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I don't think that's true. Buy them a Gameboy Advance, a FLASH cartridge and download Dragon Basic. They can advance onto GCC (or even ARM assembly for time-critical code) over time.

The GBA has C64-era (Amiga maybe) graphics (sprites, rotation, scrolling) and programming for it can be very rewarding (press LEFT, the blob moves left). Dragon Basic is apparently very capable for beginners.

Grumpy.

GBADEV

There's some talk on the DS hacking forums about the touchscreen having been changed between two revisions of the hardware already.

Details here

I personally plan to check my hardware very carefully when I get mine and be ready to return it if I get one of the bad units.

I wrote a clone of this fantastic game for the Gameboy Advance.

Check it out at GBADev

Grumpy.

Have you ordered from kicktrading before?

These people have.

Two solutions are being explored on dsdev.org forums:

• crack the encryption on the Nintendo DS cart bus, and make a cart that loads DS code from a flash cart in the GBA slot, or
• figure out how to boot the DS from Wi-Fi, and then make a small dongle that boots the DS with a program that loads DS code from a flash cart in the GBA slot.

Gods, what is with me and URLs lately?! Not only isn't that hyperlinked, its WRONG.

Let's try again

Sorry about that.

Still, ignoring mods for proprietary commercial games, how can a member of the general C++-speaking public create and distribute games for consoles? Sure, there's the Linux add-on for American and European PlayStation 2 consoles, but how can a homebrew developer test programs on systems such as Xbox, GameCube, or GBA, without using tools manufactured by companies that the console makers are trying to sue into oblivion?

The Linux add-on for the PS2 is pretty useless for making games, though I guess you could use it to make some simpler games. You're right, though, that developing for consoles is very inaccessible. That said, homebrew communities are out there, such as GBADev or DC Developer. Linux on the XBox has also opened up some homebrew opportunities, as well. If you want to make games, though, you don't need any of those. What you need is skill, passion, and a portfolio of devleopment (or art, or whatever), which you can certainly do on a PC. PC mods are great for building up a portfolio, but they're certainly not the only way. Think, what did people do before Doom and Quake created the game modification craze?

There's a nonorthogonality in the permissible operands for multiply instructions that is a pain to work around.

Is this in MUL, MLA, SMULL, or SMLAL? I have Re-eject's ARM, Thumb, and GAS charts in front of me.

Probably the ugliest part is this: the permissible displacements for load/store instructions depend on the size of the operand.

They do in just about every architecture. You can't load a 32-bit or 16-bit quantity from an odd address on ARM or on any other RISC architecture except perhaps MIPS. Patents owned by MIPS are why (for example) the open MIPS clone doesn't implement unaligned memory access.

Finally, the "every instruction can be conditionally executed" idea is clever, and we've all seen the cute Euclid's GCD algorithm assembly language fragment, but that eats four bits of every instruction. Is it really worth it?

If you have a disassembler for an architecture that doesn't use conditional instruction, count the number of instructions that are branches to one instruction ahead. But if you're really all that worried about code size or about speed of execution from slow memory, then use the 16-bit Thumb instruction encoding; ARM7TDMI (used in the Game Boy Advance system) and later ARM cores support Thumb.

especially as I myself, despite knowing how to program, have never programmed for a game console before.

Programming on the Game Boy Advance feels like programming on a PC running DOS. You ought to try it sometime.

I could've made a really nice old-style LCD game in Macromedia Flash that would not only have a nice visual touch as it took advantage of vector graphics (no pixels), but it could've run just fine on any Windows, Linux, Macintosh system without a problem.

What handheld devices run SWF? A $190 GBA plus a flash card will run GBA and NES homebrew games.

Anyway, one major point of PDROMS contests and other homebrew development efforts is to prove to console makers that there exist legitimate uses of, say, GBA flash cards other than for playing unlawful copies of proprietary video games. For example, if you have a flash card and my GSM Player, you can turn your GBA into a pocket music player.

[Is there a publicly available GBA SDK?] FUCK no.

