GBA Development

mxbx · 05-28-2002, 03:30 AM

Has anyone here attempted development of an adventure game for the Gameboy Advance? Two of my friends and I were considering starting a project for the lil' bugger soon. Anyone have any experience with it yet?

*Metallus* · 05-28-2002, 04:17 AM

I haven't heard of an independent amateur company going into the console realm, but it definitely sounds like an interesting prospect. I don't know how supportive of amateur development the platform is. It seems like it'd be difficult to get all the equipment (cartridges, etc.), but I wish you the best of luck!

Courthold · 05-28-2002, 07:09 PM

It's an interesting idea, letting amature game developers create their own games for consoles. However, I believe that you have to pay for a GBA development kit, and Nintendo are very selective about who they give them to, so at the moment i don't know how possible it would be.

mxbx · 05-28-2002, 10:02 PM

Non-licensed kits are available. The most difficult thing I can foresee would be getting a license from Nintendo to distribute or sell the finished product to the distributor.

Doodle Dude of Doom · 05-31-2002, 12:49 PM

the nintendo gba development kit cost around £6000 told Tony Warriner at Revolution Software to me. So you must have many pices of eights

mxbx · 06-02-2002, 11:30 PM

Yeah, the Nintendo Dev. Kit is expensive (to say the least.) But, there are non-licensed kits that contain re-writable test cartridges, there are emulators to test code on the computer and there are compilers for both assembly and c freely available on the internet. In fact, the cartridge-writing kit (about $200 US) isn't really necessary (although it helps significantly in getting animation timing done), bringing the cost down to time.
If it turns out that the idea itself is enough to sell the game (it won't be) and a company decides to fund the project, then a Nintendo kit is probably the better choice. But a couple hundred dollars and plenty of time is all that it really takes*.

Eat chips and pretend they're fried potatoes,
Max Bax

* as long as your team is located in a country w/ no laws requiring that workers recieve payment

Esseb · 10-08-2002, 03:37 PM

You can buy a flash linker. www.gamegizmo.com is a nice place to get them since lik-sang was shut down by M$.

I just ordered my 128m flashkit from gamegizmo last night, I'll let you know when it's arrived and how it went.

For developing, you have plenty of choices. Go to www.gbadev.org and www.devrs.com/gba and you get all the info you need. No need to purchase an original gba dev kit, as plenty of people have made their own tools and compilers. There are assembler and c compilers. http://www.thepernproject.com is a nice place for tutorials on programming games in c for the gba, though it hasn't been updated for a while. http://snow.prohosting.com/gbaguy/gbaasm.htm for assembler tutorials.

Speaking of adventures on them: I'm planning on coding one sometime. I worked on a small demo of mi2 on the gbc, but I didn't know much coding back then.

Cheers.

jannar85 · 10-09-2002, 04:50 AM

Cool Esseb!

moebius · 10-09-2002, 06:27 AM

I have seen some free development kits over there, most of them based upon GCC (The awesome free compiler), and some kind of small lC libraries to gain access to built-in ROM facilities of consoles (mainly for the PSX). I can't ensure it for the GBA, but I think it exists. You can use a GBA emulator in order to test the generated code, there are some good ones.
Just hit Google ans search something similar to "PSX gcc" or "GBA gcc" and good luck!

Esseb · 10-09-2002, 04:51 PM

Noone ever click my links...