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Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

I once tried to create a legitimate ROM for the Gameboy Advance but it was obviously pretty involved. For those interested, plenty of resources such as: http://www.loirak.com/gameboy/gbatutor.php

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Yeah - GBA homebrew is hard. Mostly because it's a modern processor (it's an ARM7TDMI) with some really nutty RAM and graphical limitations. But any 8-bit or most 16-bit systems (except the Genesis, which is something of a kludge) are pretty straightforward.

I do streaming charity events on occasion and an idea I've had is collaboratively writing an NES game over the course of a weekend, on-camera.

What? GBA is clearly easier than NES. Just set up a single tile layer in mode 0, and you got what's practically a NES with more colors, sprites and a much more powerful CPU that you can program in C++ if you like.

Sure, if you sit in mode 0 it's pretty simple. But if you're writing code for the GBA, you're probably gonna want to do stuff with the GBA's feature set, yeah? The bitmap modes, affine sprites and layers, sound, etc. get a little bit complicated. It's all stuff you can learn, don't get me wrong, and it's not like it's not so weird that knowledge you'd acquire from using other systems isn't applicable--but I find that there's a lot more that I had to have in my head when playing around with it than the NES (or systems I lean towards more, like the C64). It's a great platform to mess around with, but it is more complex. But if you're not going to use that complexity, for homebrew--I dunno, I'd just go grab a NES emulator.

GNU C++ had gremlins for the GBA last time I was writing homebrew for it, so I can't speak to that. I kinda enjoy writing assembly when messing around with this stuff, though, so, eh. For anything else, I love me some (Modern!) C++, but it kind of feels like I should be writing assembly for that stuff, it's more fun to me.

Do me a favor and chew on something for a sec, though: what does your "What?" do except add a hostile and combative edge to the conversation? Maybe don't do that. Thanks.

> GBA is clearly easier than NES.

The NES is a much simpler system. Granted, it's a simpler system that you're programming in a less-convenient language, but I think that which one is "easier" depends on what you're used to.

Most 8-bit systems perform poorly with C compilers so you are looking at writing in ASM. Additionally, there are all kinds of messy things like "mappers" on NES and GB to handle bank switching of the severely limited address space.

GBA lets you use C without bank switching. I'd say it is far easier than the older generations.

If you want to write C, that's an absolutely fair cop. I would much rather write assembly for this stuff--as I mentioned in a sibling, it sorta feels right?--so that wasn't something I was thinking about. Rather, the profusion of features that are kinda tricky (mentioned in that sibling) along with the ARM/Thumb mess.

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