FUCK yes.

And here's some of what I've made with it. Please hire me.

I'm biased toward homebrew as well because I am active in the GBA homebrew community, having developed a couple games myself. Consider the GBA like a Super NES that you can program in C.

There's a lot of this sort of thing going on for the GameBoy Advance, too. Its a lot of fun developing for such limited systems. :-)

Anyone but a hypocrite can tell you that most P2P apps are indeed made for trading copyrighted material, much like emulators are made for running copyrighted roms.

Try telling that to any member of the gbadev community. I'm one of them, with a few free software projects for GBA under my belt. What do you find so unlawful about using an emulator "for running copyrighted roms" to which you own the copyright or have a license?

Nintendo already have GBA base, and if it would release free SDK and make it easy to get license it will attract a lot of small/indie developers.

There is already a community-supported Free SDK for the Game Boy Advance. See gbadev.org. Disclaimer: I maintain that forum's FAQ.

Don't know what your best option for an assembler/dev environment would be for the Tungsten: I haven't played with ARM code outside the Gameboy Advance and back in the days of Acorn, but these links might prove useful:

• ARM Tutorial - Acorn-centric, but some of the basic stuff should still be relevant...
• Selection of ARM assembler documents
• ARM lecture notes
• GBAdev's links to ARM documentation

Obviously you're not looking very hard.

games that have no personality

I mean, really, you sound like a whiny film student...

I was speaking of all of Bung's copiers as well as all of Doctor 's copiers.

Bung, which produced the Doctor copiers and may have been linked to the Visoly copiers (given the appearance of the Flash Advance linker and the GB-Xchanger), may have been an isolated case. There apparently wasn't as much of a homebrew scene when Bung was around as there is now, and homebrew seems to legitimize copiers.

having a trademark header in ROMs doesn't count since copying that to get a game to work is covered under Sega vs Activision (though in that case, Activision lost not because of copying a trademark to get games to work but needlessly displaying it on screen (something you can't get around on a GBA, which is Nintendo's fault)

That was Sega v. Accolade, 977 F2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992), and Accolade won, in part because Sega failed to produce enough evidence that there was a way to not display the logo.

Now, all of this means to me that the law needs spelled out to cover fair use of software on any device one wants to (which, to me, is very comparable to bablefish).

Atari v. JS&A Group happened before Sony v. Universal (the Betamax case), which started down the road to legitimizing consumer copying. Also notice that the JS&A court interpreted only 17 USC 117(a)(2) as not applying to what you call "hard goods" but didn't touch on 117(a)(1) (authorizing copies and adaptations necessary to run a program on a given computer) at all.

Plus, in the future, GBA cartridges may not in fact be hard goods. Rumors have it that given the high cost of producing small to medium quantities of large mask ROMs and the insuitability of optical media for a handheld device to be used by children under 7 years of age, Nintendo is investigating switching from mask ROMs to a form of flash memory.

gbadev.org need i say more?

Freeware GBA games do exist. GBA is in fact becoming a rather popular hobbyist platform - there is a free compiler and lots of documentation out there. All you have to do is get a flash ROM, which are cheap and pretty easy to find - you simply upload your games using a USB adaptor into the GBA itself. gbadev.org has links to tutorials, places to get flash roms, and links to freeware games that people have created.

First of all, it's really not that hard to program for and most languages are available (with free compilers no less). You don't need a library, although there are ones out there that might have a license that would suit you. All you need is a flash cart and a flash cart programmer and those aren't too hard to get and don't cost that much. You'll have to look around for one but you could build your own or buy one off e-bay. You don't need a $5000 dev kit to program the GBA. And there are emulators that you can use to test your program and such. A single person can easily make a game.

The main site I'd like to point you to (although there are many) is GBAdev.org. You can find tools, tutorials, demos (with source) and more. There was going to be a book published about programing for the GBA but lawyers basically nixed it. The good news though is that the guy who wrote it put it online for free! You can find that book here (it's a bunch of PDF files).

