I was on Wikipedia looking at the specs on the Gameboy Color and wondered if anyone was doing any homebrew projects for it. That processor in the GBC really is a serious peice of chip with the it having twice the speed RAM then the original Gameboy... In some respects it's just a little bit more powerful then the NES.

Best regards.

most people that do GB stuff have taken too the GBA. The GBA is even more powerful and easier to program for. there's literally hundreds of GBA homebrews out there.

Yeah, other than the graphical limitations of the small screen, programming GBA is not really any different than other high level programming in C++.

GBC, on the other hand, requires assembly.

Thanks for the info... I'm not a programmer yet, but I've taken great interest in the homebrewing scene for sometime now for a variety of systems including the NES. It's just something about Assembly that makes people shy away from a system. May be I'll get the hang of it someday.

I've seen a few GBC homebrews, but only two or three.

Many of the concepts in the NES are used in the Game Boy, so that may be a good place to start. I really don't know the status of GB dev tools but would assume the assemblers/debuggers/tutorials are more complete for NES.

well it takes a lot more code in ASM to do what you can do in C++. It's not really any harder, just more code, etc.

The only other semi tough stuff about NES compared to say more modern systems is limitations.

You can write whatever in ASM, but unless you stay within the system limitations, it ain't gonna work.

You can also use near unlimited rom space in modern consoles, where the nes is limited.

Well I've been working on a game engine "concept" for various retro game systems, which a lot of them uses Assembly so... I've finally come to grips that I have to learn it in order to see it realized so I'll be around just to learn as much as I can.

really, ASM is pretty simple. I never touched it until like september. I had taken a course in C++ and a Visual Basic Course, so I understood basic format, functions, and logic, but other than that I knew nothing.

The tutorials here are pretty good for getting you used to the limitations and how things work for the NES specifically. Just play with the tutorials here and ask questions and you'll get it.

I still learn new things all the time. I ask stupid and simple questions, but those simple things have helped me figure out a lot of things on my own too. I'd love to see more programmers. The NES needs more homebrew. The more people who learn, the better the odds are that we see more new games.

I developed my Chunkout for the GBC 10 years ago http://chunkout.com/main_gameboy....

Oh, and that was written in C!

^^^ Neat. As far as having written it in C, though, don't the GB systems use a different processor than the NES, like a 68k instead of the 6502? (i thought they had the same chip as the TI graphing calculators) If it's the chip I'm thinking of, I would definitely expect better compiler support than the NES specific version of the 6502. (other 6502 chips - C64, Atari, Amiga, etc - seem to have pretty decent compiler support, since they use a "standard" version of the chip and have more RAM to work with)

I think it uses a Z80 chip or a chip that uses Z80 instructions, very similar to what the "Spectrum Sinclair" uses... The GBC is twice as fast with twice the RAM then the original Gameboy, which in a nutshell explains how Capcom was able to release "Dragon's Lair" for the GBC and keep all of the animation on a cartidge and is one of the reason I took interest in the GBC.

Yup, a Z80, has a few more registers I think that makes it easier to compile C to it (that's from my vague recollection, may be some other reasons)

I only watched the GB development scene from the outside, but it seemed like there were a lot of projects coded in C, even on the original Gameboy. Then after the GBA came out it looked to me like the old GB and GBC was pretty much abandoned.

yeah, Z80 is what I was thinking it had. That's the same processor the TI machines use, and is pretty well supported as a compile target.