[implicit]

I did a little bit of GBA homebrew development back in its heyday. It is a really fun little bit of hardware to hack on.

It's powerful enough that you can write your whole game in C++, but not so powerful that you should rely on the system allocator for anything.

It's in a lovely sweet spot for a particular dialect of zero-overhead C++ that's really fun to write.

As a simple example, I had a little class library of data types that were crafted to exactly map to the hardware registers of the GBA. The whole thing inlined away to nothing.

[tieze]

I've gotten into GBA homebrew again recently. The community is small but getting a bit bigger. gbadev on Discord is a fun place to hang out.

The tooling doesn't seem to have changed all that much from back in the day, which isn't a bad thing: the best way to get music on the GBA is still to compose something in an old-fashioned tracker and using Maxmod to import it. Sprite conversion tools haven't changed that much.

Programming it is just so lovely bare-metal: poking/prodding registers, writing backgrounds and sprites into memory regions.. Really fun stuff.

[benoror]

Did a bit when I was abt 12yo, embarrasing/naive code: https://github.com/benoror/gbadev/blob/master/%40rkanoid/jue...

[dleslie]

Hey now; if you genuinely wrote that when you were 12 then there's nothing to be embarassed about.

[rafaelvasco]

The programmer you are today is the result of all the code you ever wrote, good and bad;

[yc-kraln]

Reading this article gave me the warm fuzzies for the same reason; The GBA was a dream to homebrew for.