7 ms·

Making a Game Boy Game. Part 1: Getting Started

275 points by broahmed 8y ago

airstrike 8y ago
Off-topic: this is the first I've heard of neocities.org but I went there with high expectations and I'm positively impressed. I guess having been online for 20+ years makes me relatively "old" (many of those much older than my generation were not so keen to get online way back when) and by God do I miss the "old internet". Neocities' description truly resonates with me: > Neocities is a social network of 216,300 web sites that are > bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. We > offer free static web hosting and tools that allow you to > create your own web site. Join us!
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Yeah its pretty cool. Its not just another free static web hosting but a place to find quirky bits of art and creativity unlike Git* pages which is just blogs and project pages.
  - derefr 8y ago
    There's nothing stopping you from putting "quirky bits of art and creativity" on a Git-host+static-site-generator site. Given that most of the Git-host web-apps have editing interfaces, there's not even a barrier to entry. IMHO, it's mostly just that "you can freely host a static website on the same services programmers use to freely host source code" isn't a well-known thing outside of the programming community. GitHub/GitLab/etc. should do some outreach at the digital-art/interactive-media departments of universities.
    - baroffoos 8y ago
      The big big difference is discovery. Neocites has an explore page that shows you all of these mostly pointless personal pages and js games which often link internally to other neocities pages so you end up with a bubble resembling the old web rather than other static hosts that have websites that are just another blog in the modern commercialized internet.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- leggomylibro 8y ago
  I was about to make a snarky comment, because it took me awhile to realize that you weren't talking about Geocities. I guess there's probably a connection: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212025222/http://www.geocities.org:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981212025222/http://www.geocit...
- Nadya 8y ago
  My site is hosted by Neocities (who I support with a measily $5/mo) because I also miss Geocities and the "old internet". It's not that I couldn't have just picked any old host to serve static assets for me - but that it wanted to be a community of artsy/non-corporatized websites ran by hobbyists.
- swimfar 8y ago
  That is really cool. One of the featured sites is an NES RPG fan page complete with a hand-drawn interpretation of the world map. It feels funny to describe a web page as "quaint", but that's the only word I can think of. https://distantskies.neocities.org/world/ https://distantskies.neocities.org/world/
- stephenhuey 8y ago
  The first time I stumbled onto Neocities I also pined for the web as it was 2 decades ago and wondered if I shouldn’t encourage everyone I knew to put a site up there in hopes of spurring on a movement to change people’s tastes away from repetitively-polished-for-commercial-exploitation websites. Think it could work?
sneakernets 8y ago
Game Boy development was interesting in that you were always coding with battery in mind. You couldn't simply "NOP" your way through something, you had to "HALT". So your game loop was always "halt and wait for interrupt, do action, halt again". Allegedly, if you didn't do this, Nintendo would reject your game outright.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  I'm not too familiar with game development, is that unusual? It's pretty natural in other forms of software development. In user space, you mostly wait on system calls (e.g. select, blocking read/write, thread synchronization primitives), and in the kernel that usually translates to another process being scheduled. If there's nothing to be scheduled, you hit the idle loop, which, roughly spoken, halts the core until the next interrupt. Sometimes you need to poll a device that does not signal completion with an interrupt, or some locks may actually spin (for a while at least) before sleeping, but, conceptually at least, I'd almost call those exceptions to a rule.
  - phamilton 8y ago
    Run something like the original starcraft on modern hardware. It'll use 100% of a cpu.
    - anyfoo 8y ago
      Assuming the hardware is then fast enough to run at the full frame rate, what's it doing once it's done with everything that needed being done? Just burning cycles in a busy loop with no progress?
      - pcwalton 8y ago
        Typically, yes. It didn't matter back in the day when the CPU had no way to enter an idle state to begin with. Wikipedia says that Intel CPUs didn't actually enter a low-power state on HLT until 1994 [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT_(x86_instruction)#History_on_x86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT_(x86_instruction)#History_...
voltagex_ 8y ago
See also https://catskull.net/gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html https://catskull.net/gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html
- catskull 8y ago
  Wow I think this is the first time I've been mentioned on hacker news! That was a super fun project and I use the header utility very often!
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    You should submit some of your articles - they're super interesting.
thanatos_dem 8y ago
The intro to low level computing class at Georgia Tech used Game Boy Advanced as the platform that the projects were built on. It was cool at first, but I ended up too deep in the weeds with platform idiosyncrasies to really get much actual C knowledge.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  The original Game Boy is very different in that regard, to the point where it's relatively simple to get an emulator implemented that can decently play some games. Of course, there are more intricacies the deeper you dig below the surface, but for the original Game Boy, that is more of a concern for emulators that aim at going towards 100% compatibility. As a game developer, you can probably stay at the surprisingly small apparent surface for quite some time (and at least the earlier Game Boy games often did).
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  I'm curious what you felt was idiosyncratic about the gba. Things like converting a png to a bitmap array for storage were always fun, but tooling mostly handled that for you. The apis like dma and io? Or something else?
Domark 8y ago
For me I do it this way: 1. Get a sprite system, audio, sfx, save state, game loop solution going for the platform (GBC). Usually something is available like Cocos. 2. Create the game! Sprites, animations, sounds, game code for all parts. Then I test play, and iterate until it’s ready to share. Starting from scratch like this website is like starting from step zero, not step one.
- Impossible 8y ago
  Cocos on the original Game Boy? There are some C libraries like GBDK, but nothing as high level as Cocos, we're talking about a very limited hardware.
- duskwuff 8y ago
  Yeah, nooooo. Cocos2d is a relatively heavyweight game engine aimed at platforms with bitmapped graphics and lots of CPU and memory. It's completely unsuitable for an embedded system like the original Game Boy, which uses hardware tile/sprite graphics and has very limited compute resources (4.19 MHz Z80-like CPU, 8 kB SRAM).
broahmed 8y ago
Just a note that she has four other articles in this series at the moment! You can easily find them by clicking the Articles link at the top of her site.
notadog 8y ago
This is part one, but the author has also written 4 other parts. They are also pretty interesting, and some more focused on the visuals. The author also made the in-development game called Aqua and Ashes open-source on GitHub (https://github.com/InvisibleUp/AquaAndAshes https://github.com/InvisibleUp/AquaAndAshes) * Part 1 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/18/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/18/ * Part 2 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/19/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/19/ * Part 3 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/20/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/20/ * Part 4 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/21/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/21/ * Part 5 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/23/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/23/

