Pages tagged "gbdev"

Clickbait title: I Broke Your Code And I'm Not Sorry.

We all hate when something we use, or rely on, breaks. We hate it even more when it’s someone else’s fault. I’m no different!

But then, why have I, as the lead maintainer of RGBDS, been inflicting this pain upon other people for the past four years or so?

Recently, GumpyFunction remarked on Prehistorik Man’s parallax effect on the original Game Boy. While this game is not one of the console’s best known, being somewhat a average title, it’s one of, if not the most technically impressive commercial releases on the platform.

This originally started as a Twitter thread that got out of hand 30 tweets long.

Avivace asked me if I could make it into a blog post of some kind, and I figured that it was a good idea, and I might as well clean up a few things, and possibly add some images.

Smooth-Player is a system that allows stereo 4-bit sample playback at variable rates up to ~16 kiHz on Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance consoles.

Quartet is a great homebrew Game Boy game, published by Mackerel Interactive in early 2021. So why not do like the good old days and crack it?

In this post(-mortem?), I’ll explain what went into creating this cracktro. I’ll keep the most technical details out of the way until the end of this post, so it should still be a good read, even if you don’t have a technical background.

The big deal with RGBDS and its backwards compatibility is likely obvious to any seasoned member of GBDev, but maybe you, dear reader, are not one.

Let’s talk about what backwards compatibility is (in a rather general sense), and why it matters.

After having explored the space of options available to us, now is finally time to talk about the decisions that have been taken for RGBDS.

Since there will be mistakes, for one reason or another, let’s explore the various ways they can be handled, and each’s tradeoffs.

🚧 NOT WRITTEN YET 🚧

We have established that never changing anything leads to buildup of frustration, and that “moving fast and breaking things” is no better. Let’s seek a more reasonable middle ground.