4 ms·

I wrote 2 games for the Gameboy/Gameboy Advance back in the day (Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver and Matchbox Emergency Patrol) and it was an awesome experience.

by kruhft 11y ago

I wrote 2 games for the Gameboy/Gameboy Advance back in the day (Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver and Matchbox Emergency Patrol) and it was an awesome experience. There's nothing like being able to hold the entire machine in your head and have every line of code executing being written by you. If you're interested in development I suggest using the No Cash GB/GBA emulator; it's spot on and only had one glitch that Nintendo found in testing due to something about switching off the screen at the wrong time. I did almost all of my professional development in it and only had to burn to a Bung cartridge (used to be available from HK for cheap) for final testing infrequently. Much cheaper and probably better than the official dev kits available (but I wouldn't know, I never used one).

udp 11y ago
> it's spot on and only had one glitch that Nintendo found in testing due to something about switching off the screen at the wrong time. Nintendo tests third party emulators? I thought they were pretty vocally against the emulation scene.
- nak_attack 11y ago
  I think what they meant is that Nintendo only found one glitch in the game when running on the actual GBA, which hadn't occurred in the emulator.
  - kruhft 11y ago
    Yes, that's what I meant :)
JoshM33k 11y ago
Both games were very cool from my memory of them! What led you to using No$, and not having an official dev kit? I have no idea what the relationship would have been like with Nintendo...but did they wonder how you'd written the game if they'd never issued an official dev kit?
- kruhft 11y ago
  I used no$ because it was simply the best emulator available back then (circa 1999), plus the company didn't feel a need to actually buy a dev kit since I was fully capable of building my own, and actually preferred to use, using open source tools (assembler, linker, make, etc) and no$gba. We were publishing through Mattel for those games as a 3rd party developer, so they handled all the dealings with Nintendo and I assume they had an in house dev kit or two, or at least it was just a 2 gorrila relationship.

by kruhft 11y ago

udp 11y ago

> it's spot on and only had one glitch that Nintendo found in testing due to something about switching off the screen at the wrong time. Nintendo tests third party emulators? I thought they were pretty vocally against the emulation scene.

nak_attack 11y ago
I think what they meant is that Nintendo only found one glitch in the game when running on the actual GBA, which hadn't occurred in the emulator.
- kruhft 11y ago
  Yes, that's what I meant :)

JoshM33k 11y ago

Both games were very cool from my memory of them! What led you to using No$, and not having an official dev kit? I have no idea what the relationship would have been like with Nintendo...but did they wonder how you'd written the game if they'd never issued an official dev kit?

kruhft 11y ago
I used no$ because it was simply the best emulator available back then (circa 1999), plus the company didn't feel a need to actually buy a dev kit since I was fully capable of building my own, and actually preferred to use, using open source tools (assembler, linker, make, etc) and no$gba. We were publishing through Mattel for those games as a 3rd party developer, so they handled all the dealings with Nintendo and I assume they had an in house dev kit or two, or at least it was just a 2 gorrila relationship.