275 points by broahmed 8y ago

Off-topic: this is the first I've heard of neocities.org but I went there with high expectations and I'm positively impressed. I guess having been online for 20+ years makes me relatively "old" (many of those much older than my generation were not so keen to get online way back when) and by God do I miss the "old internet". Neocities' description truly resonates with me: > Neocities is a social network of 216,300 web sites that are > bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. We > offer free static web hosting and tools that allow you to > create your own web site. Join us!

baroffoos 8y ago
Yeah its pretty cool. Its not just another free static web hosting but a place to find quirky bits of art and creativity unlike Git* pages which is just blogs and project pages.
- derefr 8y ago
  There's nothing stopping you from putting "quirky bits of art and creativity" on a Git-host+static-site-generator site. Given that most of the Git-host web-apps have editing interfaces, there's not even a barrier to entry. IMHO, it's mostly just that "you can freely host a static website on the same services programmers use to freely host source code" isn't a well-known thing outside of the programming community. GitHub/GitLab/etc. should do some outreach at the digital-art/interactive-media departments of universities.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    The big big difference is discovery. Neocites has an explore page that shows you all of these mostly pointless personal pages and js games which often link internally to other neocities pages so you end up with a bubble resembling the old web rather than other static hosts that have websites that are just another blog in the modern commercialized internet.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
leggomylibro 8y ago
I was about to make a snarky comment, because it took me awhile to realize that you weren't talking about Geocities. I guess there's probably a connection: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212025222/http://www.geocities.org:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981212025222/http://www.geocit...
Nadya 8y ago
My site is hosted by Neocities (who I support with a measily $5/mo) because I also miss Geocities and the "old internet". It's not that I couldn't have just picked any old host to serve static assets for me - but that it wanted to be a community of artsy/non-corporatized websites ran by hobbyists.
swimfar 8y ago
That is really cool. One of the featured sites is an NES RPG fan page complete with a hand-drawn interpretation of the world map. It feels funny to describe a web page as "quaint", but that's the only word I can think of. https://distantskies.neocities.org/world/ https://distantskies.neocities.org/world/
stephenhuey 8y ago
The first time I stumbled onto Neocities I also pined for the web as it was 2 decades ago and wondered if I shouldn’t encourage everyone I knew to put a site up there in hopes of spurring on a movement to change people’s tastes away from repetitively-polished-for-commercial-exploitation websites. Think it could work?

