#5788 - TheGreenFalcon - Thu May 08, 2003 5:54 pm
Hi,
i'm a future newbie on gba dev :)
(but not on game dev in general)
i'm asking myself if using HAM is a good way to develop
a game(it's for a school project), or if it's better to start
from scratch, making my own graphic, sound ... libs
in fact, i want to know if HAM is a good dev kit,
is it fast enough, complete ... ?
can you give me your opinion on that please
thkx people
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#5803 - Daikath - Thu May 08, 2003 9:29 pm
Well if you dont mind a homebrew startup screen or are willing to pay for a verion without a homebrew startup screen and if you just want to create a quick project it is fine. If you like myself want to learn how to program in the long run you should't take HAM.
HAM is fast enough for 2d games, I have no knowledge on how it operates in 3d, but since it is C/C++ only it wouldt be fast enough anyways since pracitcally all decent GBA 3d engines are written in Assembly.
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#5839 - bomberman - Fri May 09, 2003 6:23 pm
Well, before being a library, HAM is a compiler chain which is very easy to install and use with its IDE VHAM.
You install a single zip and here it is, you can start programming without having to write makefiles or command line to start to compile. Just a key press, and your project is compiled, optionnally run in the debugger and you just care about nothing.
After having used DevKitAdv and HAM, I prefer compiling with HAM. I do not use HAMLib (I prefer writing my own library) and if you do not call ham_Init you won't have the startup screen. You can even modify the makefile to remove the link option -lham (your program will be 50Ko less).
I can only recommend using it !
#5889 - tubooboo - Mon May 12, 2003 11:22 am
...that people recognize HAM to be more than a library.
Thanks ;-)
Emanuel
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HAM author
http://www.ngine.de
#5912 - jenswa - Mon May 12, 2003 7:30 pm
I believe that HAM is very easy to use as well as to start with.
I couldn't get the setup to work (missed some stuff in windows, like dlls)
So went direct to devkitadv, works fine for me.
But HAM has more tutorials (last time i checked)
and lot's of 'pre' made stuff, like text i believe.
So it's nice, although you still need some brains to code :D
#6949 - philip - Thu Jun 05, 2003 12:45 am
HAM is useful for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it provides an easy interface to the GBAs in built sprite and background handling abilities. Rather than poking values in obscure registers and bitshifting, you can just call a function with a simple set of arguments. A lot of the stuff in there uses macros or defines to cerain memory areas. Now, if you absolutely WANT to know the memory address of everything in the machine, knock yourself out, but if you just want to specify a sprite and move it around, you'll find it a damn site easier to do it with HAM. Its pixel mode facilities are bad; line drawing and pixeldrawing are slow, but they let me get started quickly on my vector based game. Soon, I will write a faster routine for my own specific needs. Don't kid yourself that commercial GBA programmers have an intimate knowledge of the machine. Many will use APIs just like this
The second plus point is the installation. Apart from the Linux version STILL having no execute permissions on some (all?) files that require it, it pretty much just drops into place. Write a "Hello world" app, type "make vba", and your creation will be displayed instantly in the emulator. "make gdb" to bring up the debugger. The ROM files it creates are correct images which will work on real hardware either through multiboot (if you have MULTIBOOT at the top of you main file) AND flash (that's the same ROM image for both!). It is almost criminally easy. It allows you to get on with writing the program, and not setting up the environment, or looking up memory addresses.
#7307 - tubooboo - Sat Jun 14, 2003 3:08 pm
Hi,
thanks for the kind words on HAM - the Linux permission issue is fixed and scheduled to roll with the next update.
Best
Emanuel
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HAM author
http://www.ngine.de