FrankenGraphics wrote:
Western Design Center also offer their toolchain as free to use. It requires registration, though.
I'd just say use ca65. It's what we all use here and it's not at all difficult to get. It's still a major bummer bazz's tutorials are using WLA DX though...
Graphics were also being questioned. GIMP is perfectly adequate for making the graphics but as for transferring them to SNES format, I don't really have anything to recommend. I still use PCX2SNES even though it's garbage (I remember being really frustrated that some of my graphics were being displayed incorrectly because I found that it pads whatever you give it with 0's to be at least 512 bytes for whatever reason).