Cygnus Announces Game Boy Devel Environment

GB Fan writes "Cygnus announced today their new development environment for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance that is expected this fall. You can read more about it at GB Station. "

Comments

SOC/RO -- Gameboys

[Anonymous Coward]

SOC/RO Update: Well in my opinion the GameBoy is good for only one thing: Poke/Mon. Let's face it, Poke/Mon is the #1 recreational activity among foreign computer science graduate students in the US. So what should we assume will be written with this new GameBoy development environment: Open/Source Poke/Mon. There will be more Open/Source Poke/Mon projects than you can shake a dead cat named Belfry at! Is this a good thing for the Open/Source movement? Like everything else, no. Let me give you an example: suppose I give you a box, and a dead cat named Belfry, and some salt and a molecule. Now if you translated the vertices on the box and subdivided the surfaces, you could have a ball that you could keep the dead cat named Belfry in. Then whenever anyone tried to give you shit, you'd be all like, "Dead cat named Belfry, I choose you!" and throw the rotten, diseased and broken body of Belfry the dead cat at them. But watch out! They may also have a dead diseased animal they can throw back at you. Then they have to fight. Whichever one wins gains experience and becomes a much better dead diseased animal. When you and your adversary decide that the fight is over, make sure you pick up the correct dead animal, because they can be kind of hard to tell apart after about 2 months of proving Bohr's sillyness. It is quite embarrasing to get home and discover that you have taken the wrong diseased cat carcass, let me tell you! "What is your point?" Well I think I am pretty clear here, but in case you didn't catch it, my point is that there can only be one true champion of Poke/Mon dead cat fighting. Now I will give you a little treat, since you have been such patient readers so far. Here is a tip from one championship Poke/Mon dead cat figher to the next: only with proper care and maintenance will your Poke/Mon dead animal carcass last the grueling two years until IPO and the Poke/Mon championship (held in Tampa, Florida in the Tampa Bay convention center, July 3-7 2001, get your tickets early). "How do I properly care for my diseased animal carcass?" Well I am a man of first impressions, myself. I think the first impression is what someone always remembers of you, so it is important that you impress upon them a sense of style and class about your diseased animal carcass. Now, everyone knows that the smile is the first thing that someone sees of you, so I think proper dental hygiene is absolutely imperative in a diseased carcass if one is going to make the proper impression on the proper people. It is important that you always get the proper kind of toothpaste. No, not that cheap shit that you use for your model airplanes, the $4.67 high-roller brand. "But my diseased carcass's teeth have all fallen out," you are saying. Well then put them back in, silly! "But I lost them!" Did you check the trunk of your car? "Yes, they weren't there." Hmm well, what about your chinese torture chamber? "No not there." Well anyways, if you can't find the teeth, you can just squirt out all $4.67 worth of toothpaste and rub it in real good all over the carcass, just make sure that no critical parts come off. If they do, you may be able to find Open/Source parts on the internet. Check your local dealer too, or your local WB. Then you can print out the pages on your local University's color laser printer, free of charge (assuming you are a foreign graduate student).

Re:SOC/RO -- Gameboys

[Signal 11]

Could you please use the P tag in html because otherwise you make this really long paragraph that is difficult to read and also enforces the super-long-sentence syndrome that is very irritating to watch and I think that anyone who writes in that style should be taken out behind slashdot and beat soundly about the head and shoulders with a copy of the closest webster dictionary (or optionally a Heritage if you do not have a websters) for the simple reason that doing so will likely jar the brainwax loose and allow them to think clearly; So please, if you're gonna write super-long run-on sentences could you please shoot yourself first and save us the trouble of doing so and having to clean our shoes afterwords?

Hell yes, even better: amateur game developers

[torpor]

See this page for more details:

http://www.bung.com.hk/html/2nd_results.htm

Already exists...

[torpor]

http://www.bunk.com.hk/

Note that they also have a pretty nifty voice recorder accessory for the Gameboy too, which has just recently been hacked to be able to play back movies on the GB Color.

If you ask me, the Gameboy platform is a hackers delight... I know I love mine, and the tools I've gotten from the Asian GB Hacker contingency definitely make life more interesting.

Nothing like having a high-availabilty, cheap portable computing platform that can be fully hacked on. $50 at most Toy stores here in the US, full development kits available online, and life is sweet once you've gotten a ROM burner for it.

My GameBoy hacking facilities have become a veritable sonic screwdriver... :)

What about an Open Source plug-in for the GB?

[dustpuppy]

Without trying to sound like I'm jumping on the Open Source bandwagon, I was just thinking that Nintendo should release a game cartridge that would let you load a game from your PC and then release the game development toolkit as freeware.

