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Announcements And Comments > GBAForVS6

#32346 - Abscissa - Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:48 am

I just finished v1.0 of GBAForVS6, a new AppWizard for Visual Studio 6 for creating Game Boy Advance projects. It doesn't work on Visual Studio .NET, but I'll be making a Visual Studio .NET version soon.

Description from its website: "GBAForVS6 is a Visual Studio Project AppWizard for Microsoft Visual Studio 6 that makes it easy to use Visual Studio to develop programs for Game Boy Advance. Although it is primarily an AppWizard right now, its aim is to serve as a complete Game Boy Advance development environment hosted on Visual Studio that encompasses various homebrew GBA-development tools. The goal of GBAForVS6 is to make it as easy as possible for people new to Game Boy Advance development to get started, and to streamline the development process for more experienced Game Boy Advance developers."

Check it out at http://www.twistedpairgaming.com/gbadev :)

#32366 - identitycrisisuk - Tue Dec 21, 2004 1:31 pm

Excellent stuff, I've just about got the hang of combining a makefile with VS6 but it's really nice to have something that will do it for me everytime I add files etc. Unfortunately my current project doesn't quite work, the -O3 tag makes my sprites go mental :( Ho hum, have to work out what I've done wrong.
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#32372 - Abscissa - Tue Dec 21, 2004 3:03 pm

identitycrisisuk wrote:
Excellent stuff,

Thanks :)

Hey, I just noticed, your next post will be #100.

#32373 - identitycrisisuk - Tue Dec 21, 2004 3:15 pm

Abscissa wrote:
Hey, I just noticed, your next post will be #100.

I'm saving it for something special....

Ah crap!

;)
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#33225 - kentsimon - Fri Dec 31, 2004 10:56 pm

This is the First stop, starting point call it what you want, this made starting up a GBA project very easy for me. I was able to install and then compile (The sample app) within seconds.
Thankyou very much, I have been reading FAQ's and searching for a month, (While documenting my design) and now that I am ready to start boom I am good to go.

-Kent

#33269 - Abscissa - Sat Jan 01, 2005 7:51 am

kentsimon wrote:
This is the First stop, starting point call it what you want, this made starting up a GBA project very easy for me. I was able to install and then compile (The sample app) within seconds.
Thankyou very much, I have been reading FAQ's and searching for a month, (While documenting my design) and now that I am ready to start boom I am good to go.

-Kent


I'm glad to hear it's worked well for you. That ease-of-use, getting-started-in-seconds is exactly what I was aiming for. :)

#33332 - identitycrisisuk - Sun Jan 02, 2005 12:38 am

The only slight negative I might say is that maybe it shouldn't use the -O3 tag if it's really aimed at letting a beginner get to work. I still haven't got my code to compile with -O3 but -O2 seems fine but to do that I had to go into the makefile and edit it. Is there any way you could link some of the project settings to allow you to change the tags without editing the makefile? Then the default could be to not have optimisation and a more advanced user could add it in.

Certainly, most other GBA sample code on the web doesn't compile properly with -O3 and with it not being absolutely essential it might be confusing for a beginner to have to use it straight away.
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#33357 - Abscissa - Sun Jan 02, 2005 6:40 am

identitycrisisuk wrote:
The only slight negative I might say is that maybe it shouldn't use the -O3 tag if it's really aimed at letting a beginner get to work. I still haven't got my code to compile with -O3 but -O2 seems fine but to do that I had to go into the makefile and edit it. Is there any way you could link some of the project settings to allow you to change the tags without editing the makefile? Then the default could be to not have optimisation and a more advanced user could add it in.

Certainly, most other GBA sample code on the web doesn't compile properly with -O3 and with it not being absolutely essential it might be confusing for a beginner to have to use it straight away.


Hmm, I've been thinking about that issue with the optimizations switch, and I think you're right about that. When I put that in there, I didn't know anything about the differences other than "O3 = faster than O2", so I just used that. I think I will change that in the next version.

Maybe I should use no optimizations? The reason I ask is that if O3 can inadvertantly cause errors, maybe it's possible that any optimization-on setting has the potential to do that? Not to mention the fact that compiler-optimized code can screw up stepping through it in a debugger.

In any case, what I think I'll do is add some sort of easy define at the top of the makefile to adjust that (kind of like how I have project name and rom file name and such right now). Or probably just tying it into a debug/release setting in the makefile. Hopefully, that would allow me to have tie it in with Visual Studio's "Set Configuration, Debug/Release".

I bet I *could* set things up so that you can alter project settings such as the optimization-level at any time, instead of only being able to select them when creating a new project. The only thing is, that would require a full-fledged VS plug-in in addition to the existing AppWizard. That's actually something I had been thinking about doing, and I probably will once GBAForVS gets bigger and starts encompassing more "stuff". But, I think that would be more work than its worth for right now - there's a lot of other things I'm anxious to get in there first.

#33359 - tepples - Sun Jan 02, 2005 7:33 am

-O2 is rather safe. What you need to watch out for is that you're using a good GBA header file, with all the hardware registers marked volatile.

-O3 has failed for some people in some versions of GCC, though it has worked for me (devkitARM R8).
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