Once you make your game, all you'd have to do is take it to a publisher (or get the big ,a href="http://www.nintendo.com">N's help) and you could sell it to the largest audience in the world. The GBA has more units sold than the PS2 or any other current console (IIRC).

Actually, there is a SNES emulator for GBA in works in these days. Watch Gbadev, it will probably be posted there when it's released.

Heh. Homebrew games on closed platforms have been getting stronger every year. Have a look at pdroms.com, gbadev.org, devrs.com, et cetera. We all hold competitions like this all the time. It's what keeps us going.

Yes, but this is the same Nintendo which has been fighting the production of flash carts for the GBA. Sure, people pirate games on them but people are also developing some neat stuff using them.

I don't think any of the big console companies are really all that interested in the hobbyist market.

but that is not real-time.

Perhaps where you come from, "real-time" is short for "hard real-time". But what I meant is that I don't necessarily think it's OK to lock the machine for 10 seconds at a time while it's processing or to chew through memory like Pac-Man, both of which happen in some very-high-level programming environments I've tried. Many Python and Lisp advocates like to claim that C has no place in application programs that run on 3 GHz machines with 512 MB of RAM. However, 16 MHz devices with 384 KB of RAM are still outselling even PS2 consoles.

GBADev.org 2003 compo: Entries|Results

Gbadev.org 2002 compo

GBADev.org hearts competition

GBAEmu/GBAX compo 2003

GBADev.org 2003 compo: Entries|Results

Gbadev.org 2002 compo

GBADev.org hearts competition

GBAEmu/GBAX compo 2003

GBADev.org 2003 compo: Entries|Results

Gbadev.org 2002 compo

GBADev.org hearts competition

GBAEmu/GBAX compo 2003

GBADev.org 2003 compo: Entries|Results

Gbadev.org 2002 compo

GBADev.org hearts competition

GBAEmu/GBAX compo 2003

The thing to also remember is that you can get more games for PDAs and PCs. Why? because the cost of entry for game programming on a PDA or PC is lower.

Er. GCC, VisualBoy Advance, (checks wallet) = Free.

I would contest that the difference is that people don't have a clue just how easy it is to write GBA games. Go here and learn. (or here or here.)

Any joe can get a compiler and write a game for a PC or a PDA.

It took me almost 20 minutes to get PRC-Tools working. VisualHAM was up and running after the installer, which also has good music. DevKitAdvance and the SGADE are similarly easy to use if your'e already used to GCC.

They don't need proprietary development software or testing/emulation systems

The Palm Pilot SDK is CodeWarrior dependant, actually, which is the reason I avoided it for so long.

they don't need to buy and license ROMs from Nintendo

This is only a problem if you live in the fantasy world of making money off of your video games.

What we really need is an open alternative to the Gameboy, something that had a free development environment and connects to the PC with a USB cable to download games, yet remains cheap as a GBA (of course, things like the GBA are usually cheap because it is subsidised but you get the idea). You can even still have the rom slot so commercial game companies can still sell boxed games for it.

Ah, yes. And we see how well that keeps working. Viva la Indrema! I'm sure someone will get it to work soon.

(sigh) No I'm not.

if any console released an SDK, they would beat the others overnight.

That would be PS2 and GBA, the top two non-PC game systems in the States. The PS2 console has Linux for PlayStation 2, and the GBA handheld has the unofficial DevKit Advance and a community around it. So the systems with publicly available development tools have the biggest market share, even if the relationship isn't exactly causal.

You would do well to poke around this site for a while.

The competition part of the site is kinda scarce on info, but I think the public-donated prize is 100-plus dollars, and there's official prizes of a lot more - I found the following information in the July archives to back up the submitter:

"And as you probably know, we have 1000$usd in cash prizes as well. How this will be divided is not yet clear."

That said, the GBA has a big developer community. GBAdev.org for one (note that they have a little memorial page up today, just click through it at the bottom). There are forums, other sites, tutorials, even a book (can't find the link right now, and I've been having a hard time trying to buy it, but it exists).

