Hacker News Reader

Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

I haven't really looked into it in detail, but AFAICT GB Studio is honestly incredible. I program the Game Boy as a hobby; this machine has basically no RAM and a CPU that's - depending on how you measure a "cycle" - either ~1MHz or ~4MHz, with a shockingly limited and non-orthogonal instruction set (and don't even get me started on dealing with bank switching). Historically games for it have been almost exclusively coded in assembly. And yet someone's come along and built a seemingly fairly flexible WYSIWYG game engine for it? If it didn't exist I would've told you it was impossible. I still don't quite believe it's possible, despite the proof being right in front of me.

View on HN

Thanks, one of the things I’ve always tried to do (at work, before I started on GB Studio) is make difficult things seem easy and accessible. Though I’d have also told you this was probably impossible before starting too!

I just built it up slowly, making small tools to help me make sense of what was going on while learning GBDK, before I knew it pretty much had something I could package up. I’ve had a lot of help along the way though, untoxa’s [0] engine rewrite, and the work pau-tomas [1] did on the music editor have been especially helpful to the project.

Been a bit absent from the community recently, not had the time, but hoping to get back on it again soon!

I’m always amazed at how many awesome games people keep making though, it makes me really happy as this the first of many failed side projects that I pushed on through to completion.

[0] https://github.com/untoxa

[1] https://github.com/pau-tomas

Thanks for the incredible tool!

I love GB Studio. I plan to use it to make a movie but will release my “games” too. Are you active on Mastodon or Bluesky?

The gameboy had extensible RAM and flash - ie. a game cartridge could provide more of both if it wanted to.

I assume GB studio uses this to make it easier to make decent gameboy games without manually allocating every byte of ram in handwritten assembly.

GBStudio does use cart ROM banking (for code and assets), but extensible cart RAM (SRAM) is typically only used for save data if I remember correctly.

In general for Game Boy games the constraining factors are most often CPU and ROM (for large worlds and lots of graphics) and less so RAM.

Some of GBStudio's core is in C and some is in asm. The underlying compiler (SDCC) has been making noticeable gains in recent years, which helps. Plenty of room for SDCC to improve still, but very usable for projects.

FWIW, There is a large Game Boy homebrew competition put on by the community that just started this past week and runs for 3 months. (disclaimer: I'm one of the organizers)

Many participants (of all skill levels) will submit games written in GBStudio, and some will also write games in ASM and C.

https://gbdev.io/gbcompo23.html

https://itch.io/jam/gbcompo23

Reply on news.ycombinator.com