Imagine the type of games that would be released if people who could write their own GB games ... I'm sure people could come up with better games that what is currently on the market for GB.

Tools that are avalible now

[HomerJ]

There is already a C compiler for gameboy, and gbc. There is also a IDE called Game Boy Dev Studio, that inculdes an IDE for the above compiler, intergrates with any emulator you have, so you can test code without writing to a cart.

The above SDK also comes with an gameboy Z80(gameboy's Z80 is a little different) assembler, and the debugger that's included in no$gmb is very good.

Not putting Cygnus down at all, I'm sure their tools will be great. But if anyone wants to do gb dev now, there are plenty of free tools avalible now. Including things like map and tile editors.

links:
http://freespace.virgin.net/stephen.blanksby/gbstu dio.htm for the gameboy dev studio

http://gbdev.com hosts the GBDK site (down as of this post)

Re:Gameboy Advance?

[Anonymous Shepherd]

Now I have to disagree; I think Windows is crap because it's unstable and resource intensive, not because it hasn't improved over the years.

I think Gameboy is great because it's small, easy to use, has a long battery life, and some great games-and there has been no need to change these features other than minor evolutionary refinements. The screensize grew, the clarity and brightness of the screen improved, it's become even smaller now, and it has even better games available, with faster processor and more memory addressable and the availability of color.

Very similar arguments can be made about the Palm Pilot as well, in terms of why it is a good device where others have failed

-AS

Gameboy Revival

[Maul]

I can attribute the recent revival of Gameboy to the Pokemon empire. Though Gameboy itself has gone through some improvements (ie Color, though not 100% full color like the Lynx, or Game Gear), the newest batch of GB sales has been due to those annoying Pokemon. Hmph.

But I am impressed. Gameboy came out before the Super NES, and it has lived through four generations of platforms. Perhaps all the other handhelds were too fancy, too expensive, or too unsupported. Who knows. The death of the GB is nowhere in sight, even as systems like Playstation and N64 are getting replaced by successors. Who would have thought that this little Tetris-plaiying machine would last so long?

"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"

There are better "toys" out there than the GameBoy

[MVoelker]

If you ask me, there's a bit too much hubub going on about this...

Personally, I would much rather have a Palm V, or even better, the decidedly cheaper Handspring Visor, oh hell, I'd even take a CE device, before I had a Gameboy.

I'm not knocking the Gameboy in any sense, but shouldn't development and programming be geared towards a device that's a little more advanced?

Just my 2 cents. Moderate as you please.

Mike

Re:Gameboy Advance?

[m3000]

I've never even heard of this [Gameboy Advance]

Well, let me enlighten you to this wonderful piece of hardware:

Nintendorks.com (includes "exclusive" GBA picture ;)


DMGICE


IGN Pockets' GBA FAQ


Nintendo's Press Release

As for your question as to why it did better, the answer is games. The games on that sytem rock. It has my two favorite games (Tetrix and Super Mario Brothers Deluxe), a ton of cool RPG's and 2D games, and Pokemon is one of the fastest selling and biggest videogames of all time. It's consistantly number 1 and 2 on the weekly sales charts. The GB is far from dead, and since the GBA is going to have backwards compatiblity and bring the possiblility of internet connection to a handheld, it's going to keep on going.

Game Boy Advance

[spaceorb]

Is slated for release in Christmas (big surprise) 2000. For those that are interested/care, it will have a 32bit RISC cpu and full internet connectivity through a cellular phone (cool muliplayer internet games on a Game Boy). But it still lacks a backlit screen. Here are some specs:

* CPU: Memory embedded 32-bit RISC CPU
* LCD: Reflective TFT Color LCD
* Display Size: 40.8mm x 61.2mm
* Resolution: 240 x 160 pixels
* Size: Approximately Height 80mm / Width 135mm
* Weight: Approximately 140g
* Power Supply: 2 AA Alkaline batteries
* Battery life: 20 hours continuous play
* Maximum colors to be displayed simultaneously: 65,000

Well, because I notice a lot of posters doing this

[W Parasyte]

I see many posters posting about how the Game Boy is aging hardware, and about how it's nice that they're finally releasing a development kit...
Please stop making this mistake.
At the risk of being marked redundant, I'm going to tell you all that THIS IS NOT ABOUT THE GAME BOY. This is about the Game Boy Advance, the new 32-bit advanced portable that Nintendo is bringing out late this year. This is an entirely different system; Nintendo is just using their name recognition with the GB to sell it. Please don't get confused. Especially since develpoment kits for the GB have been out for a very long time now.
Thanks for your time (and not moderating me down).