Learning ARM7

I’ve been on and off with FE Builder and FE8 ROM Hacking for the past few years. Modding in general has been an occasional hobby that has stuck around with me for a very long time. Every once in a while, I come back to hack FE8, mess around with whatever new features and mods are out there, make something small that’s usually 3 chapters long, and then forget about it for the next couple of months. I didn’t really make anything with the goal of showing it off, or even finishing it, it was really just for my own entertainment. Well now its that time again.

I believe the longest continuous rom hack I’ve made was 7 or 8 chapters long, although, to my knowledge, I don’t have any of those old projects saved. Either way, I want to actually try making something with an audience in mind: my friends who would find seeing all of our inside jokes played out on screen mildly amusing.

I want to implement my own assembly hacks into this project. Nothing really ambitious, I just have a few ideas for small skills in mind. I have decent knowledge in languages like java, which doesn’t really help here, but what does help, I hope, is that I tried learning x86 assembly some time ago. I never really used that knowledge at all and I don’t think I was anywhere near from having what would be considered efficient knowledge, but I at least have some idea of what I’m getting into when trying to learn ARM7.

Here’s the problem, though. I have no real idea of where to start. Searching for posts and topics of other people asking the same question isn’t helpful as most of them are either outdated or go unanswered. I’ve found posts like Assembly for Dummies, one other about C that I couldn’t retrace, and one other about making custom skills with ASM that I also couldn’t find again. However, they were particularly old. The one I linked in particular is almost 4 years old. So, are there any particular resources for learning ARM7 Assembly that I should look into? Is the one I linked still up to par with today or are there different resources that this community would recommend? Am I just going to have to scour around and learn on my own? I know learning something like this is guaranteed to be a long process.

I apologize for the three chunky paragraphs dancing around the question. I was writing this with the assumption that if I didn’t give any background on where I’m at, I would receive comments of people dancing around the question, like I was, ironically, and telling me to learn FE Builder first under the assumption that I’m a completely blind beginner, which is a fair point. I feel though, as if I have my own design philosophies pinned down and on top of that, I’m going into this laying the story out and I even am sketching the 10 maps just because, and this counts for literally everything, maybe you could even say life itself, that winging has done nothing for me except being a crypt keeper of the unfinished project cemetery.

I’m sorry to the one (possible) person who read through this awful run-on sentence hell. I’m not proud of my writing either.

Edit: Wow, being able to read the whole thing on the screen at once now, this was even dreadfully longer than I thought.

1 Like

Hey at least you got paragraphs.

In my own experience, a lot of what’s in that Assembly for Dummies topic still applies, although it doesn’t go into lyn.

If you have Discord, I’d say join the FEU discord and ask questions in the #spell_academy channel. The people there can help a lot.

This is a beginner friendly guide:

& the ASM for dummies thread is still hugely relevant. While hacking tools often evolve every few years, asm code does not change, so unless we magically get a full disassembly (at which point we’d gradually move to hacking in C, I think), it shouldn’t ever really become outdated

While coding your skill, I recommend testing it in the SkillSystem github buildfile. Once it works the way you want it to, then you could insert it into an febuilder project.

You can also find great feedback in #playtesting on feu’s discord. Usually a single chapter is shared at a time in there.

I second this. #febuilder_help, #hacking_help (buildfile questions), and #spell_academy have all been vital to me.

Welcome to feu!