GBA Development: Phase 1
Thursday, December 11th, 2008Christmas season has arrived, and with it gift ideas. Ava was begging us for a Nintendo DS. And if you know me, you know you don’t have to ask me twice to buy a new gadget. They’re surprisingly affordable, so much so that I half considered buying one myself.
What stopped me, though, was that I still have a previous-generation Gameboy Advance (which the DS is backwards-compatible with). This realisation, coupled with my recent hankering to do some low-level coding, resulted in me reading up on GBA development. It’s surprisingly straightforward, and, as the platform has been around for quite a while, there is a lot of good documentation out there.
The results of a couple of hours work this morning were: a basic working knowledge of the GBA platform, a functional development environment, and my first functioning ROM image. It’s a simple thing: it displays the two photographs I recently showed at the COFA Annual (and won a prize for!). Press A and you see Botany Industrial Park Study #1, press B and you get Study #2. Neat-o.
I hope to put together a small game. Hopefully this won’t just peter out into yet another unfinished side project. (”This time for sure!”)