nesnoob wrote:
I would like to know which assemblers and sprite editors, if any, were used to create real NES games
The word "real" was a poor choice of your part here, IMO. Games made today are as real as games made in the 80's. They exist and they run on the NES... which makes them real NES games. I'd say "official" was a better word, but even in the 80's not all games were official, and what homebrew programmers do today (use whatever tools are available to program the games and put them on cartridges) isn't much different from what unlicensed developers did back in the day.
That being said, in the early days of the NES, a lot of things were done by hand. Most people didn't even have computers in their offices. Sometimes the only real tool they had was an assembler, and most of the data was either inputted by hand or generated by simple tools coded by the developers themselves. As time went by, things became less precarious, but the tools were still not nearly as versatile as what we have today.
Quote:
If they are available for download today, can you send me a link to download?
We've had access to pictures from magazines and such where we can see some of the tools being used (for example, scroll halfway down
this page and you'll see SMB3 sprites being edited), but I don't think we ever had access to any of the software. Also, the computers used by companies weren't PCs, or any other kind of personal computers regular people would have at home, so whatever software you might find will definitely not work natively on your computer, and there probably aren't any emulators for those machines since they were only used by companies.
More oldschool software can be seen
here (although this is about a SNES game).