If you haven't heard the latest big news yet, thanks to tremendous efforts of @avivace and @exelotl both @gbdev and @gbadev Mastodon accounts have been moved to a brand new dedicated instance @ fedi.gbdev.io!

Unfortunately, unlike for GBDev account, we weren't able to successfully transfer GBADev account's follower list during migration, so while we're still sorting things out, feel free to spread the word about our move in the meantime!

Announcing the upcoming Kickstarter for Collie Defense!
My new #TowerDefense game for the #GameBoyAdvance published by @TheRetroRoomRoo

Made with @deepnight’s LDtk and the help of the @gbadev community.

Sign up to be notified on the launch, so don't miss it!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elland/collie-defense

Homebrew Games Summer Showcase 2023 is a video presentation of the latest in homebrew scene that has premiered June 29th of this year on YouTube — https://youtu.be/1AGMEZvU14g

Expect to see plenty of upcoming and already available #GameBoy and #GameBoyColor titles, as well as a handful of #GameBoyAdvance games and game ports, among 140 releases by 116 developers and dev teams spanning 17 retro consoles and handhelds!

So, a brief update on the last few GBA cartridges that are currently unemulated. These carts have unique hardware that needs to be reverse-engineered (sometimes extensively), which makes them difficult to implement. Additionally, they're pretty rare and expensive.

There's only 3 of them: Nintendo Play-Yan, Glucoboy, and Campho Advance. I call them the "Triforce of Terror" because they're not easy to emulate. Each one is a monumental challenge in its own way.

#emulation #gba

STEPPER v1.4 is out!

This update adds CV and audio sync as well as theming support and UI improvements. I was so happy I had to do a new demo to celebrate!

Demo:
https://youtu.be/alqqxq4blh8

Available now on itch:
https://badd10de.itch.io/stepper-gba

Devlog:
https://badd10de.itch.io/stepper-gba/devlog/539905/stepper-v14

Source code:
https://git.badd10de.dev/stepper/

#musodon #musicproduction #gbadev

fun #gbadev thing I learned this week:

if you disable DMA at the exact same moment that it internally starts (within a few CPU cycles), the whole GBA will lock up.

So, say you're using HBlank DMA to achieve one of those fancy scanline parallax effects. When cleaning up the scene you want to stop the effect, so you cancel the DMA right away in your main game code.

Bad news! You've now introduced a 1 in 400 chance that the game will crash any time the player dies, goes through a door, etc. Only on hardware, not on emulators! Even worse, in some cases (from what I can tell) it will trash _all_ the memory, obliterating their save file!

The solution is simple: just make sure to only clear DMA when you're certain DMA is not about to trigger (e.g. at the start of your VBlank handler). But woww I can't believe it's taken all these years for me to learn about this!