#Programming

How to write GameBoy Advance (GBA) homebrew using modern tools and systems in 2020. Compilers, editors, debugging and more!

This isn’t the definitive way of doing things, but it’s a way that seems to work for me. Also you might read this and think it a bit convoluted and full on. I didn’t create it all in one go, it’s a workflow that has evolved over time.

A short comparison between low level Z80 assembler and high level C

The beating heart of any CPU is the fetch-decode-execute cycle. It is the same for our simulator

Sometimes you have to type out almost identical lines of code, and it’s either time consuming or error prone. Here’s how to avoid it all by using some clever Excel techniques.

How to efficiently store and execute many small functions, without using a single if statement or switch construct.

To begin, this isn’t technically an emulator, the system I’m trying to model isn’t real. This is more of a simulator, but that’s less of a catchy search word on the Internet.

As a challenge I thought I’d try to implement the Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm, and have a play with it. My code is based off the excellent Coding Train video on the same topic which you can watch here. It’s where I got the code from, and then mixed in some code from the Arrays of Objects video too.

Last time I explained in detail how the whole system worked. This time I will focus on the component system, as it is quite complex. Using it isn’t complex, but I’m trying to mimic Unity’s functionality that was written in C#. Functionality that is partially implemented within the editor and doesn’t relate directly to typing in code. I have no idea how Unity really does this, but the solution I have come up with seems tidy enough and fits neatly within a single C++ header.

This is going to be the first part in a continuing series where I try to explain how and why I’m creating my own game engine using C++ and the SDL library. My engine isn’t going to do anything amazing, but will borrow ideas from other engines I’ve used before such as Unity.

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