Game-makers creating new Game Boy games (2021)

I’ve basically stopped at my SEGA Saturn, gaming tech wise.

I used to carry a Game Boy Color from about when I was 20 to when I was 26.

Recently, my girlfriend gave me some weird crummy little NES/GBC emulator device from AliBaba and I like it because it is lightweight, has a backlight; charges via USB and lasts forever. I love it.

At home, though; it’s strictly my SEGA, still. I don’t think I will ever evolve.

Same setup and same reasons. Other advantages are that tactile buttons feel great and the games are designed to be a complete experience i.e. no in app purchases.

My DS Lite has the same infinite battery. I turn it on once every 3 years to see if it still works and end up playing a game for 30 mins. I don't remember the last time i charged it ;) More than 3 years ago I'm sure.

Haha, I learned to solder a few weeks ago just to get my Emerald cartridge to run properly. I couldn't stop taking pictures of how beautiful Links Awakening DX was. I'd say DS also has a few games worthy of your attention.

I play them in HD via Gameboy Player + a good Cube upscaler. And you can get a SNES to Cube controller adapter for a good dpad. Throw in an Everdrive and it's heaven.

This is something you should share. Many would love to see what you came up with.

Nintendo used, or attempted to use, various hardware/software, legal, and economic techniques to force publishers to use their cartridges, for which they took a significant cut of sales. The hardware‐enforced logo mentioned in another comment was one technique, that was an attempt at abusing trademark (not copyright) law to limit third‐party cartridge manufacturers. However, the courts decisively struck that strategy down in Sega v. Accolade.

As for economic techniques, there’s a fun story about a third‐party developer named Color Dreams. They released several games, including Crystal Mines, without Nintendo approval, and made their own cartridges. As the story goes, Nintendo threatened to pull their stock from any toy store that sold unlicensed games, and all the stores naturally caved since Nintendo had the most popular titles. Color Dreams saw the writing on the wall, and came up with a strategy to target one market that Nintendo had no hold over: Christian bookstores. Color Dreams rebranded as “Wisdom Tree,” gave all their games a thin Biblical veneer, and started marketing their games heavily to the religious demographic. By all accounts it was a huge success (relatively speaking, for a completely independent publisher).

For an example of the results, check out their conversion of Wolfenstein, Super 3D Noah’s Ark (originally for SNES, now on Steam!): https://store.steampowered.com/app/371180/Super_3D_Noahs_Ark...

On the original Game Boy, the lockout is enforced by the "Nintendo" logo that you see on bootup. There is a bootup ROM in the hardware, which checks that this image exists in the cartridge ROM before issuing a jump instruction to any cartridge code. The image is copyrighted, so Nintendo's defense is to legally go after anyone who includes that copyrighted image in their ROM. It's a legal protection, not really a hardware protection; the hardware part has no secret and is easily defeated.

"Nintendo doesn't care" is an approximation. They would, but hobbyists are too small for them to bother with legal action, since any recovered damages would be infinitesimal on Nintendo's scale.

They're not really "new" either but there's also a thriving scene of modding/hacking official games

For example there's a hack for Gameboy Tetris that retrofits modern Tetris mechanics into it

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5813/

I had to look this up to see it, it's pretty awesome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igEUjEci-eg

The GBA port is new-ish but the OpenLara project itself is several years old.

Other way around for me, I've experienced a lot of the original hardware but actually find the emulated experience more enjoyable. Things like save states, upscaled resolution on 3D games, customizable controls, online netplay for games that only had local multiplayer etc. Also in recent years some emulators have implemented features like rolling back one or multiple frames to do an input before you actually pressed the button, leading to lower input latency than the original hardware (can't remember the name of this feature at the moment).

Like you, went through all of that as well; I liked it so much that I started buying old computers in the 90s (when many of these were cheap or even free to pick up); I have well over 1000 rare ones and I regularly try them (they are pretty robust; I even rarely have capacitor issues). Although I enjoy the real thing more (joysticks, especially Arcade with 2 buttons, are so much better for me than modern ones); I like handheld emulators, simply because they work everywhere. I cannot take my msx, zx spectrum or vcs 2600 on the road with me and with an emulator handheld device I just bring everything, including the dev environments.

But I agree; when I really want to feel nostalgic, I take a c64 with tape rec and load a game. Sit very quiet after the load command as any movement makes it fail and you can rewind and restart the 20min game load. Somehow it feels very relaxing to me.

I'm old, but I missed out on a lot of the original systems back in the day.

I have been slowly rectifying this by obtaining old systems and playing the games on flash carts, on original hardware, on a CRT.

I generally prefer it to emulation. That true zero-lag feeling of real hardware is such a treat. But emulation is cool too. Sometimes, save states make the experience 100x more enjoyable.

It's like music. Generally I listen digitally, but records are really fun in their own way too. For me it's not really a war between the two.

I much prefer original hardware, but not necessarily in the original state. My consoles are RGB modded, and I make use of flashcarts and things like PS-IO.

