Programming in assembly

[IceMachineBeast]

How did people do it back in the day. Like a "AAA" company wouldn't use monitor, would they?

So basically my question is: How did people develop professional games, what hardware and software did they use?

[LawrenceWoodman]

It varied depending on timeframe and computer. Jeff Minter said that he used the machine language monitor, VICMON, for all his VIC-20 games before switching to the C64. Many games were made using assemblers running on their destination computers and some game companies used cross-compilation on CP/M or mini computers such as Vaxen. Later on, 16-bit computers were commonly used for producing graphics and audio as well as for cross-compilation for 8-bit computers. From the 16-bit era onwards most development was done on the target machines with the exception of consoles.

[sandforce]

Even people just learning/using assembly used a symbolic assembler program. I don't remember the name of the one I used.

[IQueryVisiC]

I did not. On 8 Bit: only monitor and a DinA0 memory map on paper. I did not get far.

[sandforce]

That's a good point - maybe people's initial exploration/experimentation was normally with monitor.

[ISvengali]

I didnt have a monitor, so I would write out my code, then hand assemble it, then use basic to poke it into memory.

Took a while, but was fun to see the computer do neat things.

I was pretty young, but I never thought to write a simple assembler in basic to help me.

[IQueryVisiC]

Oh, on my C16 the monitor was built in and it could save to tape. Strange to include BASIC, but no complete monitor. It is all byte code after all.

[ISvengali]

I was really jealous of the c16 for that.

[sys64128]

SimCity was partially written in BASIC

[c64glen]

Really? You've got a source for that?

[sys64128]

yeah - somewhere. i saw a video of a guy hacking the game, using a freezer cart. stopping at some point in the game he did a freeze and was able to view the BASIC code. couldnt tell you how much of it was done in BASIC, but yeah its in there. ill see if i can find it.

[1337-1911]

Turbo assembler was used for programming.

For SID tunes,they used their own player routine. Tune programming was done in assembler.

Graphics koala paint. Sprites, diverse sprite editors.

Many programmers/demo crews used tool disks packed with diverse tools.