[HN Gopher] Gameboy technical reference for homebrew developers
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Gameboy technical reference for homebrew developers
Author : BramLovesYams
Score : 179 points
Date : 2023-11-23 10:42 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gbdev.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (gbdev.io)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The gbdev and emu dev discord communities were indispensable when
| writing my GB emulator. They're helpful and social and many can
| basically look at your corrupt output and suggest what vblank or
| other bugs you might have.
|
| My first interaction was asking why the Nintendo logo would
| appear and never disappear and they immediately knew it was a
| rookie pitfall: I had my button inputs set to low which actually
| means pressed, so my emulator was resetting itself infinitely.
| iamjackg wrote:
| A long, long time ago I started a YouTube series[0] on the
| internal workings of the Game Boy during a brief break from work.
| I eventually started working again and animating the episodes was
| taking way too long, so I had to stop, but I've kept orbiting the
| world of Game Boy reverse engineering.
|
| The amount of dedication, skill, and passion that goes into it on
| a daily basis is mindblowing, and people keep discovering
| hardware quirks and bugs to this very day! I believe it wasn't
| that long ago that people discovered a glitch in the audio
| subsystem that gave you more control over note envelopes, and it
| was promptly added to LSDj (a tracker for the Game Boy that was
| first released in 2000) by the original author, who's still
| maintaining it to this day.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZUDEaLa5Nw
|
| EDIT: oops, forgot the link!
| datpiff wrote:
| Is there a link missing here? I would like to see your YT
| series :)
| iamjackg wrote:
| Oops! I just added it.
| datpiff wrote:
| I was already subscribed!
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Did you ever consider storyboarding the animations and farming
| it out to someone? It probably wouldn't make sense financially,
| but it might bring it back under the amount of time you'd
| have/want to spend on it.
| iamjackg wrote:
| Briefly, but I realized that the creative satisfaction of the
| whole thing came from being able to do everything myself, so
| giving that up would have made it pointless to me. I feel bad
| about it because it's definitely a bit of a narcissistic take
| (praise me, for I can do it all!), but the truth is that I
| was also discouraged by the mistakes I made in the research
| process, and how mean some of the commenters who pointed them
| out were.
|
| I started to get a lot of anxiety about the whole process,
| and realized that I would have had to put even more effort
| into it ok top of my full time job, which further cemented my
| choice to just run away from it. I periodically feel really
| bad about it. Hopefully some day I'll win the lottery and
| I'll be able to make another episode. I actually have the
| script for episode 3 all done: I wrote it on parental leave,
| but that also didn't last forever!
| nuclearnice1 wrote:
| You did a beautiful job and you should be proud of it. Both
| the information and the aesthetics are a treat.
|
| Can I ask what technology stack you used? For the images,
| the animations, and the voice over?
|
| I'd like to be able to do something like this.
| iamjackg wrote:
| Thank you so much! It's all done in After Effects, with
| some Photoshop work for more complex graphics. The voice
| over was kindly provided by my wife.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Excellent work, the animation is top notch. The voice was
| so good I also assumed it was generated.
| hbn wrote:
| What a world where someone would sooner believe a good
| human voice is from a computer before a human!
| teruakohatu wrote:
| When machines started making perfect rugs, humans began
| valuing those rugs with imperfections.
| iamjackg wrote:
| That would have been really impressive in 2016!
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| Any link for the new hardware quirk added to lsdj?
| iamjackg wrote:
| Yeah! Search for "zombie mode" on this page:
| https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Gameboy_sound_hardware
| lopis wrote:
| Amazing series. Great refresher on assembly too.
| lancefisher wrote:
| Thanks for making those videos. I really enjoyed watching them
| earlier this year. I've been getting into making games,
| restoring, and collecting Game Boys.
| azmodeus wrote:
| Your YouTube video was amazing. Inspiring to see such
| educational content.
|
| How did you find your narrator and how did you do your
| animations?
| iamjackg wrote:
| I found my narrator by being married to her, and all the
| animation was done in After Effects.
| namuol wrote:
| I've really enjoyed watching these while working on a toy
| emulator during little bouts of free time in the past year.
| Thanks for making these!
|
| Edit: Just realized how similar my comment was to a neighbor
| comment. There must be a lot of folks pining for a better time
| from their past...
| aquova wrote:
| I wrote a Game Boy emulator as a pandemic project, and the
| pandocs linked here are indispensable. It contains all the
| technical documentation you need while leaving the implementation
| up to you. I tried getting into Sega emulators after, and while
| there is some good info there (SMS Power has good docs), none
| quite matched this.
| 5- wrote:
| a similarly comprehensive document for game boy advance /
| nintendo ds / lite / dsi:
|
| https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm
|
| i've got myself a dsi and at some point plan on doing some from-
| scratch development for it -- that single file should be enough.
| BramLovesYams wrote:
| Thanks for the tip! I've been wanting to dive into DS/lite/DSI.
| raytopia wrote:
| The Gameboy homebrew community is amazing. Hoping in the future
| that other homebrew communities grow as popular.
| ant6n wrote:
| Text version of pandocs: https://problemkaputt.de/pandocs.htm
| kaoD wrote:
| Obligatory link to the Ultimate Game Boy Talk:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyzD8pNlpwI
| shinyeye4 wrote:
| Oh, I'm so happy to see this here. I'm avivace[0], lead of the
| https://gbdev.io iniative. Pan Docs is really a labor of love and
| we've been investing a lot of time in improving it and making it
| more accurate and accessible.
|
| We do maintain a bunch of other stuff too! A Game Boy Assembly
| Tutorial[1], an open digital repository of Game Boy homebrew
| software[2] and RGBDS[3], the de-facto standard assembly
| toolchain for the Game Boy.
|
| We also hosted popular game jams such as the gbcompo21[4] and
| gbcompo23[5], with winning entries usually going the long way and
| publishing as physical products.
|
| Come join us on Discord[6] if you'd like to get involved and
| contribute.
|
| [0] https://github.com/avivace [1] https://gbdev.io/gb-asm-
| tutorial/ [2] https://hh.gbdev.io/ [3] https://rgbds.gbdev.io/
| [4] https://itch.io/jam/gbcompo21 [5]
| https://itch.io/jam/gbcompo23 [6] https://gbdev.io/chat.html
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(page generated 2023-11-23 23:00 UTC)