sneakernets 8y ago

Game Boy development was interesting in that you were always coding with battery in mind. You couldn't simply "NOP" your way through something, you had to "HALT". So your game loop was always "halt and wait for interrupt, do action, halt again". Allegedly, if you didn't do this, Nintendo would reject your game outright.

anyfoo 8y ago
I'm not too familiar with game development, is that unusual? It's pretty natural in other forms of software development. In user space, you mostly wait on system calls (e.g. select, blocking read/write, thread synchronization primitives), and in the kernel that usually translates to another process being scheduled. If there's nothing to be scheduled, you hit the idle loop, which, roughly spoken, halts the core until the next interrupt. Sometimes you need to poll a device that does not signal completion with an interrupt, or some locks may actually spin (for a while at least) before sleeping, but, conceptually at least, I'd almost call those exceptions to a rule.
- phamilton 8y ago
  Run something like the original starcraft on modern hardware. It'll use 100% of a cpu.
  - anyfoo 8y ago
    Assuming the hardware is then fast enough to run at the full frame rate, what's it doing once it's done with everything that needed being done? Just burning cycles in a busy loop with no progress?
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      Typically, yes. It didn't matter back in the day when the CPU had no way to enter an idle state to begin with. Wikipedia says that Intel CPUs didn't actually enter a low-power state on HLT until 1994 [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT_(x86_instruction)#History_on_x86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLT_(x86_instruction)#History_...

voltagex_ 8y ago

See also https://catskull.net/gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html https://catskull.net/gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html

catskull 8y ago
Wow I think this is the first time I've been mentioned on hacker news! That was a super fun project and I use the header utility very often!
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  You should submit some of your articles - they're super interesting.

thanatos_dem 8y ago

The intro to low level computing class at Georgia Tech used Game Boy Advanced as the platform that the projects were built on. It was cool at first, but I ended up too deep in the weeds with platform idiosyncrasies to really get much actual C knowledge.

anyfoo 8y ago
The original Game Boy is very different in that regard, to the point where it's relatively simple to get an emulator implemented that can decently play some games. Of course, there are more intricacies the deeper you dig below the surface, but for the original Game Boy, that is more of a concern for emulators that aim at going towards 100% compatibility. As a game developer, you can probably stay at the surprisingly small apparent surface for quite some time (and at least the earlier Game Boy games often did).
joshuamorton 8y ago
I'm curious what you felt was idiosyncratic about the gba. Things like converting a png to a bitmap array for storage were always fun, but tooling mostly handled that for you. The apis like dma and io? Or something else?

Domark 8y ago

For me I do it this way: 1. Get a sprite system, audio, sfx, save state, game loop solution going for the platform (GBC). Usually something is available like Cocos. 2. Create the game! Sprites, animations, sounds, game code for all parts. Then I test play, and iterate until it’s ready to share. Starting from scratch like this website is like starting from step zero, not step one.

Impossible 8y ago
Cocos on the original Game Boy? There are some C libraries like GBDK, but nothing as high level as Cocos, we're talking about a very limited hardware.
duskwuff 8y ago
Yeah, nooooo. Cocos2d is a relatively heavyweight game engine aimed at platforms with bitmapped graphics and lots of CPU and memory. It's completely unsuitable for an embedded system like the original Game Boy, which uses hardware tile/sprite graphics and has very limited compute resources (4.19 MHz Z80-like CPU, 8 kB SRAM).

broahmed 8y ago

Just a note that she has four other articles in this series at the moment! You can easily find them by clicking the Articles link at the top of her site.

notadog 8y ago

This is part one, but the author has also written 4 other parts. They are also pretty interesting, and some more focused on the visuals. The author also made the in-development game called Aqua and Ashes open-source on GitHub (https://github.com/InvisibleUp/AquaAndAshes https://github.com/InvisibleUp/AquaAndAshes) * Part 1 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/18/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/18/ * Part 2 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/19/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/19/ * Part 3 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/20/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/20/ * Part 4 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/21/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/21/ * Part 5 - https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/23/ https://invisibleup.neocities.org/articles/23/