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chrismaltby / gb-studio

A quick and easy to use drag and drop retro game creator for your favourite handheld video game system
https://www.gbstudio.dev
MIT License
8.52k stars 470 forks source link

Gameboy Advance Support #1062

Open UntrustedInstaller opened 2 years ago

UntrustedInstaller commented 2 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. No

Describe the solution you'd like Support for developing and compiling GBA games Maybe like a separate project type with extended resources for GBA compat

Describe alternatives you've considered Butano (GBA C++ Game engine)

Additional context you could implement butano into GBStudio and do it that way

DeerTears commented 2 years ago

A few devs have answered this question before. Unfortunately GB Studio's IDE is catered to generate C code for the GB. Even though it uses external libraries to compile roms, GB Studio is still responsible for generating most of that GB code, which can't be run on the GBA's unique architecture. They are two fairly different machines despite the name.

It wouldn't be impossible, but there's not a lot of people actively working on GB Studio right now, so refactoring the entire engine (even more than the full engine re-write that was done for 3.0!) and then maintaining compatibility for multiple systems would definitely slow down GB Studio's development. So adding GBA support might kill GB Studio 😅

See also: https://github.com/asiekierka/gbsenpai

kenyonbowers commented 2 years ago

@UntrustedInstaller I am currently working on a game engine called DS Creator. And once it is done, I plan to make a game engine for making GBA games. From what I've heard from GBA game devs, the DS and the GBA are very similar. Also, @DeerTears if you were to use libgba which you can install with devkitPro, you could write C code for the GBA. You would just need to find out how to include libgba inside GB Studio.