Introduction

The original Nintendo Gameboy was released in 1989 and is one of the most recognisable game consoles from the 90s era. I’ve always wanted to write a game for it, but sadly this was a project that I kept postponing, mainly due to the associated complexity and dedication required when working with assembly code.

This series of blog posts aim to serve as a collection of notes for myself, but I am also taking this opportunity to share my findings in the hope that they may be useful for your own projects.

Nintendo Gameboy

source: thealmightyguru.com

My objective is to create a simple, yet fully functional game, written entirely in assembly. I will begin this journey with the simplest possible program that runs on the Gameboy and build upon it iteratively. In each iteration, I will go through the code, line by line, and explain what each instruction does. I will also try to give further context around some subtle details that might not be obvious at first glance.

In this post, I introduce the development tools and then write a simple program that prints “hello world!” on the screen.

The tools of the trade

My development platform is Debian Linux, however you should be able to follow the same process under any OS. I use the RGBDS toolchain, with Vim serving as my IDE, and BGB for debugging.

You can download the toolchain and the debugger using the links below:

• RGBDS
• BGB

The toolchain is fairly simple to follow.