User:Alex Field/Sonic 1 ROM Hacking for Newbies

Disassemblies

Hivebrain 2005

• SNASM68K (not recommended, see below)
• ASM68K
• AS

This disassembly by Hivebrain was released all the way back in 2005; it was originally developed for SNASM68K (which doesn't work on 64-bit OSes or Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7), but ports to ASM68K and AS were soon made. Although it lacks variable names and has some minor labelling mistakes, I consider this the most user-friendly disassembly for the following reasons:

1. Most of the coding is stored within a single .asm file, meaning finding specific labels shouldn't be too difficult.
2. Many How-To guides use the 2005 version as a basis.

For downsides:

1. Lacks many "modern" labels or variable names (effectively the "raw" code).
2. SonED2 files for it are broken.

Github

• ASM68K
• AS

This is the one being worked on by the community to this day, and was originally hosted on SVN before being moved to GitHub; although it has names for most variables, making it the easiest for understanding the code, it is extremely polarizing due to two huge downsides:

1. A lot of the code was split into many, many .asm files, meaning finding a specific label is very hard.
2. Most historical labels aren't listed, and the new labels aren't exactly the best either.