gbadev.org forum archive

This is a read-only mirror of the content originally found on forum.gbadev.org (now offline), salvaged from Wayback machine copies. A new forum can be found here.

Beginners > What are the best tools for developing?

#172996 - Maximum Potion - Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:42 am

I'm looking into making a side scroller for the gba, and I have a few questions.

Are C / C++ based gba roms able to run at full speed on the actual hardware, or should I stick with asm?
Furthermore, which of the 3 languages works best as a developer, and which compiler is reccomended?

Regarding the data (tiles, maps and music), which utilities are suggested for these? There are a lot of tools on this site, and it's hard to tell which ones work best.

Thank you for your time.

#173017 - gauauu - Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:18 pm

Maximum Potion wrote:
I'm looking into making a side scroller for the gba, and I have a few questions.

Are C / C++ based gba roms able to run at full speed on the actual hardware,

Yes
Quote:

Furthermore, which of the 3 languages works best as a developer,

For most of the development, C or C++. Whichever you are more familiar or comfortable with.

It's possible that you might eventually want to dip in to assembly for a critical section, but you can do most development without ever having to touch it.

Quote:
and which compiler is reccomended?

GCC. Get devkitArm and libgba from DevkitPro and it will have the full toolchain of everything you need.

Quote:

Regarding the data (tiles, maps and music), which utilities are suggested for these? There are a lot of tools on this site, and it's hard to tell which ones work best.

DevkitArm comes with Grit, which is a graphics utility that you'll want to use (converts images to formats usable by gba, etc). Cearn's Usenti is highly recommended for graphics editing.

I'm not sure that there is a standard recommendation for tiles/maps/music. I used Usenti for laying out tile sets, and Mappy for map design.
I haven't looked recently at libgba to see what audio libraries/etc are available, but a few years ago I used Kusma's Pimpmobile for playing audio and was quite happy with it. For editing audio files, I used modPlug.

It's likely that there's better tools than what I used, though.

#173018 - sverx - Mon Mar 15, 2010 4:51 pm

gauauu wrote:
I haven't looked recently at libgba to see what audio libraries/etc are available, but a few years ago I used Kusma's Pimpmobile for playing audio and was quite happy with it. For editing audio files, I used modPlug


There's MaxMod also for GBA. You can download it with devKitPro package.

#173030 - Maximum Potion - Tue Mar 16, 2010 3:54 am

Cool, thanks for all the information.