Contents  Introduction  An overview of  the system  What we will need  Printable version  Discuss this article The Series  Volume I  Volume II  Volume III

What we will need

I'm going to be introducing most of the tools we will need as we go along, but there are a few things you should have to start out (or are at least nifty).

Tools

You are going to want a bitmap editor (ie: Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop) and a text editor (Notepad). Although the GBA will not directly read bitmaps in the standard Windows format, later I will introduce conversion tools. The Notepad is for writing your code. Actually, I use MSVC++ to write my code and then I just use the 3rd party compiler for compilation, but this is your choice.

Compiler

I strongly advise you get DevKitAdvance for compilation, as it is the easiest to use. You can find it at http://www.io.com/~fenix/devkitadv.

Hardware

Obviously, you want a GBA. You can live without this, but it's just not as fun not seeing your work on hardware.

If you want to see your program on hardware, you're also going to want a flash cart and a linker. You can buy them both at www.lik-sang.com by purchasing the "Flash Advance 64M ready to go Set."

Next Article

Next article, I'm going to go into getting you familiar with the frikkin' compilation that plagued me for so long. I'm also going to delve into the bitmap screen modes (3,4,5) as they are the easiest to start with.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank dovoto, as his tutorials have been my biggest source of information on GBA development since I started. Check out his site at www.thepernproject.com. I'd also like to thank the guys in #gamedev and #gbadev on EFNet in IRC for all their help, and all the help they'll be giving me as I write these articles.

If you have any questions or comments, you can always e-mail me at genesisgenocide@yahoo.com or nairb@usa.com.