[HN Gopher] Gameboy technical reference for homebrew developers ___________________________________________________________________ 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 ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-23 23:00 UTC)