Don't forget to check out Pocket NES.

gamers don't want to sacrifice their smooth 60 fps framerates

Most LAN games don't update themselves every frame; instead, they predict what happens in one frame based on the velocities of the avatars. A racing game such as F-Zero, Mario Kart, or possibly Kirby's Air Ride (which I've been following since it was supposed to be an early N64 title but got back-burnered in favor of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards) can probably use much stronger prediction than some twitch game like Super Smash Bros. Melee.

We're not evil like Microsoft, so as long as they aren't pirating stuff, we won't really care.

So why did Nintendo sue the flash cart makers even when the devices had a substantial non-infringing use?

I'm not very sure you really work for Nintendo.

IMO the 3rd party GBA dev units ARE NOT illegal in any way. Just as Alex from lik-sang said in his
comment, just because you CAN use something to dump/pirate stuff doesnt mean you automaticly do.
I can break thousands of laws with many "legal" items such as cd-burners, scanners, computers(!!),
video recorders etc etc etc. However, only because Nintendo has a monpoly in making GBA
cartridges they seem to think these units can be banned.
But really Nintendo, wouldnt the fair thing be to cut the crap and let anyone and everyone make GBA
games and produce the carts at the gba cart manufacturer of their choice?

Nintendo, maybe if you made some kind of reasonable priced development setup for amateur
developers THEN you could claim that these units are basicly used only for piracy, but NOT before
then! It would still be a monpoly BUT at least you wouldnt go around claiming that these units
are only used for piracy. A very good example of this would be www.gbadev.org!
They use these units and still you go around calling them pirates!?! Some of them make better
games at home then official games available in the stores.

at least the home developers over at gbadev.org and forum.gbadev.org can show that
not everyone uses these flash cards for copying commercial games.

And another thing; "Following the recent Hong Kong ruling, Nintendo believes the cheap copying devices,
which were manufactured in China, are no longer on the market, Daugherty said." Ok maybe the old flash linker
isnt available anymore but no one would buy that anyways now that EZ-Flash, XG-Flash, F2A and their USB versions are available.
Good job nintendo, 1 down & just 20 more to go! erm yeah...*cough*

at least the home developers over at gbadev.org and forum.gbadev.org can show that
not everyone uses these flash cards for copying commercial games.

And another thing; "Following the recent Hong Kong ruling, Nintendo believes the cheap copying devices,
which were manufactured in China, are no longer on the market, Daugherty said." Ok maybe the old flash linker
isnt available anymore but no one would buy that anyways now that EZ-Flash, XG-Flash, F2A and their USB versions are available.
Good job nintendo, 1 down & just 20 more to go! erm yeah...*cough*

If someone goes through the trouble of modchipping their console, then they're going to want a return on their investment in the form of free games.

"Free games"? I'd be happy with free as in speech, as has happened on the PS2 and on the Xbox. I play a lot of freely redistributable games on my GBA, and I've written a couple GPL'd GBA games of my own.

Here's a couple of good ones.
Devr's
GBADev

I've bought almost every Gameboy released in the U.S. since its inception: The original Gameboy in 1989, the colored Gameboy (NOT the GB Color!) in 1995

Ahh, the "Play It Loud" series of brick-form-factor Game Boy systems with different color cases. It's a good thing you qualified it with "almost" because you can't claim to have one every GB system unless you have all colors, including the limited editions that were only available as prizes in a Nintendo Power sweepstakes. Collectors have driven up the eBay prices for those.

I have a brick GB, a Super Game Boy (GB->SNES adapter), a GBC, and a GBA, that is, one of each platform. But I also have a Virtual Boy, and you don't. Nyeh!

Do you program?

Yup. It's not that hard either. Download a tutorial, a GCC compiler that's tuned for the ARM processor, a GBA emulator, and a few examples, and you're ready to go. I started here www.gbajunkie.co.uk

I just finished my first GBA game (Space Cmdr Pac-Man.. http://www.gbadev.org/demo_feb2003.html) and I'm started on my second.

