i wanted to make a cool boss.

I was impressed by Bio and GhettoYouth's ASM work and I wanted to do such things too. That was the starting point for me.

I don't think Brutal Mario existed even, back then? Not too sure. But that hack was pretty damn inspiring too.

Even when I knew a decent amount of ASM, I would keep getting impressed by other people. smkdan's VRAM expansion patch, the whole dynamic sprites system, and so on. Such creations just kept feeding me inspiration and motivation to learn more.

It's really nice to see some people getting inspired by my works. That in turn just makes me want to finish the online version of my ASM tutorial more (I've been slacking lately I admit).

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My blog. I could post stuff now and then

My Assembly for the SNES tutorial (it's actually finished now!)

I'm not really sure. I guess I wanted to make my own resources? I started learning from Schwa's ASM tutorial, and I spent a lot of time looking at Davros's old sprites and thinking it was interesting that existing sprites could do new things (the P-Switch that spawns a block, for instance). And yeah, the fact that nobody took ASM requests probably had something to do with it.

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here.

literally this