I also experienced them all first hand. I remember being blown away by my friend's dad's brand new Pong game in about 1976. I still have quite a bit of old 8-bit and newer hardware stored away (I've even got one of the earliest five C64's currently known). Truthfully, pulling the old hardware out now is not nearly as satisfying as running an emulator. When I want to relive, say, my teenage days playing Amiga mod disks while I did my homework, it's a pain in the rear to get the old Amiga 2000 up and running, while it is a matter of seconds to fire up the emulator. Last time I dug out my Sun 3/80 and tried to boot it, it led to a weeks worth of repairing hardware, finding a modern compatible AUI ethernet adapter, digging up the old sunos4 install files, and getting it all installed.

I find the opposite myself. I have a load of old hardware including my original SNES from when it was released but I find myself playing an Anbernic RG351MP far more. It’s portable, plays games well enough that I can’t discern from the original, things like scraping original manuals, preview videos and ratings makes it a really nice browsing experience and retroachievements it’s a really fun new addition to old gaming experiences I’ve had. Retro emulation is really a lot of fun these days.

I also experienced the games on the real hardware but last time that I tried to emulate them purely for nostalgia reasons I didn't notice anything wrong with emulation.

I ended up with a stack of 2600s a few years back. I used to go to estate sales, (for older people that had died), and almost universally they had a 2600 with a box of games. And I would give the organizers $10 and walk out with the whole thing. NESes common too. Would recommend giving estate sales a chance if you live in the USA.

It's an objective fact that paddle games from the 2600 have never been, and I believe never will be, emulated properly. On original hardware and a CRT TV, it feels like your physically touching the paddle on the screen through the paddle. The lack of lag is insane.

2600 stuff in particular is cheap and easy to find.

I had similar feelings when I first saw it. My response was to focus on making things that you can't using GB Studio - pushing the hardware to its limits, playing with novel control/graphics schemes, doing things that make people say "you can do that on a gameboy?". I was never really much of a game designer so I enjoy this "technical challenge" work more anyway.

I can understand making a retro style game, most of the games I play look like they're from the SNES era.

Why add the additional barrier to entry that is needing to set up an emulator or own the ancient hardware and a flash cartridge?

The only benefit I see it adding is the developer may enjoy working through the hardware's limitations, but even then couldn't you arbitrarily set yourself comparable limitations?

Have a blog or updates or anything for the game? I love me a good monster battle rpg

While not quite as WYSIWYG, jo-engine for SEGA Saturn homebrew development has been a massive blessing to me, and I’m sure dozens of other Saturn enthusiasts as well:

https://jo-engine.org

Is anyone aware of such great homebrew toolkits for other retro platforms? I’d love to see something similar for, EG; the N64.

Same. Spend 5 days a week working on a commercial game dev project then on weekends I can’t wait to work on my hobby game dev ha

Is an FPGA acting like the real hardware really "native" or just emulation on hardware level? Serious question.

Most homebrew is distributed l as ROM files for use in emulators (because that’s easiest), and you can also play these ROM files on the original hardware if you have a flashcart. Some homebrew developers actually manufacture and sell cartridges for their games (though usually this is in addition to a digital release, and not the primary means of distribution).

The article briefly mentions how this game is distributed:

> Freely available on Itch.io, a limited physical run of Deadeus was also sold through Spacebot Interactive, a one-man publisher founded by Chris Beach.

Emulators?

I use an Everdrive GB

There’s more to it than just nostalgia — I’ve spent a lot of time in the past several years writing NES emulators, experimenting with making little “games”/proof-of-concepts, and of course just playing NES games. But I wasn’t born when the NES was around; I didn’t grow up with the NES so I don’t really have any nostalgia for it.

Rather, I find it fun because of the technology and the constraints. The NES’s hardware is straightforward and easy to understand (but filled with cleverness and quirks, like all hardware from that era). The software side is primitive — games are typically hand-written in 6502 assembly, and there’s no operating system or standard library to hide the intricacies of the hardware. There’s something really refreshing about taking a break from our modern complicated tech stacks to go write 6502 assembly.

Some games suffer from the hardware limitations, but most are designed around these limitations, and the good games are very fun to play.

For myself and many, many other homebrew developers, it has little to do with nostalgia, and much to do with learning and the forced limitations that come with the hardware.

For someone like myself, and many other homebrew developers; it’s about unlocking the potential the hardware had. Look at Stunt Race FX for the Game Boy as a perfect example. IIRC, someone just ported DOOM to the bare-bones SEGA Genesis.

Nostalgia is why people play these games. (Well, that and they’re often excellent quality games.)

The challenge, and the learning of low level systems; is why homebrew developers choose these older systems to work with.

Hope that makes sense!

Also scarcity breeds innovation. There is no simpler computer that still has software development than the knockoff Z80. It's not easy making fun toys on a computer so small that has been around for nearly 50 years. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.

It's also about the most advanced hardware a solo developer has a reasonable chance of making a game for that would rival games of the time. Much newer and the consoles won't be as well-documented, and 3D graphics add layers of complication.