It's actually quite fun. The restrictive nature of the GBA hardware (compared to other gaming platforms) lowers the bar so just about anyone can create fun games.

the preamble is

Unless you construct the preamble and tail in-place, which few functional languages make easy, you have to repeatedly create new objects "preamble" and a new object "tail". Then, to get rid of unreachable objects, you need to run GC in the background, which AFAIK doesn't work reliably in a real-time setting on an embedded system such as a a game console with a 16.78 MHz processor and 384 KB of RAM. (But then, I may not know far enough.)

Also, pirating the games and downloading requires some, albeit very basic, level of technical competence.

The Game Boy Advance has a homebrew scene about it as well. You can get a full dev kit for $200: $70 for a GBA, $30 for an MBV2 cable (used to test small programs), $80 for a flash cartridge (used to test large programs), and $20 for a month of Internet access (used to download the tools from gbadev.org).

SDKs. Playstation, gamecube, Xbox development kits are out-of-reach for us

So develop on Game Boy Advance. You can get the compiler, libraries, and demos as free software, and you can get a flash cartridge for under 100 USD.

You can develop for a modded Xbox or a PS2 running Linux until you get enough dough to buy the DVD consoles' devkits.

Lik-Sang is neither a hardware manufacturer

Actually, Lik Sang does manufacture a few devices such as the excellent MBV2 cable, which connects a Game Boy Advance system to a PC in much the same way that Nintendo's cable connects a GBA to a GameCube console. The MBV2 cable lets you run homebrew software on the GBA by copying a binary from the PC into the GBA's 288 KB of internal RAM. But because proprietary commercial games are 2 MB to 8 MB in size, the MBV2 won't let you play those on a GBA. Thus, Nintendo turned a blind eye turned to the MBV2 cable and let Lik Sang continue to sell it.

Plug: Tetanus On Drugs, a homebrew falling tetramino game for GBA. Works with MBV2 cable.

out of curiosity, where do you get those tech specs?

If you want to get started programming the Game Boy Advance, start at gbadev.org. Write a few demos to become familiar with the hardware. Then you can attack porting ROTT. You may have to run the game in GOTA386 mode (flat-shaded floors and ceilings) if you have trouble optimizing the horizontal tmapper to get the game to run at a solid 20 fps.

on PC you can play games from 1980s to 2002

You can't play games from 1981 to 1995 on a computer that primarily boots to a Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional operating system or a Microsoft Windows XP operating system without emulation or virtualization, because 1. NT operating systems have poor support for DOS apps, and 2. those DOS games that do work with NT may run too fast to be playable.

on PC you can use a lot of freeware/shareware games, Free Software is also much closer to PC than consoles

Same on GBA. Have you played Tetanus On Drugs for GBA?

but do they have a review of nethack or moria or any other rogue-like?

"The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" has been ported to the GBA platform. That should be similar enough to the rogue clones to pacify you until somebody ports one of the more popular roguelikes.

off the record, Nintendo, et al. aren't too concerned about importing of games (and DVDs, etc), compared to piracy.

What about homebrew software development for Nintendo consoles such as the GBA? Here's what I've gathered about Nintendo's behavior in practice:

• Devices designed for region modding, such as NES, SNES, and N64 region adapters and GCN modchips: Blind eye.
• Devices that make piracy easy, such as flash carts with the same memory map as official carts: Lawsuit.
• Devices designed only for homebrew development, such as the MBV2 cable produced by Lik Sang Manufacturing: Blind eye.

We just have the region locks to keep the suits happy

Specifically, 1) to distinguish 50 Hz (Europe/Australia) and 60 Hz (Japan/America) consoles, and 2) to solve the "Peter Pan problem", where different entities own a particular franchise in different markets. (Barrie's Peter Pan is in PD in >=1923 USA and life+50 Japan but not in life+70 EU.) So why did Nintendo put Japan vs. America region locks on the NES, Super NES, N64, and GCN consoles, but not on the GBA system?