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I did a little bit of GBA homebrew development back in its heyday. It is a really fun little bit of hardware to hack on. It's powerful enough that you can wri
by implicit 6y ago
I did a little bit of GBA homebrew development back in its heyday. It is a really fun little bit of hardware to hack on.
It's powerful enough that you can write your whole game in C++, but not so powerful that you should rely on the system allocator for anything.
It's in a lovely sweet spot for a particular dialect of zero-overhead C++ that's really fun to write.
As a simple example, I had a little class library of data types that were crafted to exactly map to the hardware registers of the GBA. The whole thing inlined away to nothing.
- benoror 6y agoDid a bit when I was abt 12yo, embarrasing/naive code: https://github.com/benoror/gbadev/blob/master/%40rkanoid/juego.c https://github.com/benoror/gbadev/blob/master/%40rkanoid/jue...
- dleslie 6y agoHey now; if you genuinely wrote that when you were 12 then there's nothing to be embarassed about.
- rafaelvasco 6y agoThe programmer you are today is the result of all the code you ever wrote, good and bad;
- tieze 6y agoI've gotten into GBA homebrew again recently. The community is small but getting a bit bigger. gbadev on Discord is a fun place to hang out. The tooling doesn't seem to have changed all that much from back in the day, which isn't a bad thing: the best way to get music on the GBA is still to compose something in an old-fashioned tracker and using Maxmod to import it. Sprite conversion tools haven't changed that much. Programming it is just so lovely bare-metal: poking/prodding registers, writing backgrounds and sprites into memory regions.. Really fun stuff.
- yc-kraln 6y agoReading this article gave me the warm fuzzies for the same reason; The GBA was a dream to homebrew for.