[HN Gopher] GB Studio: Drag and drop retro game creator for GameBoy
___________________________________________________________________
GB Studio: Drag and drop retro game creator for GameBoy
Author : CharlesW
Score : 185 points
Date : 2023-06-17 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gbstudio.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gbstudio.dev)
| ihappentobe wrote:
| GB Studio is a great way to mess around with making a gameboy
| game! It exports a rom that can be flashed onto a blank cart, and
| played on real hardware--with recent versions adding gameboy
| color support. The recently hyped McDonald's Grimace game was
| reportedly made with GB studio:
| https://gbstudiocentral.com/news/mcdonalds-celebrates-grimac...
| navanchauhan wrote:
| Previous:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717558 (4 years ago)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26979879 (2 years ago)
| jhbadger wrote:
| Yeah, I assume this is posted again because of the buzz over
| the Gameboy Color game that was created using it that
| McDonald's released in a recent promotion
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36311378
| zgluck wrote:
| "Drag and drop"... what?
|
| (I'm sure I can find out by reading further on the site or
| googling, but that's kind of beside the point. Retrogaming
| software very often have very puzzling usability issues, IMO.)
| gymbeaux wrote:
| I'm hoping somebody ports Pokemon Colosseum to GBA/GBC
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| What does this have to do with GB Studio? Was Pokemon Colosseum
| made with it?
| whateveracct wrote:
| I think it's more that the game would be more fun as a 2D
| pokemon instead of the 3D it was.
|
| It's a niche request by GP for sure!
| gymbeaux wrote:
| Thanks homie. Not everyone gets it. Pokemon Colosseum is
| the Deep Space Nine of the Pokemon games.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Just in case anyone doesn't read deep enough to run into it:
|
| > You can generate ROM files that can be run in an emulator, on a
| web page or on real Game Boy hardware.
|
| Being able to play these on the web is very, very cool.
| esotericsean wrote:
| I've been making a game using GBDK (C) and a little engine called
| ZGB for the past several years, but the work that Chris and the
| team have done on GB Studio makes me want to switch to the
| platform. I'll still finish my game using C because I'm so far
| into development now there's no point in starting over, but if I
| was starting fresh, GB Studio would be the way to go.
|
| That said, I'm glad I made my game in C because I've learned so
| much more about coding. I feel like I get better every day. Not
| sure I would have that same experience using GB Studio.
|
| One day I want to try using ASM...
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Oh cool GB Studio is still going. Good for them.
| wk_end wrote:
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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.
| chrismaltby wrote:
| 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
| Waterluvian wrote:
| WOW. What's the compile pipeline to get to valid ROMs?!
|
| I need to dig deep when I get home. This is frankly astounding.
| djxfade wrote:
| I used to contribute to the project back in v1 days. I'm not
| sure if the architecture has changed since then, but basically
| it worked by compiling the game logic as a kind of byte code
| that got interpreted at run time.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Like on top of the CPU's opcodes? I imagine you mean the
| opcodes. That CPU probably can't handle much abstraction.
| What impresses me the most is that to get performance out of
| these games, they're often very carefully coded in the
| Sharp/Z80/8080 assembly. This compiler must be quite
| something.
| ehaliewicz2 wrote:
| It actually does interpret bytecode, you can see the opcode
| definitions here https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-
| studio/blob/1f995a976bd3aa...
|
| The trick is that a lot of the heavier stuff is implemented
| in assembly and this is mostly used for scripting (from
| what I understand).
| djxfade wrote:
| Yes exactly. It's not a zero cost abstraction, but it's a
| very simple format, each byte code oppose maps directly
| to function and passes its args. So it's basically just a
| conditional jump
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| If you want to program the Gameboy or Gameboy color with C the
| SDCC compiler toolchain is typically used:
| https://sdcc.sourceforge.net/ There's a ton of good info and
| dev tools here: https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-17 23:00 UTC)