Note: this is the latest official version 2.96a from April 2002. Now there is an actively developed community driven reboot called gbdk-2020 with compiled versions ready to run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

GBDK

"The GameBoy Developer's Kit (GBDK), is a set of tools that enable to develop programs for the Nintendo GameBoy system, either in C or in assembly. GBDK includes a set of libraries for the most common requirements and generates image files for use with a real GameBoy or with an emulator like VGB or no$gmb. [...]

GBDK features:

• An ANSI C compiler.
• An assembler that generates relocatable code.
• A peephole optimiser.
• A linker that produces GameBoy image files.
• Support for multiple-bank images.
• Smart linking.
• A set of libraries, with source code.
• Example programs in assembly and in C."

From http://gbdk.sourceforge.net

Quick summary

The base version (2.96a) was downloaded from the official site. Although this is the latest version, it was released quite a while ago (back in April 2002).

The code can be compiled in an up-to-date 64-bit Linux environment (at least it is up-to-date here in 2016).

Original sites:

• http://gbdk.sourceforge.net
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/gbdk

Building

For the build I recommend an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (you don't even need to install it, the Live system works just fine).

The environment will need a few packages, all of them can be installed using apt-get:

sudo apt-get -y install make gcc g++ bison flex

After downloading the source you can use the Makefile to compile the binaries:

cd /path/where/you/extracted
make

Installing the compiled binaries can be done via make as well:

sudo make install

Compiling the examples:

cd ./gbdk-lib/examples/gb
make

Note: compiling the examples requires you to install the binaries you just built in the previous steps.